The Washington Post's opinion pages carried a piece this Thursday under a headline that deserves to be read slowly: James Talarico and the progressive Christians are challenging the Republican Party's claim on God. The framing is instructive before a single argument is made, because it presents the Almighty as a contested asset — something one party has long held and another now proposes to take back, the way one might contest a donor network or a cable channel. And the piece's own sober conclusion, that the effort is unlikely to succeed until the Democratic Party moderates, completes the picture with admirable candor: the recovery of God is to be evaluated by its electoral yield. Whether any of this has anything to do with the God in question — whether He exists, what He has revealed, what He asks — does not enter the analysis, because in the grammar of American political journalism that question has become unaskable. We are invited to watch a property dispute. Nobody thinks to check the title deed.
The man at the center of the dispute is genuinely interesting, which is precisely why he deserves better than the coverage he is receiving from admirers and detractors alike. James Talarico is a Texas state representative and a seminarian at a Presbyterian institution in Austin, an aspiring minister who quotes Scripture fluently and from memory, who won his Senate primary against Representative Jasmine Crockett, and who will face whichever Republican survives the runoff between Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994, so his candidacy is less a campaign than a wager: that there exists, beneath the party's secular managerial class, an electorate that still thinks in the cadences of the King James Bible and has simply stopped being spoken to. On the diagnosis, he is largely right. The historical record he invokes is real: the social gospel that animated the New Deal coalitions, the Black churches that carried the civil rights movement on their shoulders, the long American tradition in which economic mercy was preached from pulpits and not merely from podiums. It is true, and worth saying, that the fusion of Christianity with one party's platform is a recent artifact — a construction of the late 1970s and the 1980s — and not a law of nature.
But a true diagnosis does not absolve a false cure, and the cure on offer repeats the disease with the signs reversed. The proposition that Christianity has been wrongly captured by the right is not answered by capturing it for the left; it is answered by returning it to its own authority, which is precisely what neither operation can afford to do. Consider the episode his opponents will not let him forget. In 2021, during a floor debate over youth sports legislation, Talarico declared that God is nonbinary, and the remark has pursued him ever since — the National Republican Senatorial Committee has lately deployed it in an AI-assembled attack ad, itself a small marvel of our era: synthetic media manufactured to prosecute a theological grievance. Here is what almost no one on either side has been willing to say. As metaphysics, the underlying claim is unremarkable: God is not a body, is not sexed, and the most rigorous doctors of the Christian tradition across seventeen centuries taught exactly that, which is why Talarico's later clarification — that God is beyond gender — would scandalize no one who has read them. The scandal lies elsewhere. It lies in the conversion of that ancient and delicate truth into a floor-debate weapon, deployed not to elevate the argument toward the eternal but to flatten the eternal into the argument — to enlist the divine transcendence of sex as a proxy endorsement for a contemporary legislative position it does not address. The statement was not heresy. It was something more corrosive and more bipartisan: the reduction of theology to rhetoric, the same reduction his adversaries perform when they wrap the tariff schedule in the Beatitudes.
The deeper problem with the project was named, from within its own camp's opposition, months ago. In March, the same newspaper published an essay arguing that Talarico represents Christianity's past, not its future, and the demographic ledger behind that barb is not seriously disputed: the mainline Protestant denominations that embraced progressive accommodation most completely have spent six decades emptying, while their seminaries close and their median age climbs toward the actuarial horizon. This is the fact that should trouble the celebrants of a religious left far more than any Republican attack ad. A Christianity that reliably arrives at whatever conclusions its educated neighbors reached five years earlier gives those neighbors no reason to rise early on Sunday, for one does not need a church to learn what the culture already teaches free of charge. The congregations that endure, here and everywhere, are those that ask something — that hold a line precisely where holding it is costly. This is not a partisan observation. It cuts equally against the megachurch that has quietly swapped the Sermon on the Mount for a market ideology and a flag, and it explains why the pews of both political theologies keep thinning while the shouting grows louder: a faith that functions as a chaplaincy to power, any power, forfeits the authority that made its blessing worth seeking in the first place.
And yet the honest observer must concede what the mockery of Talarico obscures: the hunger he has located is real, and the party consultants who regard him as a curiosity understand it less than he does. When he says the border should be like a front porch — a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door — he is reaching, however imprecisely, for a moral synthesis that the two available orthodoxies have made unspeakable: that the stranger bears an inviolable dignity and that the household has a right to its walls, and that these are not competing claims but the same claim, since only a home that exists can extend hospitality. That such an ordinary piece of moral reasoning now sounds exotic in American public speech is the true measure of what the duopoly of political theologies has cost the country. Each party keeps the half of the moral tradition that flatters its coalition and prosecutes the other half as either bigotry or licentiousness, and the citizen who holds both halves together — the citizen, as it happens, most likely to be found kneeling in an actual church — is offered no ballot line at all.
So the Post is right that a challenge is underway, and right, for the wrong reasons, that it will likely fail. It will fail not because the Democratic Party has yet to moderate, as though the enterprise were a pricing error awaiting correction, but because it shares the defect of the fortress it besieges: it approaches the sanctuary asking what God can do for the coalition, and the only question that has ever built anything durable in the sanctuary is the reverse. The nation does not lack for parties bidding on the divine endorsement; it lacks men and women willing to submit their politics to an authority they did not elect and cannot amend. Until one of these campaigns is prepared to lose an election rather than trim a commandment, the fight over who owns God will remain what it is this morning on the front page: a quarrel between two marketing departments over a trademark whose Holder, we are given to understand, was not consulted — and who has a long and documented history of declining to be owned.
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