Senate candidate James Talarico is young, affable, and the latest incarnation of the Democratic Party’s long-standing daydream of turning Texas blue. Recent such efforts flopped (remember Beto?), but this time around, Democrats’ hope stands on two legs.
First is that following a contentious GOP primary, Talarico’s Republican rival is Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, allegedly a repeat adulterer who has been “indicted on charges of felony securities fraud, and he’s been impeached, too—with votes from members of his own party—on allegations of bribery, dereliction of duty, obstruction of justice and abuse of the public trust, and other misdeeds.”
Second is how openly and often Talarico speaks of his faith while running in one of America’s more religious states. Texas maintains an above-average proportion of Christians (and specifically of evangelicals) even as it becomes increasingly urbanized and diverse—and it is, not coincidentally, the right-of-center heavyweight in the Electoral College.
Accordingly, we’ve seen a lot of emphasis on Talarico’s Christianity and exhortations, both explicit and implicit, that evangelical Republicans could or even should cross the aisle come November: See, he’s a Christian, and you’re a Christian, so put faith over partisanship and vote for your fellow Christian.
But that’s not how any of this works!
Yes, character matters immensely. Yes, we have a problem with partisanship in this country. Yes, Paxton’s record makes his candidacy unacceptable to many Christian voters, even lifelong Republicans, and this article is not an argument for voting Paxton.
Yet big political disagreements with a heavy moral valence—on issues like abortion, transgender issues, and immigration under the Trump administration—don’t cease to matter just because a candidate professes the same faith. And in Talarico’s case, for evangelicals, whether he does profess the same faith is itself in question.
Examples of Talarico foregrounding his faith or having it sympathetically foregrounded for him abound. His campaign slogan, headlining his website, is “It’s time to start flipping tables,” a reference to Jesus cleansing the Temple (John 2:13–25).
The Wall Street Journal introduced him as a “Bible scholar” with a “faith-based message,” noting that he’s in the middle of a seminary degree (now on pause for politics) and proposing that he might “draw moderates and disaffected Republicans” with this approach.
For The New York Times, David French described Talarico as a politician “willing to dive deep into theology,” positing that he’s “giving people hope” and may win over some of the “legions of weary Americans who aren’t motivated primarily by ideology” but like Talarico’s civil, “faith-forward” approach.
And at The Atlantic, leftist Catholic writer Elizabeth Bruenig noted that “party loyalty often takes precedence over religious affiliation,” suggesting in the observation that here it shouldn’t: that Talarico should get his fellow Christians’ votes because of their shared faith.
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I can understand the impulse here, both the partisan version from Democrats who want a win and the exhausted version from Republicans and independents who just can’t stomach Paxton. But this notion that evangelicals should simply put policies and ethics aside to vote for a friendly fellow Christian grossly misunderstands these voters and their convictions around the issues in play.
Perhaps it’s easier to understand in the reverse: Ardently pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ, pro-immigration Democrats wouldn’t vote for pro-life, gender-critical, build-the-wall Republicans just because they check the same religion box on a census form.
And, crucially, no one would expect them to vote that way. It’s not difficult to imagine hypotheticals here, like RealClearPolitics election analyst Sean Trende’s scenario of liberal, secular Jewish voters being unwilling to back a likeable but super-conservative, ultra-Orthodox rabbi. Or think back to 2004: As a fellow Protestant, George W. Bush was arguably a closer coreligionist to progressive Episcopalians than the Catholic John Kerry was, yet no one thought Bush would get their votes.
But actually, we don’t need to deal in hypotheticals or history here because a similar situation is playing out for Democrats in Maine right now. The anticipated Democratic Senate nominee there, Graham Platner, is dogged with allegations of infidelity, “disturbing” behavior as a boyfriend, and lies—not to mention the Nazi tattoo. Platner is the “Paxton” of this race, the candidate with very public problems of character.
Nevertheless, Platner’s holding onto his side’s support. Democratic representative Ro Khanna made clear he’s not put off by Platner’s “toxicity.” Longtime strategist James Carville said Platner “has value,” highlighting his difference from his GOP opponent senator Susan Collins on foreign policy. In The New Republic, editor Michael Tomasky—who last year bemoaned Republican voters’ lack of care about character—focused on “Collins’s record, not [Platner’s] past,” and argued that in this light, “short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt.”
Anyone who can grasp Democrats’ reasoning for rejecting Collins should equally be able to grasp parallel reasoning on the right. Thus, for conservative evangelical Texans (whether or not they go for Paxton), Talarico’s talk about Christianity typically won’t override their alarm at his political positions. If anything, as conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat wrote at The New York Times, Talarico’s “vision of political morality” is so far afield that his expressions of “piety [make] it more threatening, not more congenial.”
And it is far afield. The “God is nonbinary” line he kind of walked back is but the beginning. Talarico seems sincere, but his Christianity is undeniably heterodox, if not outright heretical.
I don’t say that with any malice nor to help Paxton. This is just a straightforward assessment of how Talarico speaks about the biblical canon, about Christianity as merely one religion of many pointing to the same truth, about the value of doctrine, about his delight that his kind of Christianity is amenable to atheists—not atheists who are becoming Christians, mind you, but active atheists—and about Jesus himself, whom Talarico says “not once in the entire Bible [asked] us to worship him.”
All that is before we get to the most contentious ethical debates of our moment. Among many other comments, Talarico has implied Mary could’ve aborted Jesus, claimed “the Bible is silent on abortion,” enthused about how “our trans community needs abortion care too,” and repeatedly reduced women to “neighbors with a uterus,” a strange and demeaning turn of phrase.
Undoubtedly there are Texas Republicans voting for Paxton because they don’t much care about character. But evangelicals who care about character are in no way obliged to vote for a candidate with these theological and political views no matter his religious affiliation. It’s not necessarily an excess of partisanship to look at all that and say, Nah.
Talarico himself has decried “people baptizing their partisanship and calling that Christianity, when in reality your politics should grow out of your faith, not the other way around.” That’s a needful warning as politics seems to overtake ever more of our lives. If only Talarico and his boosters could see that many evangelicals do source their politics in their faith, however imperfectly, and that’s exactly why he’s unlikely to get their votes.
Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor of Christianity Today.
The post Talarico’s Faith Won’t Win Him Many Evangelical Votes appeared first on Christianity Today.
