James Talarico, a onetime Sunday school teacher, opened his acceptance speech on Tuesday night with a Bible story.
“I’m reminded of that story from Scripture of a shepherd boy who goes up against a giant,” he told an ebullient crowd in Austin, Texas. In the end, of course, the shepherd boy defeats the well-armed Goliath with only a slingshot.
Mr. Talarico slew his own giant this week, ending decades of Republican control in Texas with a decisive win that carried multiple other Democrats in the state to victory. He did it in part by speaking easily and openly about how his Christian beliefs inform his politics, starting with the biblical command to love God and “love thy neighbor,” as the sign on his lectern read on Tuesday night.
He was one of many successful Democrats across the country who framed their politics in terms of their Christian faith. The Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton pulled off a similar upset in Kansas. Two ordained ministers, Sarah Trone Garriott and Lindsay James, flipped House seats for Democrats in Iowa.
In Texas, Mr. Talarico was an underdog not just because of his party, but because of the type of Christianity he practices. He is a progressive mainline Protestant — a Presbyterian, specifically — in a state defined culturally and politically by conservative evangelicalism. Texas has seven of the 20 largest churches in the country, all of which can be characterized as evangelical. Sprawling big-box-style campuses line the highways, and steeples dot the back roads. In cities, Bible study gatherings often require microphones.
In recent years, an increasingly combative Christian conservatism came to feel like a kind of official state language of faith. This summer, Texas became the first state to mandate Bible readings in public schools, after a successful push to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms there. Republican lawmakers also turned the power of the state against some Muslim groups, often framing the cause as a spiritual battle.
More than a quarter of adult Texans are self-described evangelicals. But the state is also home to progressive Protestants like Mr. Talarico, millions of Catholics, and politically active Black congregations, including one in Dallas whose pastor was elected to Congress as a Democrat this week.
Mr. Talarico, an eighth-generation Texan and onetime seminarian, understood all that. His own grandfather, once a Baptist preacher, found himself on the “moderate” side when conservatives took over the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1970s and ’80s, a move masterminded in Texas. Mr. Talarico was raised in a church that has been known locally for its progressive activism for decades.
In a town hall hosted by CNN in October, a voter from his hometown of Round Rock, Texas, pressed him “Christian to Christian” about provocative past statements like “God is nonbinary.”
“Do you believe that the Bible is the absolute source of truth and God’s final authoritative word, even when our culture says otherwise?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Talarico answered.
For many, his rise was a reminder of the capacious borders of Christianity in the state.
“The loudest voices that people hear are these megachurches, and they think that’s what we’re all doing,” said the Rev. Janet Maykus. She was raised in a progressive church in then-rural Lancaster, Texas, where she was taught that “faith is something particular to every person,” rooted in justice and kindness rather than doctrine.
Ms. Maykus, 64, now leads the United Christian Church of Austin, a small mainline Protestant congregation in the capital.
When her congregation recites the Lord’s Prayer, it’s a “train wreck,” she said fondly. Some people recite a version with gender-inclusive language; others tack on a few extra words here and there. In every service, Ms. Maykus also prays aloud for “our siblings in Christ who have lost their way to the lure of white Christian nationalism.”
In recent months, she said, she has talked with multiple visitors to the church who said they had been inspired by Mr. Talarico to seek out a church like hers. She is baptizing a baby on Sunday.
The growth of progressive congregations like hers is exactly why Robert Jeffress, pastor of the politically influential church First Baptist Dallas, watched Mr. Talarico’s ascent with alarm, he said in an interview this week.
“What James Talarico believes about the Bible and about Jesus, those beliefs don’t disqualify him from being a senator, but they do disqualify him from being a Christian pastor, or even a Christian,” Mr. Jeffress said, referring in part to Mr. Talarico’s suggestion that Christianity is not the only religion that points to the truth.
Last Sunday, Mr. Jeffress said, he alluded to Mr. Talarico as he preached about the tower of Babel, warning how “false religion always mixes truth with error.”
Mr. Jeffress’s church, established in the 1860s, is one of many institutions that have long made Texas a major exporter of politically conservative Christianity.
Texas is where the folksy fundamentalist radio host W. Lee O’Daniel became governor in 1938, with a platform based on the Ten Commandments and low taxes. It’s where W.A. Criswell, a predecessor of Mr. Jeffress, called the separation of church and state “the figment of some infidel’s imagination” in 1984. And it’s where Dan Patrick, the state’s current lieutenant governor, described his socially conservative agenda as an expression of his Christian faith.
In the run-up to the Senate race, pastors of some of the largest evangelical congregations in the state worked overtime to make the case against Mr. Talarico, even as they nodded at the scandal-ridden reputation of his opponent, Ken Paxton.
“Wise Christians can differentiate between a FALLEN candidate and an EVIL candidate,” Josh Howerton, the pastor of a large church in North Texas, wrote on X last week, without mentioning Mr. Paxton or Mr. Talarico by name.
A so-called fallen candidate has “personal sin” in his or her own life, the pastor wrote. An evil candidate, by contrast, “leads entire communities, states, and nations to sin.”
Mr. Paxton made his own pitch to conservative Christians. One ad used artificial intelligence to depict Mr. Talarico defacing a Bible and reciting quotes taken out of context from his sermons and speeches.
“If Christians don’t vote,” Mr. Paxton told the right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Election Day, “we’re going to have trouble sustaining Christianity in this country.”
But Mr. Paxton didn’t speak as easily about his own religious life. It was never clear during the campaign whether he still belongs to a church. His former pastor, Jack Graham, the longtime leader of a politically influential megachurch near Dallas, joined the faith council of his opponent in the primary, John Cornyn.
This week, some in the state wondered if they were seeing the end of one era of Texas Christianity, and the beginning of another.
“If that form of conservative Christianity was going to die out, this is what it would look like,” said Joseph Locke, an historian at the University of North Texas and the author of a recent book about religion in the state.
“It would start with these isolated victories, and you could see the cracks forming,” he said.
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