Texas House representative James Talarico recently won the Democratic Senate primary, and his eloquent and reserved manner have earned him a lot of praise. He’s also a seminarian in the Presbyterian Church of America, so he gives sermons as well as speeches, like this one, where he says he will give more sermons on how transgender men require access to abortion.
Indeed, Talarico has been heralded as a revival of the “religious left” because of his ability to wrap secular liberal policy positions in the mantle of a cozy Christian sermon. On The Joe Rogan Experience, he even defended keeping abortion legal with an appeal to Mary’s fiat being an example of how the Bible affirms “consent” and bodily autonomy.
I say all this in terms of in context of abortion because before God comes over Mary and we have the Incarnation, God asks for Mary’s consent. . . . That is a an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create.
Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings. But that has to be done with consent. It has to be done with freedom. And to me that is absolutely consistent with the ministry and life and death of Jesus.
Creation requires consent, but abortion isn’t the decision to “not create.” Abortion is the decision to destroy what is already created. To make an analogy, a pilot must consent before he decides to fly you in a private plane. But once he does that, he can’t revoke consent or abort the flight by parachuting out midway through the trip, leaving the passengers to crash.
Likewise, whenever a child has come into existence, he must be protected, just as we would protect a born person, who is also our neighbor, made in the image and likeness of God.
I would also ask Talarico, “Would it have been a sin for Mary to decide to abort Jesus after the Annunciation?” If he believes that women have complete autonomy, I think he would be forced to say it would not have been a sin to abort our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
But appealing to Mary’s fiat in defense of killing unborn children doesn’t just reveal the grotesque reality of Talarico’s worldview. It also reveals a glaring hypocrisy in the far “religious left.”
First, liberal Christians like Talarico will go through all kinds of exegetical gymnastics to explain away the Bible’s clear teaching on the sinfulness of things like sodomy. The Old Testament’s clear injunction that a man “shall not lie with a man as with a woman” (Lev. 18:22) and its re-affirmation in the New Testament (1 Cor 6:9-10, Rom. 1:21-27) are handwaved away as byproducts of a culture that knew nothing about “modern same-sex couples.”
But Talarico can also peer into the same ancient text and see in passages that say to “welcome the stranger” a divine condemnation of Republican immigration policies in 2026, without any concern about the Bible being situated in a different cultural context. Or he can read a story about Mary cooperating with God’s plan of redemption to be done according to “your will” as the prologue of a feminist manifesto that celebrates any evil done under the name of bodily autonomy.
Second, liberal Christians like Talarico will sound the alarm about the scourge of “Christian nationalism,” as he did in a discussion with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, but ignore the reality that they embody the very thing they warn against. On The Late Show, he said, “There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power in the name of Christ. And it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Of course, Talarico does want to use the power of government to enforce his view of what it means to “love your neighbor.” The Atlantic recently published an essay by Heath W. Carter called “Americans Should Stop Using the Term ‘Christian Nationalism’” with the subtitle “Religious beliefs have driven political change for centuries. The question today is which Christian values will prevail.”
Even The Atlantic admits that liberals don’t mind when Christians promote their faith through politics, as long as it aligns with their liberal values. So each side should just admit that it’s trying to do the same thing. Carter writes about Colbert’s appearance on The Late Show:
In one 2023 sermon, Talarico suggested that if the United States were actually a Christian nation, then it would embrace all of the policies for which he is fighting: student loan forgiveness, universal health care, gay rights, and basic support for the poor. Talarico would fit snugly into the tradition . . . of progressive Christians who have sought, across generations, to enshrine their religious convictions in the law.
What’s funny is that whereas the left-leaning Atlantic can see this, self-described conservatives like David French can’t. In the New York Times, French said of Talarico,
When he’s arguing with the religious right about, say, Christian nationalism, he makes a specifically Christian argument to counter a poisonous Christian movement. “Jesus liberates,” Talarico said in a sermon in 2023. “Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves. Christian nationalism kills. Jesus started a universal movement based on mutual love. Christian nationalism is a sectarian movement based on mutual hate.”
I have no idea what French is even talking about. His image of “Christian nationalists” is as fictional and over-the-top as a villain from Captain Planet who wants to pollute for the sake of causing pollution. Sure, there are probably some wackos who call themselves Christian nationalists and hate people, but you can bet that if you think marriage should retain its perennial, natural definition and that unborn children should be protected under the law, then to most liberals, you are a hateful, controlling, and maybe murderous “Christian nationalist.”
In his Joe Rogan interview, Talarico painted Christian nationalists this way: “I think that’s what we see across this Christian nationalist movement, is controlling what you do with your own body, controlling what you read, uh, controlling what you learn, controlling where you travel. I mean, this is religion at its worst, right?”
But liberals absolutely want to control people through the law, and often do so in the name of religion. They want to control what car you can drive or whether you have a gas stove in the name of climate change. They want to control if you can own a firearm or use your tax dollars on your own child’s education through vouchers.
In August of 2025, Talarico voted against ivermectin being made available over the counter while voting to make it easier to get abortion pills, even though abortion pills are much more likely than ivermectin to cause serious side-effects. Talarico also voted against a bill that would prevent men from having access to women’s changing rooms. This shows that Talarico is not pro-“choice,” and he doesn’t just believe in bodily autonomy. The widespread liberal belief in forcing everyone to put COVID masks on two-year-olds, and in preventing women in public spaces from having the freedom not to have to see male genitals in a locker room, shows that liberals generally aren’t pro-“choice,” either. They are pro-abortion.
Ultimately, Talarico’s far-left Christian nationalism is a self-defeating venture. It will always trade away parts of its Christian façade to make it more palatable to its liberal supporters until nothing relevantly Christian remains.
In 1991, Camille Paglia wrote an article responding to the Presbyterian Church USA’s statement on sexuality. Paglia noted that not only does the liberal wing of the Presbyterian church dilute Christianity, but as long as it claims to be Christian, it will always be an obstacle to a truly transgressive sexual ethos. This led Paglia, the self-described “lapsed Catholic” with pagan sympathies, to pointedly ask her fellow liberals, “Why remain Christian at all?”
The question is haunting to those who belong to denominations enamored with human tradition, but easy to answer for those who hold fast to the one deposit of faith given two thousand years ago. Why remain Christian? Because as St. Peter said to our Lord, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).