Earlier this month, in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat from Texas, 36-year-old state representative James Talarico defeated congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. Among liberals, his victory set off a wave of euphoria. Among conservatives, it triggered responses ranging from “bring it on!” to mild concern to what Buzzfeed deemed a “complete meltdown” from Donald Trump.
That meltdown could be warranted. Not only because the GOP’s senate candidate might eventually be Ken Paxton, the Papa Karamazov of Lone Star State politics, but also because Talarico is a highly, highly unusual and appealing Democrat. A seminarian and Presbyterian minister in training, he speaks openly about his faith and how it impacts his policy prescriptions. Black Democrats do this all the time. But Talarico is not Black. The New Yorker described his complexion as sitting “between a golf ball and cream cheese.”
Phenotype aside, one wonders if this devotee of “incarnational politics” can become the first Texas Democrat to win a statewide office in nearly forty years. I am skeptical, but intrigued.
The New Yorker described his complexion as sitting “between a golf ball and cream cheese.”
Democrats are perennially in search of politicians who can peel away those religious voters who have, over the past half century, made their home in the Republican Party. Some Democrats—Bill Clinton, Barack Obama—have pulled this off. But can this former sixth-grade school teacher find votes among an electorate hardened to view progressive figures like him with deep suspicion? And can he do so in an era in which the wall of separation between church and state has been reduced to rubble?
To make sense of Talarico’s candidacy, its perils and its possibilities, you need to understand Obama’s radical reconfiguration of the Democratic Party. Our saga begins in November 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in the presidential election. The Democrats’ post-mortem analysis raised a troubling question: how did a flailing incumbent like Bush, presiding over a limp economy and an unpopular war in Iraq, manage to get reelected?
The answer: the so-called “values voters.” At that time, they were also referred to as “the Christian Right.” Like their eighties-era forebears, the “Moral Majority,” their ranks included Protestant evangelicals, Catholics of the traditionalist variety, and smaller groups like conservative Mormons. The issue that galvanized them in 2004 was not weapons of mass destruction, or inflation, but down-ballot gay marriage amendments. In the swing state of Ohio, the values voters supported Bush, thereby confirming Karl Rove’s base intuition that homophobia would drive turnout.
Despondent Democrats did some soul-searching, as it were. Their autopsy concluded that their party was too “secular,” too hostile to “religion,” too doctrinaire about separation of church and state.
Some data bore this out. When Democrats fielded candidates uncomfortable talking about God and connecting with communities of faith (e.g., Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Kerry in 2004), they lost. Bill Clinton, by contrast, was always up for some Bible thumpin’ and was rewarded with high office in 1992 and 1996.
By the time the 2006 midterms rolled around, Washington was knee-deep in operatives tasked with closing “the God Gap.” These pollsters, consultants and activists had read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Howard Thurman. Some also listened to Arcade Fire. Their mission was to shore up the “religious outreach” of their clients, who in 2008 included Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama.
Obama, of course, didn’t need consultants to teach him how to deploy faith on the campaign trail. His grounding in the Black church graced him with fluency in God talk. As early as the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he had brought the house down when he exclaimed that we “worship an awesome God in the Blue States.”
Obama didn’t merely wear faith on his sleeve. He wanted to break with the party’s secular orthodoxy. Since the Kennedy administration, Democrats had been secular separationists. It didn’t mean they were anti-religious (secularism, I stress, is not atheism). For these politicians, like Catholic John Kennedy or Baptist Jimmy Carter, secularism meant that a “high and impregnable” wall of separation between church and state was good. It was good for the government, good for religious majorities and minorities, good for nonbelievers, and good for America.
But mindful of the 2004 wipeout, and mindful that losing was bad, Obama engaged in some Clintonesque triangulation. He was going to eat the Christian Right’s lunch (of Wonder Bread and mayonnaise). In a passage from The Audacity of Hope (2006) he intoned: “In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning.” I distinctly remember how unnerved some Democrats were by this discourse. It recalled nineties-era writers like Richard John Neuhaus (The Naked Public Square) and Stephen Carter (The Culture of Disbelief), both lionized by Christian conservatives.
But it worked! The junior senator from Illinois sliced off a small but statistically significant percentage of values voters. Equally important, he may have lightly depressed their aggregate turnout—after all, he wasn’t some godless ingrate. It helped that Obama was blessed with John McCain as an opponent, for the Arizona senator had brawled with the Christian Right for years. Only in 2008, with his campaign in a tailspin, did he hypocritically find God.
Obama won. The Christian Right was pronounced dead (again), even by some of its own. The Democrats had found their faith!
By the time the 2006 midterms rolled around, Washington was knee-deep in operatives tasked with closing “the God Gap.”
Once in office, Obama triangulated even harder. He didn’t eliminate George W. Bush’s much-maligned Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he supersized it. He didn’t make a rote appearance at prayer breakfasts but orated at length about “Christ” (and sent me off the rails).
Meanwhile, Obama infamously abandoned the party’s fifty-state strategy, focusing resources on swing states. As a result, purple states became red, red states, crimson. Their legislatures became Republican supermajorities—“laboratories of autocracy,” in which every imaginable experiment in anti-secular Christian supremacy was conducted.
Throughout his two terms, Obama stiffly made the proper noises about the importance of Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation. I don’t think he necessarily wanted to destroy the wall, just make it less high and impregnable. Let’s call it the “low-wall posture.”
That was, however, a slope that got very slippery, very fast. For starters, Obama’s faith-friendly policies validated and emboldened the Christian Right. If a Democratic president could talk openly about Christ, why couldn’t a Republican invite dozens of ministers to the White House to lay hands on him? If a liberal president funded a federal office of faith-based initiatives, why couldn’t a conservative one forklift millions into the coffers of religious schools?
More subtly, Obama’s course correction, while good electoral politics, effectively lobotomized that part of the Democratic brain that once thought seriously about church-state relations. Secularism asks many timeless questions, one of them being, “What is the proper relationship between a government and the religious and non-religious citizens it governs?” From the Obama era forward, Democrats sat on their low wall. They devoted zero innovation or even thought to this question. They forfeited the political language needed to answer that essential question. Which is really unfortunate, because the Christian Right was busily blasting their low wall into oblivion.
Christian nationalism, according to James Talarico, “is the worship of power in the name of Christ.” That formula is devastatingly clear and effective—an example of why liberal voters are drawn to him. That same answer also points to why Talarico will have difficulty replicating Obama’s electoral success.
What we are dealing with today isn’t Obama’s or even your grandfather’s Christian Right. Two decades back, Christian nationalists were on the fringes of a social movement which was itself regarded as somewhat fringe-y. Now, for all intents and purposes, Christian nationalists are the Christian Right, and they’re not on the fringes of anything. As never before, they have a president’s ear. They have cabinet-level appointees. They have bottomless financial resources. They have media empires. They have grassroots infrastructure.
Evangelicals are a quarter of the Texas electorate, and they voted 90 percent for the Republican Party in 2024 (numbers similar to what Obama faced nationwide in 2008). To do what Obama did, Talarico would need to flip a small percentage of them. Better yet, he must disincentivize a bunch of them to vote at all. Will Talarico’s religious credibility help him here, as it did with Obama?
I don’t think so. For starters, we can count on GOP oppo research to swift-boat Talarico’s greatest strength (i.e., his identity as a man of faith). If the GOP tried to disgrace Obama by crazy-glueing him to the worldview of his mentor, Black nationalist preacher Jeremiah Wright, they will try to disgrace James Talarico by connecting him to James Talarico. His theology is far more progressive, and occasionally radical, than nearly anything Obama himself served up.
In the hothouse intellectual environment of a seminary, Talarico’s religious takes are par for the course. Outside of the seminary, they will strike many religious conservatives as high heresy. When asked about abortion, he (accurately) points out the subject never appears in the Bible. Talarico thus reasons that we could interpret the Archangel Gabriel’s discussion with Mary in Luke 1 as an endorsement of choice. I was suprised to hear him challenge anti-gay readings of Leviticus 18:22 (on Joe Rogan no less!) by recourse to rather complicated linguistic arguments I myself made some 20 years ago.
Republican ads will feast on Talarico’s statement that God is “nonbinary.” Calling Jesus a “loving atheist”? Some operative in Lubbock is writing a memo about that as we speak. His opponents won’t overlook his suggestion that Buddhists and Hindus are more Christ-like than some Christians. And as much as I may personally appreciate his ecumenical insight that “all faith traditions are circling the same truth,” I can’t imagine that Christian nationalists are going to let that one slide.
They will try to disgrace James Talarico by connecting him to James Talarico. His theology is far more progressive, and occasionally radical, than nearly anything Obama himself served up.
What Black and Latino voters (not all of whom are necessarily Democrats) will make of Talarico’s candidacy is difficult to predict. Who, after all, is James Talarico’s recent “comp”? Who is the white, male, faith-first, theologically sophisticated, Democratic politician who toggles between liberal and progressive positions and roots them explicitly in his faith?
Outside of Jimmy Carter, the list I came up with was not long and not particularly convincing. It included Heath Shuler (former congressman from North Carolina), Ted Strickland (former governor of Ohio), and Andy Bashear (governor of Kentucky). If we relax our gender criteria, we might look at Iowa state representative Sarah Trone Garriott.
Among Latinos, roughly 40 percent of the Texas electorate, Talarico has to walk a fine line between Catholics and Protestants. In terms of trends, Latinos are cooling on their 2024 embrace of MAGA. Yet it is not clear to me how a unicorn like him performs among Latinos who are not committed Democrats.
As for Black Texans, they are 14 percent of the electorate and a reliable Democratic consistency. While some might suspect that Talarico is a political Elvis, an appropriator of a Black tradition that ingeniously mixes faith and politics, he’ll likely do well among this constituency, especially women. He’ll need massive turnout. Let’s not forget that Texas’s state-of-the-art autocracy lab has made it very hard for certain people to vote.
Then again, when Talarico lights up billionaires, as he is wont to do, he’s got the wind at his back among Latinos, Blacks, and the rest of the electorate. He promises to “flip tables” like Jesus, thereby alluding to another biblical prooftext that will let him advance his economic populism and perhaps flip the electorate.
In Talarico’s recent interview with Stephen Colbert, he did something that surprised me: defended the wall of separation between church and state. He even spoke of “sacred separation.” On Joe Rogan’s show, he said, “I grew up in a tradition that cherished the separation of church and state.” (I’m guessing he’s probably referring to the old-school Baptist faith of his grandfather.)
That a left-of-center Democrat and seminarian would trumpet separation in 2026 is triply odd. Above all, it is odd because the Obama Democrats, as we saw above, gave lip service to separationist secularism, but not much more.
Second, the progressive religious left, from which Talarico hails, positively abhors secularism. The reasons are too complicated to explain here, but they associate it with Western imperialism, Enlightenment arrogance, government bullying of citizens, and even veiled Christian supremacy.
Third, judicially speaking, separationist secularism is either comatose or dead, probably dead at least as far as the highest court in the land is concerned. The Roberts Court has eviscerated Kennedy-era separationist readings of the Establishment Clause. The supremes have subordinated the latter to Free Exercise claims in ways that heavily favor the nation’s majoritarian Christian actors. A colleague and I refer to this as “neo-preferentialism,” a judicial philosophy that values the rights of certain types of Christian groups over and above those of other Christians, of non-Christians, and of non-believers.
Yet here stands James Talarico pronouncing the S-Word—in defiance of the Obamacrats, the postcolonial theologians, and the conservative Supreme Court. Is this commitment to church/state separation something he has thought through? Does he plan to restore Obama’s low wall? Does he want to build it back better and higher?
Or, as I hope (and pray), is he going to innovate in this space? Separationism is one form of secularism. But it’s not the only form.
The wall couldn’t stop the Texas legislature from mandating the display of The Ten Commandments in public schools. Talarico invoked separationism as he opposed that measure in the state House of Representatives; the case is rattling around in the courts. Ken Paxton is leading the charge to override a temporary injunction against the bill. If Talarico is going to innovate in the secular space, he must reconcile this contradiction: how can he, a liberal, justify bringing his own faith into politics, when he sees the civic damage wrought by conservatives who performed precisely the same operation?
And, if he truly does prefer a wall of separation between church and state, what is the constituency for that argument, nearly twenty years after Barack Obama celebrated his victory by cutting the wall down to size?