That's James Talarico, pictured above at the upper right. Talarico is a Democrat, and is running for a seat in the United States Senate. In Texas! In a couple of days, we're going to find out whether or not Talarico was able to win that Senate seat. Ordinarily, he would not be given any chance to win, at all. Texas is nothing if not "Republican." However, things are actually looking pretty good for Talarico. It will be interesting to see if he pulls off the upset that increasingly seems possible.
Today, I am responding to an article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, September 27, 2026. The article, by Jia Lynn Yang, is titled as follows: "Can Democrats Reclaim The Christian Moral High Ground?" Here's how that article begins, and it does seem that Talarico is placing a lot of emphasis on his Christian faith:
When James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for the Senate, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show this month, he put forward a question that many American millennials may recall from the cloth bracelets that were de rigueur among Christian youth groups in the 1990s.
“I often wonder,” Talarico said, “What would Jesus do if he visited the U.S. Senate?”
“I think he would tell the senators on the floor, ‘Depart from me,’” Talarico said, quoting Jesus Christ when he describes in the Sermon on the Mount how he will cast out false prophets from his heavenly kingdom.
Then Talarico gained more steam. “For I was hungry and you cut my food assistance. I was sick and you kicked me off Medicaid. I was a stranger and you deported me and my family. And then I think he would flip over those fancy desks on the floor of the U.S. Senate and demand that we take care of all of our neighbors, especially the least of these.”
The audience broke into cheers before he had even finished.
The interview has been viewed more than 11 million times (emphasis added).
I am more of a "reader" than a "viewer," which means that while I had read a lot about Talarico, I had never actually seen him - not until I stopped reading Yang's article and clicked that link she provided. I have to say, I was impressed!
I was also impressed with Yang's discussion about how the relationship of Christianity to our politics may actually be changing (emphasis added):
According to the historian Matthew Avery Sutton, in the second half of the 20th century, the United Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians lost more than half of their members. During the same period, Southern Baptists grew by 37 percent, as they unabashedly proclaimed a Christian vision for the whole nation.
These conservatives found a political home in the Republican Party. The historian Randall Balmer traces the beginning of the alliance to a fight in the 1970s over the tax-exempt status of racially segregated private schools.... A few years later, activists like Paul Weyrich engineered abortion as an important evangelical cause by hitching it to concerns over the changing role of women in society.
These conservatives laid claim to Christianity as a political ethos. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to recreate this great nation,” wrote Weyrich, who was also a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation.
The claim to a “moral majority,” though, was always dubious. Millions of Black churchgoers never acceded to the political program of the white evangelicals. Nor did many who remained in the mainline churches. Instead, evangelical conservatives took on the identity of a persecuted minority as the country embraced divorce and gay marriage. Punching back from their enviable perch in the Republican Party, they saw the achievement of once-unthinkable goals, like overturning the right to an abortion in 2022. The alliance persists today. White evangelicals remain Trump’s most loyal backers.
But its control over the G.O.P. may be weakening. “The religious right had its moment, and the coalition can’t last forever,” says Ryan Burge, a political scientist focused on American religious demographics at Washington University in St. Louis.... Candidates like Talarico are unsettling the public vocabulary of Christianity, which remains America’s moral lingua franca, no matter how many pews are empty on Sunday. The Republican base, meanwhile, is itself becoming steadily less devout. In 2007, nearly half of all Republican voters attended a religious service at least once a week. By 2023-24, that figure had dropped to one-third, according to Pew....
That same study found that half of Democrats still identify as Christian, making them the largest group in the party. (Among these, about a third are Catholic, a population that doesn’t lean hard to one party or the other.) Some 40 percent of Democrats say they have no religious affiliation, but even many of these say they believe in God or have a Christian background.
But for now, the conservatives are jealously guarding their position. In Texas this month, at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention, the evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas called Talarico’s views “blasphemous.”
“James Talarico believes that all religions are equally valid and are simply different truths or different paths up the same mountain of truth,” he said. “But Jesus Christ disagrees with James Talarico. In John 14:6, Jesus said: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.’”
I don't know what Talarico has, specifically, said about "salvation," but I would like to suggest to Pastor Jeffress that he spend a little time reading up on what a good many theologians think about John 14:6. My understanding, from my one year at Union Theological Seminary as a Rockefeller Brothers' Fellow, is that what Jesus said in that Bible verse does not, in fact, have Jesus claiming that only those who specifically identify as "Christians" will be "saved" (to use that terminology).
That verse from John can (and I think should) be read as Jesus saying, in fact, the exact opposite of what Pastor Jeffress is claiming. Jesus was telling his disciples that anyone who "comes to the Father," however she or he gets there, and whatever words that person may use, is in fact going to be received and welcomed, just as those who profess the name of Jesus will be received, because Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life." Anyone who "comes to the Father," however they get there, will be getting there by way of Jesus, by God's grace.
Finding ways to divide, deny, and discriminate against those searching for God, who don't use the specific words that Pastor Jeffress elevates as the linguistic formula for salvation, is the very opposite of what Jesus has told those who have "ears to hear."
Image Credit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/magazine/talarico-christian-pastors-democrats.html
