THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TALARICO

James Talarico has a problem with the authority of Scripture

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  October 26, 2026

At a CNN town hall earlier this month, a Texas woman named Sarah Gardner, a Christian and a small business owner, looked James Talarico in the eye. She told him that what he has said about God, gender and abortion had led a great many Christian voters to question whether his faith was real.

It was the most important question of the evening, and it deserved a better answer than the one he gave.

Talarico is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas. On November 3 he faces Ken Paxton, and the polls have him narrowly ahead. He is a Presbyterian seminarian and a former schoolteacher with a preacher's cadence, and he has made his Christian faith the centerpiece of his campaign. That is why this matters beyond Texas. When a man asks for votes in the name of Jesus, it is fair to ask which Jesus he means.

I do not care whether Mr. Talarico is a Democrat or a Republican. Politics is not my quarrel; theology is. What he teaches should be answered from every orthodox pulpit in the land, because it is not the faith once delivered to the saints. It is the faith of the progressive mainline, and we know what that faith does to churches. His own Presbyterian Church (USA) counted more than three million members at its reunion in 1983. Today it has barely a million. Progressive Christianity does not fill churches. It empties them.

Give him his due. He is articulate and quick, and he is unafraid of a hostile room. He has told CBS that some of his past statements "missed the mark." The question is whether he regrets the theology or merely the phrasing. The record suggests the latter.

His errors fall under three heads. He silences Scripture where it speaks, he relativizes Christ, and he rewrites the gospel.

I. Scripture Silenced

"The Bible is silent on abortion." Talarico has said this on the campaign trail, and he said it again at the CNN town hall to a voter who opposes abortion. Jesus never mentions abortion, he argues, so Christians must read Scripture as a whole. On Joe Rogan's podcast in July 2025 he went further, saying the idea of a set Christian orthodoxy on abortion "is just not rooted in Scripture."

He also offered Rogan an argument from the Annunciation. Before the Incarnation, he said, God asked Mary's consent, and therefore creation must be done with consent and freedom.

Let us take him at his word and read Luke 1 as a whole. Mary did consent, to conceive. Then watch what happens. Mary hurries to the hill country, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, greets her as "the mother of my Lord" (Luke 1:43). The child in Mary's womb, an embryo of days, is already called Lord. The unborn John leaps for joy in his presence (1:41–44). Talarico's own proof text is among the most pro-life passages in the New Testament.

Nor is the rest of Scripture silent. The Psalmist was knit together in his mother's womb and seen by God before he was formed (Psalm 139:13–16). Jeremiah was known and consecrated before birth (Jeremiah 1:5). Christ's repeated concern for the little ones and the least, the weak and voiceless who cannot defend themselves, extends by every principle of justice to the most defenseless human beings there are.

The Church understood this from the beginning. The Didache, written within living memory of the apostles, commands plainly: "You shall not murder a child by abortion." The Epistle of Barnabas says the same. Rome, Constantinople and the churches of the Reformation agreed for nineteen centuries, and the Orthodox Church still regards abortion as the taking of innocent life. That consensus broke only in the twentieth century, when some Protestant denominations decided the culture understood the matter better than the Fathers. Talarico is not recovering an ancient silence. He is repeating a modern innovation.

"God is non-binary." Talarico made this case in an October 2021 Texas House floor speech against a girls' sports bill. Genesis opens, he said, with a masculine Hebrew noun for God and a feminine noun for the Spirit, so God is masculine, feminine and everything in between. In the same speech he called trans children God's children, made in God's image. At the CNN town hall he admitted he had been "provocative" but defended the theology, claiming Charlie Kirk and Pope Benedict had said the same. (In fairness, he backed a national ban on gender-affirming surgery for minors that same evening.)

Let us concede what is true. God is not a sexual being. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says God is neither man nor woman. Benedict would have said so, and so would every orthodox theologian from Athanasius to Packer. If that were all Talarico meant, there would be no argument.

But that is not all he meant. The question is not whether God has a body. It is whether we may rename Him. Grammatical gender is not sexual identity. The Hebrew ruach is usually feminine and occasionally masculine, and no Jewish reader ever took either form as a statement about the sex of the Almighty. What Scripture does is far more deliberate. God names Himself Father, King and Lord. The eternal Son became incarnate as a man. When the disciples asked how to pray, Jesus did not offer them a menu. He said, "Our Father." We do not get to improve on the name God has given us.

Talarico's better text is Genesis 1:27: "in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." That verse does not blur the line between the sexes; it draws it. Jesus Himself cited it, together with Genesis 2:24, as the foundation of marriage (Matthew 19:4–6). The image of God is borne by man and woman as distinct and complementary creatures, not by a spectrum.

Sexuality. This brings us to homosexuality. Talarico has championed LGBTQ+ causes and called transgender children "God's children." He argues that Jesus never spoke about gay marriage and that the culture wars have overemphasized it at the expense of the rest of Scripture.

The argument from Jesus' silence is the same move he makes on abortion, and it fails the same way. Jesus was not silent about sex. He condemned adultery, including adultery of the heart (Matthew 5:27–32). He named porneia, sexual immorality, among the evils that come out of the human heart and defile a man (Mark 7:21). Spoken to Jews, that word covered the whole range of sexual sins forbidden in Leviticus 18, same-sex relations among them. When He was asked about marriage, Jesus went back to the beginning: one man, one woman, one flesh, for life. He did not need to address every modern variation, because He had already defined the thing itself.

As for "rights," Paul certainly had them. He invoked his Roman citizenship to avoid a flogging (Acts 22:25) and appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:11). In 1 Corinthians 9 he insists on his rights as an apostle, then tells the Corinthians he has not used them, "rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ" (9:12). That is the Christian posture toward rights: held lightly and surrendered gladly for Christ. Paul never claimed a right to any sexual behavior. He claimed the right to suffer for the Name.

II. Christ Relativized

On a New York Times podcast in January, Talarico said his Christian faith had grown through learning about Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. He described all of them as circling the same truth about the cosmos.

They are not circling the same truth. They do not agree on whether God is personal or whether the self is real. They disagree about whether Jesus is Lord, prophet, avatar or blasphemer. They differ on whether salvation comes by grace, by merit, by extinction or by escape from the wheel. To say they circle the same truth is not generosity. It is a refusal to take any of them seriously, Christianity included.

Jesus did not leave the matter open: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Peter told the Sanhedrin there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).

I was at Lausanne in 1974 when the evangelical world, with John Stott as chief drafter, put its name to a covenant. It affirmed the uniqueness and universality of Christ and rejected any syncretism implying that Christ speaks equally through all religions. Stott was no fundamentalist; he was the most gracious evangelical of his century. He would not have yielded an inch here.

A man who believes the great religions circle the same truth may be a capable legislator. He should not be ordained to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. On this statement alone, an orthodox presbytery should decline to examine him further.

III. The Gospel Rewritten

Atheists more Christlike than Christians. On the Hunt/Carville podcast, Talarico said some atheists are more Christ-like than some of his Christian colleagues in the Texas House. He accused conservatives of baptizing their partisanship and calling it Christianity.

Here he has a point, and I grant it. Christian nationalism is a real temptation, and not every man who shouts loudest about God has met Him. I learned that first-hand. During the Clinton years, Jerry Falwell Sr. accused Bill Clinton of running drugs into the country by small plane to fund his political ambitions. He offered no proof. It was an accusation and nothing more. Tony Campolo, who was close to Clinton, asked me to write a press release condemning it, and I did. The next day my phone rang. It was Falwell, and he was not calling to discuss the evidence. He threatened me and told me I would never preach in one of his churches. It was an empty threat, since I had no desire to. But I have not forgotten that call. Bearing false witness does not stop being a breach of the ninth commandment because it is done in the service of Christian politics.

My conversations with Malcolm Muggeridge, who came to faith late and with great humility, were another thing altogether. Graciousness is not the same as orthodoxy, but its absence is a poor advertisement for it.

Notice, though, which way Talarico's sympathy runs. Conservative Christians are hypocrites and atheists are Christ-like. His scales are not balanced.

Love as the test of faith. On Rogan, Talarico said the real test is not whether you love Jesus, because Jesus is easy to love. The test is whether you love Judas. He built this on Dorothy Day's line that you love God only as much as the person you love least.

There is a truth buried in this, and it should be acknowledged. Christ commanded us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44). He washed Judas' feet, and in Gethsemane He greeted His betrayer as "friend" (Matthew 26:50). No Christian may exempt anyone from love.

The error lies elsewhere, in two places. First, Jesus is not easy to love. The world hated Him, and He warned His disciples it would hate them too (John 15:18). They nailed Him to a cross. A Jesus who is easy to love is a Jesus who has been edited.

Second, Scripture's test of faith is not an ethical achievement but a confession. "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (1 John 4:2). If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9). Love for one's neighbor, even the unlovable neighbor, flows from that faith; it does not replace it. Talarico has turned the fruit into the root.

Race in place of sin. In tweets after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, Talarico described racism as a virus that white Americans spread through words, actions and systems even when they show no symptoms.

Racism is a sin, and the Church has much to repent of. But Scripture locates the virus elsewhere. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men (Romans 5:12). Not to white men; to all men. A racialized doctrine of original sin is still a doctrine of original sin, simply aimed at the wrong target. It also offers no remedy, because there is no cross in it, only guilt that cannot be washed away because it is inherited in the skin.

Jesus without repentance. Talarico has repeatedly argued that Jesus reserved His harshest condemnations for religious hypocrites rather than ordinary sinners.

Half of that is true. Jesus ate with tax collectors and prostitutes, and Matthew 23, the most scorching chapter in the Gospels, is aimed squarely at the scribes and Pharisees. But Talarico keeps the welcome and drops the call. Jesus began His public ministry with one word: "Repent" (Mark 1:15). When people told Him of the Galileans Pilate had slaughtered, He offered no consolation about structural injustice. He said, "Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish" (Luke 13:3). He pronounced woes on whole towns, Chorazin and Bethsaida, for refusing to repent (Matthew 11:20–24), not only on Pharisees. To the woman caught in adultery He said, "Neither do I condemn you," and then, "Go, and from now on sin no more" (John 8:11). Zacchaeus was received, and Zacchaeus was changed.

A gospel of welcome without repentance is not the gospel. It is a hospitality policy.

Conclusion

James Talarico is an able man who may well be elected on November 3. Texas will judge his politics. The Church must judge his theology, and on Scripture, on Christ and on the gospel itself, it falls short.

If his political career falters, he will find a warm welcome in the Episcopal Church. There one can believe almost anything, so long as it is not the orthodox teaching of Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer or the Thirty-Nine Articles. And if you do not embrace gay marriage, you will be shown the door. Just ask Bishop William Love, who was driven from the Diocese of Albany for refusing to do so.

END