As Talarico Eyes Senate Bid, Religion Becomes A Texas Battleground
(ANALYSIS) Vote Common Good, an organization hostile to “MAGA Trumpism,” has been tracking some 30 white Christian clergy or seminarians seeking public office in this election cycle.
Democrats hope such candidates might convey an appealing, pious image in conservative precincts. Eight of these are running for Congress, where few ordained ministers have served throughout American history.
The highest-profile example by far is in Texas, where Democrats hope James Talarico, a squeaky-clean progressive state legislator and outspokenly religious seminary student, can flip a Republican U.S. Senate seat. His opponent is Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Southern Baptist whose frequent “scandal-plagued” label in news articles is understandable.
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In the GOP primary, Paxton, who endorsed Donald Trump for president, easily defeated incumbent John Cornyn, who had won seven straight races whether for state Supreme Court, state Attorney General or U.S. Senate.
The New York Times reports that “Republicans believe they have an opponent they can cast as a wacky liberal from Austin.” Religion will be part of that pitch in this God-fearing state loaded with conservative Protestants. In the inelegant words of Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, “Tala-freako is a creep. He's a vegan. He thinks God is non-binary. He wants to mutilate children.” (See below on that last point).
Talarico strongly identifies with relatively liberal “mainline” Protestantism as a lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and of activist St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, and a student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Republicans also make a target of Talarico’s lifelong pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jim Rigby (profiled here by a conservative critic), a pioneer proponent of same-sex marriage and the sort of left-winger who welcomed an atheist into church membership.
It’s possible that the PC(USA) General Assembly in Milwaukee June 29-July 2 will provide Paxton some ammunition. Some background: In 2011, the denomination deleted its requirement that clergy live in “marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness,” and in 2015 it loosened its definition of marriage to be “between two people, traditionally a man and a woman.” Both measures were designed to approve gay and lesbian couples, but this left ambiguity on other sexual matters.
The next phase arises as Presbyterian delegates consider a bill to require that clergy sexual relationships must be “monogamous,” and to authorize new pastoral resources to guide “individuals exiting polyamorous or polygamous situations” (like living simultaneously with two or more partners).
Lest this concern seem far-fetched, the denomination’s chief LGBT caucus argues against such “conformity to narrow relational expectations” and “rigid and universalized standards.” The proposed polyamory/polygamy ban also faces opposition from several PC(USA) agencies. For one, the Advocacy Committee for Women and Gender Justice objects that this legislation seeks to “regulate the private lives and relational structures of individuals in ways that risk harm rather than healing.”
The 2018 General Assembly affirmed full church “inclusion of transgender people, people who identify as gender non-binary, and people of all gender identities within the full life of the church and the world.” A separate bill in Milwaukee would develop new theology to carry out that belief, teaching “a fluid, celebratory, and expansive understanding of gender and sexuality” with “multiple forms of family life” not “defined by binaries or heteronormativity.”
Talarico is aligned with his denomination on transgender issues. Speaking against a state House bill to exclude genetic men from women’s sports, he declared that “trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image. There’s nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all. They are perfect. They are beautiful and they are sacred.”
Contra the Gruters crack above, Talarico favors gender-transition treatments for youths under age 18, but only puberty blockers and hormone treatments, not surgery.
The gender lingo brings to mind Republicans’ frequent mention of Talarico’s 2021 statement that “God is non-binary.” He explained that he meant to make the point that “God is beyond gender.”
Though his original fashionable phrase caused head-scratching, the later cleanup phrase is orthodox. The Bible calls God the “Father,” English grammar imposes male pronouns, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel imagined God in human form for artistic purposes. But in Jewish and Christian teaching, God is neither embodied nor gendered and is depicted in Scripture with both male and female metaphors.
Like the PC(USA), Talarico is pro-choice and stated in a pro-feminist sermon at St. Andrew’s that “the Bible doesn’t mention abortion.” Conservatives pounced, citing Psalm 139:13, Jeremiah 1:5, and the pre-born John the Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:41).
A political sermon Talarico delivered at St. Andrew’s in 2024 provided a good overview of the way “my politics grows out of my faith,” namely to “challenge the system," advocate separation of church and state, and fight efforts for “Christian dominance.”
Worshipers cheered this partisan one-liner: “Christian nationalism is forcing schools to post The 10 Commandments while nominating a candidate for president who has violated almost all of them.”
By Pew Research Center count, the Texas population is 27% evangelical Protestant, 10% “mainline” Protestant, 5% in historically Black Protestant churches, 22% Catholic (do not neglect these white and Hispanic 2026 voters!), 10% other, and 26% religiously unaffiliated.
Looking at specific Protestant groups in the 2020 Religion Census, the two largest are the Southern Baptist Convention, with 3.3 million members in 7,935 local congregations, and the 4,212 non-denominational congregations, mostly evangelical, with 2.4 million members. The PC(USA) state membership is 81,282 in 417 congregations.
Talarico’s seminary has a “full-time equivalent” enrollment of 111 while the two largest of the evangelical seminaries, Dallas and Southwestern Baptist, together report 2,369.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.