These days, I’m asked more about James Talarico than I’m asked about any politician not named Donald Trump.
Talarico is a 36-year-old Texas state representative and the Democratic Party’s latest and greatest hope for winning its first statewide election there in more than 30 years.
He’s also one of the most faith-forward politicians in the United States.
Talarico doesn’t just root his policies and ideology in his Christian beliefs, he’s a seminarian willing to dive deep into theology. When he’s arguing with the religious right about, say, Christian nationalism, he makes a specifically Christian argument to counter a poisonous Christian movement.
“Jesus liberates,” Talarico said in a sermon in 2023. “Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves. Christian nationalism kills. Jesus started a universal movement based on mutual love. Christian nationalism is a sectarian movement based on mutual hate.”
The same thing applies to his discussions about specific government policies. Just as Christian conservatives often root their arguments about immigration and abortion in Scripture, so does Talarico.
For example, in an interview with my colleague Ezra Klein, Talarico criticized the evangelical focus on abortion and homosexuality in politics. “It’s remarkable to me,” Talarico said, “that you have an entire political movement using Christianity to prioritize two issues that Jesus never talked about.”
“And so,” he continued, “I’m not saying they’re not important — I actually think both of those issues are very important. But to focus on those two things instead of feeding the hungry and healing the sick and welcoming the stranger — three things we’re told to do ad nauseam in Scripture — to me, is just mind-blowing.”
When I hear Talarico speak about faith, I alternate between agreement and disagreement. He’s spot on about the dangers of Christian nationalism, and yet I can’t help but respond to his arguments about the relative priority of abortion by asking: “Why can’t we do it all? Provide high-quality health care, welcome immigrants and protect the unborn?”
And that’s hardly the only disagreement — theological or ideological — between us.
But those disagreements are to be expected. Talarico is a political and religious progressive. I am a political and religious conservative. But focusing on those disagreements misses the reason I’m asked about him so much.
Talarico isn’t just making arguments. He’s giving people hope, and I think I know why.
Put simply, if the primary American divide is between right and left, then Talarico isn’t that interesting. There’s a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism. White evangelicals might be overwhelmingly Republican, but American Christians are remarkably diverse politically, and we’ve been arguing with one another for a long time.
Yet if the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.
Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.
For too long we’ve evaluated Christians in politics primarily through their policy positions. Are you pro-life or pro-choice? Do you support same-sex marriage? What’s your position on immigration enforcement? Yet this is exactly backward.
If you were to crack open Scripture today and start reading, one of the first things you should notice is that the Bible contains remarkably few political mandates. You can read it from cover to cover and not know the definitive biblical tax rate, welfare program or foreign policy.
But the next thing you’ll notice is that there is an immense amount of guidance describing how Christians should behave. Indeed, in the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul says that the fruit of the spirit is a set of virtues — “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
Absent from that list is a single theological or ideological proposition. That’s not to say that theology or ideology are unimportant. It does really matter whether a politician is pro-life or pro-choice, but there is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.
I’m reminded of three related concepts — orthodoxy, orthopraxy and orthocardia. The first two words might be familiar to some of you; certainly the first one will be. Orthodoxy is the term for the traditional beliefs in any given religious tradition. Orthopraxy refers to righteous conduct.
The final word, however, is arguably the most important, even if it is easily the most obscure. I first heard of orthocardia in a Sunday school lesson taught by Josh Strahan, a professor of biblical interpretation and the New Testament at Lipscomb University, where I teach.
Orthocardia means what it sounds like — “having a right heart.” In essence, it means that our beliefs and behaviors flow from our heart — and that a right posture toward God and man both makes us eager to learn God’s truth (driving us toward orthodoxy) and eager to love our neighbor (pointing us to orthopraxy).
Or, as Jesus said, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
For example, when Talarico won his Senate primary, he said, “I am tired of being pitted against my neighbor. I’m tired of being told to hate my neighbor. It’s been more than 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as total war. It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time.”
I know there are people who register those words deeply. They’ve endured the fractured friendships. They’ve seen their own families fall to pieces. And the idea that a politician might actually run a race without rancor and hatred, can feel intoxicating — even if you have theological or ideological disagreements with him.
To be clear, the answer to hate and division isn’t just becoming more mild-mannered and milquetoast. It’s the combination of conviction and compassion that’s imperative for Christian politicians. I also know that Talarico won’t win over many truly conservative voters. He’s far too progressive. But there are legions of weary Americans who aren’t motivated primarily by ideology, and those are exactly the people who talk to me about Talarico.
One reason politics has been so exhausting — and even so frightening — is that we often know that opposing politicians don’t just disagree with us, but that they hate us. And if a politician hates us, then we know they won’t listen to us, they won’t care about us, and they may well actively try to harm us when they’re in office.
This is what MAGA Christianity has become. In that world, cruelty in the name of Trumpism is no vice, and kindness in the name of progressivism is no virtue.
There is no better representation of that reality than one of Talarico’s potential general election opponents, Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas.
The man is an admitted adulterer, which is something that used to matter to conservative Christians. His wife, a conservative state senator, has filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.” Paxton tried to help Trump steal the 2020 election, and he’s so corrupt that several of his top aides blew the whistle on him and resigned or were removed from their jobs, with many of them claiming that he provided favors for a donor in exchange for personal benefits, including finding employment for the woman said to be his mistress. Paxton has denied wrongdoing.
He was impeached by the Republican-controlled House, only to be acquitted by the Texas Senate. And yet, if Paxton wins, MAGA evangelicals will no doubt claim that he is the only viable candidate for Christians to support — after all, it’s a common sentiment on the right that you can’t be a Christian and vote for Democrats.
Fortunately, however, there are signs in Texas that voters of both parties are turning toward virtue. Senator John Cornyn, the incumbent Republican, won a surprising (though narrow) plurality over Paxton in the first round of Texas primary voting.
Cornyn ran a campaign centered around character — unusual in today’s Republican Party. As my colleague Michelle Cottle wrote, Cornyn couldn’t be more clear: “Ken Paxton is betting that character doesn’t matter to Texas Republican primary voters. I’m betting the opposite. I’m betting character. Still. Matters.”
At the same time, Cornyn’s ultimate prospects may hinge on whether the lowest-character politician in America endorses him. Trump has stayed out of the race so far, but he’s reportedly set to endorse Cornyn for instrumental reasons — Cornyn has a far better chance of keeping Texas red than Paxton.
We know that the Trump era will end. We don’t know how. Political scientists often speak of the American electorate as “thermostatic,” often reacting against the party in power.
There are different ways this can work. The public can certainly react against the ruling party’s ideology by swinging right or left in response.
But what if the coming thermostatic reaction isn’t about ideology as much as about character and temperament? What if we’re seeing a 21st-century version of the American public’s movement away from the cruelty and corruption of Richard Nixon toward the ethics and integrity of Jimmy Carter — a man who won for all the right reasons in 1976, even if his presidency didn’t live up to his promise?
It’s too soon to be that optimistic, but that’s what I see in people’s attitudes toward Talarico. That’s what I see in Cornyn’s surprising plurality over Paxton. This miserable political moment won’t end when the left takes back the government from the right or if the right continues to beat the left. It will end when our politicians — especially Christian politicians — forsake cruelty for compassion and realize that we shall know Christians in politics not by their stridency and ideology, but by their integrity and love, including their love for, as Talarico put it, “all of our neighbors.”
That’s the significance of the Talarico moment — not the old news that a Christian can be progressive, but rather that Christian politicians can actually act like Christians. Kindness still has a place in the public square, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.
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