James Talarico is having a moment. The Texas state representative and Democratic Senate candidate has gone viral more times than most politicians manage to in a full career, partly because he’s young and articulate, and partly because he does something unusual for a Democrat: he talks about Jesus. A lot.
He quotes Scripture on the House floor. Joe Rogan told him to run for president. The political media has decided Talarico represents something new: a Democrat who can finally speak Christian and counter their secular reputation.
I want to take that claim seriously because I think it deserves a serious answer. And the serious answer is: no, he doesn’t.
James Talarico simply stands for an old form of religious progressivism that is more interested in achieving progressive outcomes than holding sincerely to the Christian faith.
The question isn’t whether Talarico is personally sincere. I have no reason to doubt that he is. The question is whether his Christianity is doing any actual work in his politics and whether it functions as a theological foundation or is merely a rhetorical costume. When you look closely, the answer is pretty clearly the latter — Talarico’s Christianity is a Trojan horse with a progressive interior and a Christian exterior.
There is no progressive policy that Talarico’s Christianity hasn’t made peace with. Talarico supports abortion access, transgender ideology, expansive redistribution, and a vision of government robust enough to accomplish the full progressive policy agenda. He opposes the Ten Commandments in public schools and has described God as “nonbinary.” He attends a PCUSA church whose congregants celebrate being free from “dusty old creeds and dogma.” Now, here’s what’s interesting: you could arrive at every single one of those positions through standard secular progressive reasoning: appeals to autonomy, identity, equity, and the expansion of the administrative state. You don’t need the Bible to get there. You don’t need the atoning work of Jesus. Christianity is merely decorative. It’s a rhetorical add-on bolted onto a political program that was already fully assembled before Scripture even entered the room.
Here is what I mean when I say progressive Christianity wears Christianity as a skin suit. The framework is secular progressivism: identity politics, abortion, sexual revolutionary politics, and redistributionist economics. Christian language gets stitched over the top of it to make the whole thing look familiar to voters who grew up in church. It is smarmy and syrupy in its appeals to the “brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.” But the theological content has been hollowed out and replaced. What remains is a set of emotional associations strangely redolent with progressivism (funny how that happens, isn’t it?), and it goes something like this: Jesus loved people, therefore expand Medicaid; the prophets cared for the poor, therefore raise the marginal tax rate; love your neighbor, therefore no borders. The assertions don’t hold up when the Bible is used responsibly, but they feel right to people who want the warmth and consolation of faith without the theological demands that counter progressive orthodoxy.
But oddly, none of this actually works in the long run for the people who employ it. Liberals don’t need Christianity to reach the conclusions Talarico is reaching. They already have a fully operational secular moral vocabulary — rights, autonomy, justice, and equity — that gets them to the same place. So why bother with the theological window dressing? The answer is purely electoral. Democrats have been hemorrhaging religious voters for a generation, and they’re looking for a way to stop the bleeding. Talarico is the proposed solution.
But the solution has a structural problem, and sociology is rather clear about it. Liberal theological commitments corrode religious belief across generations. This isn’t a conservative talking point; it’s one of the better-documented findings in the sociology of religion. Churches that accommodate the surrounding culture’s moral assumptions tend to empty out within two or three generations. The children of progressive Christians disproportionately become religiously unaffiliated. Why? Because if Christianity is just a more emotional version of what MSNBC already told you, you don’t need to get up on Sunday morning to hear it. You do not have to tithe; you do not have to bear social scorn for holding to supposedly outmoded dogmas “on the wrong side of history.”
Theological substance — creation, fall, redemption, resurrection, judgment, human dignity, sexual ethics, and the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ — is precisely what makes Christianity worth believing. Strip that away in the name of openness, and you’ve kept the brand while destroying the product. That Talarico is having a moment should surprise no one. Previous generations of religious progressives had their moment, too, and in time, it all ends the same way: churches mutating into art museums and social justice clubs.
What Talarico and the progressive Christian project are doing is trying to make the Democratic Party look religion-friendly while simultaneously denying religion its actual substance. This betrays what Christianity really is by transforming it into progressive sentiment. Orthodox Christians won’t be persuaded, because they can see the theology has been replaced. Secular progressives don’t need Christianity anyway, so the whole performance ends up as a media-fueled vanity project to bolster progressive politics.
Talarico may mean well. But Christianity isn’t a political tool. It’s a truth claim about reality at odds with the progressivism of his “Christianity.”
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Andrew T. Walker serves as Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a Fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. You can follow him on X: @AndrewTWalker.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
