James Talarico’s Tough Sell
While some might pray for hope or peace in such dark times, others are praying for the death of Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate. During a recent episode of the right-wing Protestant podcast Reformation Red Pill, host Joshua Haymes told the pastor Brooks Potteiger that he prays that “God kills” Talarico, given that the politician seems to be possessed by demons. Potteiger agreed, offering that Talarico should be “crucified with Christ.” Both Haymes and Potteiger later insisted that their remarks were not sincere expressions of violent intent, but rather metaphorical calls for Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, to find salvation in their brand of Christianity. Talarico shrewdly responded by offering forgiveness: “You may pray for my death, Pastor, but I still love you. I love you more than you could ever hate me.”
A cherubic and well-scrubbed 36-year-old state lawmaker, Talarico seems lately to invite such vitriol. This despite the fact that he has run a generally positive campaign. Born and raised in Texas, he is campaigning on a fairly standard Democratic platform: He supports higher wages, labor organizing, Medicare for All, comprehensive immigration reform, and increasing firearm regulations. Talarico’s sermonic speeches are largely about inclusivity and justice.
What has made his candidacy so controversial is what he says about God. An avowed progressive, Talarico argues that the country’s powerful Christian conservatives have distorted the lessons of their faith. The words of Jesus, he insists, endorse policies the left embraces. In deep-red evangelical Texas, does his brand of Christian politics have a chance?
In a 2021 debate on transgender issues in the Texas House of Representatives, Talarico said that “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between. God is nonbinary.” In a 2025 conversation with Joe Rogan, Talarico argued that “this idea that there is a set Christian orthodoxy on the issue of abortion is just not rooted in Scripture,” explaining (somewhat confusingly) that because God sought Mary’s consent before the conception of Jesus, Christians ought to conclude that creation requires permission—and therefore that women should have access to legal abortion.
As soon as Talarico’s primary victory over Jasmine Crockett was certain, conservatives called on those remarks and others to swiftly and uniformly deride his Christianity as blasphemous and insincere. “Talarico is a leftist atheist’s idea of a good Christian,” Allie Beth Stuckey, a Texas-based evangelical-conservative influencer, wrote in The Daily Wire. She accused him of being “a progressive culture warrior in lockstep with the secular world” and “uninterested in foundational Christian principles like sin, repentance, or salvation.” A spokesperson for the conservative group Turning Point USA accused Talarico of speaking “the language of an evangelical while completely undermining the central truth claims of the Scripture.”
That such an even-tempered candidate would attract such attacks reveals just how much Republicans stand to lose if Talarico wins. Talarico’s candidacy not only threatens Republican control of Texas and Republican control of the Senate; it also signals an appetite for faith in politics beyond the confines of conservatism.
[Elaine Godfrey: Things are about to get ugly in Texas]
An alliance with right-wing Christians has long played a valuable role for Republicans at the ballot box, most notably in the elections of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Talarico, following in the example of progressive Christians from Martin Luther King Jr. to Raphael Warnock, seems determined to help break this monopoly by offering an alternative vision for Christians alienated by the right. His campaign is gaining momentum at a time when many of the administration’s steadfast Christian backers—alarmed by the president’s bullying campaign against Pope Leo XIV in recent weeks, among other heresies—have been rethinking their support. Talarico is essentially campaigning not only for a Senate seat in a red state, but to redefine who gets to be a good Christian in America.
Talarico has made it his mission to confront what he describes as the unbiblical, un-Christian brand of right-wing Christian nationalism rampant in the MAGA movement. He is particularly concerned about efforts to use the state to enforce this more punitive vision of Christianity. He has described Christian nationalism as the worship of power instead of Christ, and “a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
The Democratic primary brought 2.3 million voters to the polls—nearly double the turnout of the preceding midterm primaries—and Talarico won the race handily by a seven-point margin. Although Crockett’s campaign was trained on bringing out the progressive base, polling shows that Talarico’s winning coalition not only included the majority of white, Hispanic, and male voters, but also led Crockett among both the young and Democrat-leaning independents.
Yet Talarico faces significant hurdles to victory. To win in November, he will need to widen his coalition, but the moderate Christian conservatives and independents he needs to attract are likely wary of his unorthodox approach to faith. James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that although Talarico’s name recognition and fundraising efforts have skyrocketed thanks to prominent media interviews and fawning profiles, the reality is that most Texans who consider religion important in their lives are Republicans who are unlikely to be persuaded by Talarico’s leftward pitch. Such resistance would be in keeping with general voter trends in the United States, where party loyalty often takes precedence over religious affiliation.
In more than a dozen conversations I had with Texan voters, quite a few sounded uncomfortable with Talarico’s leftish blend of faith and politics. Matthew Berry, a Catholic professor of politics in Dallas, told me that although he is open to applying a Christian lens to issues such as immigration and poverty, he is wary of a candidate whose progressive views seem to inform his Christian beliefs, rather than the other way around. “It seems to me like what’s beneath the surface is just a political position delivered in religious language,” Berry said. Likewise, Greg Camacho, a Catholic 36-year-old high-school teacher in San Antonio, agrees with Talarico on a number of policies, including immigration and strengthening the state’s energy grid, but said that he is “allergic” to any candidate who uses faith as part of his “brand.” Camacho added that he found Talarico’s comments about the conception of Jesus implying a right to abortion “silly and unfortunate and almost offensive,” and he doubted that anyone takes that kind of reasoning seriously. Camacho does not plan to vote in the coming election.
Talarico seems to recognize that some Texans mistrust his novel messaging, and that his job now is to convince would-be Christian voters that his faith is an honest reading of scripture—which just so happens to point in a progressive direction. In a written statement issued by his campaign spokesperson, Talarico told me that he does not “believe in a progressive or conservative Christianity; I believe in a biblical Christianity. My faith is rooted in scripture and the teachings of Jesus Christ.” He added that he tries his “best to follow the two commandments Jesus gave us: love God and love neighbor.”
[Heath W. Carter: Americans should stop using the term Christian nationalism]
Cynthia Rigby, one of Talarico’s theology professors at Austin Seminary, challenged the idea that Talarico’s faith is somehow illegitimate or tailored to fit his political agenda. Contrary to the insistence of his critics, she said that “the jury’s out on what’s real Christianity and what’s fake Christianity.” Rigby explained that Presbyterianism, as a product of the Protestant Reformation, is a denomination open to change. Followers take seriously the Latin motto Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, meaning “The church reformed, always reforming.”
Talarico’s faith—and his regular meetings with Black faith leaders in the state—may help him with Black voters, who make up 13 percent of the electorate and who largely went for Crockett in the primary. Lydia Bean, a Democratic candidate for clerk of Tarrant County, suggests that Talarico’s Christian view of social justice “is common sense” for most Black Christians. Nikkie S., a Black woman who did not want her full name used because her job demands political neutrality, told me that she appreciates the way Talarico offers Texans an opportunity to prayerfully reconsider their assumptions about how Christianity speaks to politics.
Though the relationship between Christianity and progressive politics described by Talarico may appear convenient, the same could be said of Christian conservatives. Countless policies, including slavery and welfare reform, have been sold by conservatives as dictates of the faith, even as they are difficult to square with the words of Jesus Christ, who did not care for the exploitation of marginalized people. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, also had few positive things to say about men who gleefully spill blood, yet Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has seemed to revel in the U.S. military’s ability to shower “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” Hegseth has also called on God to deliver “overwhelming violence” to America’s enemies in Iran “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
After the primary runoff on May 26, Talarico will learn whether he will be facing off against incumbent Senator John Cornyn or his challenger, Attorney General Ken Paxton. Voters who worry about Talarico’s deployment of faith may not be reassured by Paxton’s rather punitive approach to Christianity. Arguing that Christianity is central to the country’s “moral heritage,” Paxton has zealously worked to inject Christian elements into secular institutions. After backing a 2025 law mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public-school classroom—which a federal appeals court upheld this week—he has sued school districts that have refused to comply. Paxton has also championed legislation that would allow schools to allot time each day for prayer and Bible reading, and he has gone after Catholic charities that serve recent immigrants.
Paxton has likened Talarico to a “false prophet” and an “anti-Christian.” Speaking with a conservative podcast host earlier this month, Paxton complained that everything Talarico says “is as far from the gospel of Jesus Christ as could possibly be imagined,” and darkly alluded to Jesus’s remark that it would be better to tie a millstone around one’s neck and dive into the sea than to mislead God’s children.
[Peter Wehner: Hegseth’s unholy war]
As Talarico calibrates his balance of faith and politics, he will also need to win over nonreligious people—a core Democratic constituency and roughly a quarter of the state’s population. “I just feel like every time he’s interviewed, it’s just instantly about faith,” David Stroot, a nonreligious landman in Fort Worth, told me, sounding exasperated.
Yet spiritually agnostic voters may take comfort in Talarico’s rejection of Paxton’s willful mix of Church and state. The Democratic candidate has described the separation of the two as something “sacred”—and mainly “for the benefit of the Church.” Talarico has also said that “instead of putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, instead of forcing schoolchildren to read the Bible against their wills, why don’t we, all of us, look inward and figure out how we can be more Christlike”—a comment that some saw as a swipe at the allegations of bribery, fraud, and adultery that have checkered Paxton’s career. Stroot said he plans to vote for Talarico in November.
A Democratic loss in Texas would be unremarkable. An upset could be a significant salvo in the battle for the soul of the country. In Christian America, evangelical conservatives have held sway for decades. A victory for Talarico could mean that Americans—faithful and otherwise—are hungry for change.