‘Fake’ Christian? Or Faithful?

“One of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian.” 

That’s how conservative New York Times columnist David French recently characterized James Talarico and the Texas Democrat’s “faith-forward” campaign for the U.S. Senate. It should come as no surprise that Talarico walks the Christian walk: He’s currently on leave from his training for the ministry at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary (APTS). 

However, given the MAGA Christian response to the young politician-seminarian, you might think it was the Antichrist running for the Senate. He’s been called “demonic,” a “fake Christian,” and “blasphemous,” with “very, very radical and extreme views.” One Newsmax host accused him of using “fake passages from the Bible, tortured and misrepresented.” Talarico has drawn fire for characterizing God as “nonbinary,” though he later explained he meant God is “beyond gender” (a common theological notion). U.S. Representative Ronny Jackson, an Amarillo Republican, said the statement showed Talarico is “a full-on RADICAL LEFTIST!!”

Such over-the-top rhetoric is a sad fact of life in this age of post-truth hyperbole. But the ferocity of anti-Talarico invective reveals a deep and very public clash between two distinct ways of being Christian. 

While MAGA Christians insist that the Bible dictates their anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant Christian nationalism, the Mainline Protestant tradition—of which Talarico’s Presbyterian Church (USA) is a part—has a very different understanding of what it means to follow Jesus, one that leads to a politics precisely opposite from that of MAGA Christians. 

Within this Mainline tradition, Talarico is quite orthodox. His campaign, then, and the shrill attacks it provokes from right-wing Christians, is a vivid reminder of just how varied Christianity is. And paradoxically, Talarico’s unabashedly biblical politics also underscore the imperative of defending our nation’s venerable, but now vulnerable, tradition of church-state separation.

So strongly does Talarico’s campaign foreground his Christian faith that The New Yorker claims his platform is basically the New Testament. 

That’s a bit of an overstatement. Talarico is running on a standard progressive Democratic platform. He advocates “paid family leave, affordable child care, [and] the right of every American to marry who they love.” He envisions an America “where every person and every family—regardless of religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other difference between us—can truly be free and live up to their full potential.” This could easily be the platform of a Kamala Harris or an Elizabeth Warren.

Naturally, this is anathema to conservative Republicans and their evangelical Protestant allies. But what seems to particularly irk MAGA Christians is that, unlike most Democratic politicians, Talarico explicitly grounds his progressive agenda in the same Bible that MAGA Christians claim as their own. 

Talarico often says he learned from his Baptist preacher grandfather that Christians “follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments: Love God and love neighbor—because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.” That’s a reference to Matthew 22:36-40, one of Talarico’s go-to, and definitely non-“fake,” scripture passages. And as Talarico told Stephen Colbert, it has radical implications: We are to love our neighbor “regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation or immigration status or religious affiliation.” 

Another of Talarico’s go-to Gospel passages, Matthew 25:35-40, directly links love for Jesus with care for the hungry, the stranger, and the imprisoned. For many evangelicals, this passage refers mainly to a future end-times Tribulation. For Talarico, by contrast, it is manifestly current and intensely political. Here’s how he deploys it in the Colbert appearance:

“For 50 years, the religious right … convinced a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage … two issues that Jesus never talked about. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and every one of our fellow believers [are] going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger.”

Accordingly, Talarico calls for “a politics of love—a love for this state, a love for this country, and a love for all of our neighbors. A love that can heal what’s broken in America.”

However blasphemous Talarico’s “politics of love” may seem to MAGA Christians, he’s quite orthodox within the Mainline Protestant family. Texas Impact’s Bee Moorhead—a Presbyterian Church (USA) elder who has taught Talarico at seminary—considers his politics and biblical appeals “extremely consistent” with their shared denomination’s teachings. Rev. Dr. Josh Robinson, pastor at Austin’s Hope Presbyterian Church, also finds Talarico’s “theological grounding, in most meaningful respects, consistent with PC(USA) teaching.” The denomination, Robinson adds, is “a big tent,” embracing “serious theological diversity, from confessional conservatives to progressive activists. … Talarico is on the progressive end of that tent, but he is inside it.”

Claiming more than 1 million members in the United States, Talarico’s denomination is part of the Reformed tradition of Protestantism. Basic Presbyterian beliefs echo those that most evangelicals affirm: God rules over creation; all persons are sinners; and Christians must live “in accordance with God’s moral law.” Like evangelicals, Presbyterians also believe in Christ’s Second Coming and a final judgment, and they deem the Bible “the infallible word of God.” 

Yet, when applying that divine word to social and political issues, the Presbyterian Church (USA) departs radically from MAGA Christians. According to the denomination’s website, Reformed theology calls the faithful to “respond to God’s call to work for a society that seeks justice.” Another document spells out the denomination’s commitment: “Our social witness stance … encourages church members and leaders to go to places of suffering and need to alleviate poverty, stop violence, protect the planet from climate change, and seek justice for immigrants, the LGBTQIA+ community, and people of color.”

For these Presbyterians, like Talarico, Jesus’ call in Matthew 25 to serve “the least of these” requires a commitment to “dismantling structural racism, and eradicating systemic poverty.” 

Robinson said that Talarico’s use of Matthew 25 “maps directly onto one of our denomination’s central, biblical commitments.” Rev. Dr. Duane Bidwell, pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church in California and a former faculty member at Claremont School of Theology, agreed: “When Talarico emphasizes dignity, compassion, fair economic policies, and moral responsibility, he’s drawing straight from the teachings of Jesus, and he fits right in with the PC(USA)’s social witness tradition.”

When Talarico declares, “The closest thing we have to the Kingdom of Heaven is a multiracial, multicultural democracy,” he echoes leading theological voices in his denomination. For instance, here’s the late Letty M. Russell, longtime Presbyterian professor at Yale Divinity: “[I]n Christ, difference is a given. God intends for many voices, cultures, and languages and presses the church to be part of every nation and culture, growing and learning from the differences of people in its midst.”

Not all members of Talarico’s denomination are as socially and politically liberal as their denomination’s official teachings. Members are fairly evenly divided between Republicans (47 percent) and Democrats (48 percent), and between those who think the growing immigrant population is a change for the better (36 percent) or for the worse (38 percent). Robinson noted that “more theologically conservative members … would take genuine issue” with Talarico’s framing of God as non-binary, especially those “who have been taught to picture God through the default masculine lens.” 

Nevertheless, denomination members appear to align more closely with Talarico on other issues: Seven out of 10 believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, strongly favor same-sex marriage, and believe homosexuality should be accepted. “Talarico’s stances aren’t revolutionary,” Bidwell said. “He’s saying things that have been in the mainstream of PC(USA) life and theological education for 30 or 40 years.”

The broader Mainline Protestant family also includes the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Disciples of Christ, and the Episcopal Church (my own denomination). In Texas, and nationwide, this religious grouping accounts for about 10 percent of adults—significant, but well behind evangelicals (27 percent in Texas) and Catholics (22 percent).

More liberal theologically and politically than their evangelical neighbors, Mainline Protestants generally share Talarico’s concern for those who suffer injustice, marginalization, and discrimination. Last year, Episcopalian bishop Marian Edgar Budde took a characteristically Mainline stand when she called on President Trump to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” including LGBTQ+ persons and undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation. In response, Trump labeled her “a radical left hard-line Trump hater”—shades of the MAGA Christian invective against Talarico.

Apart from rare occasions like the Trump-Budde controversy, Mainline Protestants get precious little coverage in the mainstream media compared to the other major Christian tendencies. And like all Christian groups, they have seen a steady decline in membership in recent decades. So, for many Mainline Protestants I’ve talked to, Talarico’s campaign is as welcome and refreshing as the first raindrops after a long drought.

Talarico in San Antonio on March 1 (AP Photo/Brenda Bazán, File)

Despite positive polling, Talarico still faces an uphill slog to win stubbornly red Texas. Yet however he fares in November, his campaign serves as a timely reminder that there are many ways of following that “barefoot rabbi”—indeed, many ways of being religious, as witnessed by the proliferation of mosques, synagogues, and Hindu and Buddhist temples across the Lone Star State. People of faith, including people of the same faith, disagree profoundly over moral, cultural, and political issues. The “religious vote” is far from monolithic.

And this highlights a basic problem with Christian nationalism, long dominant in Texas politics and seeing an unprecedented ascendency in the second Trump administration. When partisans of that ideology call for the United States to be an explicitly “Christian nation” governed by Bible-based laws, they beg a central but all-important question: Whose version of Christian, and whose interpretation of the Bible? 

Somewhat paradoxically, by running on his faith and thereby drawing vitriol from MAGA Christians, Talarico also reminds us of the wisdom of church-state separation—that venerable constitutional principle which Talarico himself has called “sacred.” (Here again, as Robinson noted, Talarico is orthodox within the Presbyterian tradition: “Presbyterians,” Robinson said, “have a long and serious commitment to [the church-state] boundary, not because faith is private but because coerced religion is a distortion of it.”) As Talarico told Colbert, this separation harmonizes with Jesus’ command to love one’s neighbors, including one’s non-Christian neighbors: “Forcing our religion down their throats is not love.” 

With so wide a variety of viewpoints—even within the same faith community—it’s dangerous for any one to have too much power. While people’s religious commitments inevitably shape their political choices, as Talarico’s Presbyterianism clearly shapes his, no single faith community should have a political monopoly.

When I asked Moorhead how she positions Talarico within the U.S. Presbyterian community as a whole, she replied, “Hopefully he represents the future of the church.” 

Whether he’ll be Texas’ future senator remains to be seen. But his “faith-forward” campaign reminds us of our state’s religious diversity—and of our shared imperative to guard against religious tyranny.

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