Editorial illustration
James Talarico won the Texas Democratic Senate primary this week, and the media is treating him like the second coming of Jimmy Carter — a soft-spoken man of faith who can reach across the aisle and redeem the Democratic Party’s relationship with Christian voters.
Don’t fall for it.
Talarico is a 36-year-old state representative and Presbyterian seminarian who has built his entire political brand around the claim that progressive politics and Christianity are not just compatible but inseparable. He quotes Scripture on the campaign trail, talks about his seminary coursework on Joe Rogan, and delivers what can only be described as sermons from the Texas House floor — all in service of a theology so thoroughly gutted of its Biblical substance that it’s barely recognizable as Christian at all.
“God Is Non-Binary”
Let’s start with what Talarico actually believes, because the media profile pieces tend to skip past the specifics and focus on how “refreshing” it is to see a Democrat talk about Jesus.
On the Texas House floor in 2021, opposing a bill to keep biological males out of women’s sports, Talarico declared: “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is non-binary.”
He followed that up with: “Trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image.”
Meet James Talarico, Texas’ Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate.
He thinks “God is nonbinary.” pic.twitter.com/PTXKT6GdeK
— Senate Republicans (@NRSC) March 4, 2026
The first statement is heresy. The second is a category error wrapped in emotional manipulation. Nobody disputes that every child is made in God’s image — Genesis 1:27 is clear about that. What Genesis 1:27 is equally clear about is that God made them “male and female.” Not non-binary. Not on a spectrum. Male and female. Talarico, the self-described seminarian, knows this verse. He just doesn’t like what it says.
As for calling God “non-binary” — the God of the Bible reveals Himself as Father. Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father.” The Son became incarnate as a man. The Holy Spirit is referred to with masculine pronouns throughout Scripture. You can debate the nature of God’s transcendence all you want, but slapping a gender studies label on the Creator of the universe to score political points on a House floor isn’t theology. It’s performance art.
The Abortion Gospel
It gets worse. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Talarico offered what might be the most theologically tortured defense of abortion ever attempted by a professing Christian. His argument: before the Incarnation, God asked Mary for her “consent.” Therefore, the Bible affirms that “creation has to be done with consent” — and that means abortion is Christian.
Read that again. He is arguing that the Annunciation — one of the most sacred moments in the entire Christian story — is really just a proof text for Roe v. Wade.
The problems with this interpretation are so numerous that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Mary’s response in Luke 1:38 — “I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” — is an act of submission and obedience, not a negotiation over bodily autonomy. The angel Gabriel didn’t show up with a consent form. He came with a declaration from the Most High God. Mary’s “yes” was the response of a faithful servant, not a patient at a clinic weighing her options.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, Talarico dropped the seminary voice entirely: “This summer, more than half our population became second-class citizens. Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the State. And nothing is more un-Christian.”
Nothing is more un-Christian? Not murder? Not child sacrifice? Not the shedding of innocent blood that the Bible condemns in passages too numerous to count? Proverbs 6:17 lists “hands that shed innocent blood” among the things the Lord hates. Jeremiah condemns the children of Israel for burning their sons and daughters in the fire — something “I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.” But Talarico, the seminarian, has decided that the real sin is restricting access to the procedure.
All Roads Lead to God?
On The Ezra Klein Show, Talarico was asked about other religions. His answer would have gotten him excommunicated from most Christian churches in most centuries of Christian history:
“I believe that Jesus Christ reveals that reality to us, but I also believe that other traditions reveal that reality in their own ways. And I’ve learned more about my tradition by learning more about Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam and Judaism. And so, I see these beautiful faith traditions as circling the same truth about the universe.”
This is universalism — the belief that all religions are essentially the same. It flatly contradicts Jesus’s own words in John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Not one of many ways. Not a particularly good way among several equally valid options. The way. Talarico’s seminary apparently hasn’t covered that verse yet.
“Jesus Was a Radical Feminist”
In what appears to be a sermon delivered in an actual church, Talarico asked his audience: “Did they teach you in Sunday school that Jesus Christ himself was a radical feminist?”
Jesus elevated women in ways that were revolutionary for first-century Palestine. He spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. He forgave the woman caught in adultery. Women were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. All of this is true, and all of it is important. But calling Jesus a “radical feminist” imports an entire modern ideological framework — one built on abortion rights, gender theory, and the dismantling of complementary gender roles — and projects it backward onto a figure who affirmed marriage as between man and woman, appointed twelve male apostles, and submitted to a patriarchal human lineage by design.
Jesus wasn’t a feminist. He was God. And God doesn’t need our political labels.
The PCUSA Problem
Here’s the part the media profiles conveniently omit: Talarico is a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the PCUSA — and the PCUSA is a denomination in freefall. It peaked at 4.25 million members in 1965. It will drop below one million this year. It lost nearly 49,000 members in 2024 alone. Two-thirds of its congregations have fewer than a hundred members. A third of its membership is over seventy. It planted four new churches in all of 2024.
The PCUSA arrived at this point by doing exactly what Talarico now proposes: subordinating Scripture to progressive politics and calling the result “the Gospel.” Meanwhile, the theologically conservative Presbyterian Church in America grew nearly two percent last year and added twenty-two new congregations.
The market has spoken. When you empty Christianity of its content and fill it with the Democratic platform, people leave. They don’t leave because they’re bigots or because they’re afraid of change. They leave because they came looking for God and were handed a voter registration card instead.
What This Is Really About
Talarico is not reclaiming Christianity. He is borrowing its language and moral authority to advance a political agenda that contradicts its foundational teachings on the sanctity of life, the nature of God, the exclusivity of Christ, and the created order of male and female.
This isn’t new. The religious left has been running this playbook since the mainline Protestant collapse of the 1960s. What’s new is the packaging — a young, telegenic seminarian who can hold his own on Joe Rogan and Stephen Colbert. The product is the same. Only the salesman has changed.
Texas conservatives should see Talarico for exactly what he is: a gifted communicator selling a counterfeit gospel. Whether he faces John Cornyn or Ken Paxton in November, the contrast between a faith that submits to Scripture and one that edits Scripture to match the DNC platform will be impossible to miss.
As First Things put it: “One does not reclaim what one currently possesses.” The progressive mainline lost Christianity decades ago. No amount of TikTok charisma can bring it back — because what they’re selling was never Christianity in the first place.
Providence watches over the bold.
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