There’s been a ton of talk about James Talarico, the Democrats’ nominee for the Senate seat in Texas, and how he claims that Christianity is a left-wing faith. The left so desperately wants it to be true, even as so many leftists reject Christianity.
A couple of mainstream media outlets are hyping up Talarico as a new kind of Christian politician. What they’re inadvertently doing is revealing how out of touch with true Christianity Talarico actually is.
If you want an idea of how far out of the mainstream Talarico’s theology is, check out the first few paragraphs of a profile of the candidate's pastor in the New York Times:
On a recent Sunday morning at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, Jim Rigby asked his congregation to share what came to mind when he mentioned the Apostle Paul, the major Christian figure to whom 13 books in the Bible are attributed. They cheerfully complied:
“Villain!”
“Homophobic!”
“He’s a jerk.”
Paul’s attributed writings include passages seen as encouraging wives to submit to their husbands and instructing them to be quiet in church, and others condemning same-sex sexual behavior as sinful.
Mr. Rigby acknowledged the trouble. But in a sermon that also cited the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha, he nudged his congregation to reconsider the apostle, one of the most important in the early Christian church. “Aristotle and Plato, they were creeps, too, in modern times,” Mr. Rigby said. “But do we want to learn from our ancestors or not?”
That fourth paragraph gives a lot away. We expect the Times to approach everything from the left, so of course, it would judge the Apostle Paul to be on the “wrong side of history,” to use that phrase the left loves so much.
But the article tells us much more about the faith environment Talarico grew up in. His pastor:
…does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service. He does not use the word “Lord,” because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God, he said. For that matter, he added, he does not much care for the word “God.” He uses it on occasion, he said, but he tries to use synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”
In his sermon that morning, he had referred to “the creative impulse of the universe,” which “can be called God, but it doesn’t have to be called God.”
This is the environment that shaped Talarico’s views on faith, scripture, and theology. No wonder he doesn’t sound like any mainstream Christian.
The Atlantic gives the game away with a ballsy headline: “Texans Will Decide if Jesus Was a Lefty.” In this piece, Elizabeth Bruenig repeats the lie that podcasters Joshua Haymes and Brooks Potteiger called for Talarico’s death, when, as I wrote in March (see the link below), the two men were using the biblical language of killing Talarico’s sin nature and arguing that he should be, in Paul’s words, “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).
Related: The Left Thinks That Basic Christian Theology Is a Call for Murder
“What has made his candidacy so controversial is what he says about God,” Bruenig writes. “An avowed progressive, Talarico argues that the country’s powerful Christian conservatives have distorted the lessons of their faith. The words of Jesus, he insists, endorse policies the left embraces. In deep-red evangelical Texas, does his brand of Christian politics have a chance?”
Of course, the truth is that Talarico is the one distorting Christianity. He has twisted scripture, practiced eisegesis (which is reading one’s own meaning into a biblical text — and in Talarico’s case, bringing his own agenda into scripture) to claim that the Bible says what it doesn’t, and even preached from heretical, false Gnostic texts to paper a far-left agenda over Christianity.
Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not trying to claim that Christianity is the exclusive claim of conservatives and Republicans. Liberals can be faithful Christians and still have misguided political beliefs. But Talarico’s theology is so far outside the mainstream because he leads from his politics and builds his faith convictions around them. It should be the other way around.
Christianity is not right-wing or left-wing. It is truth. And that truth judges every ideology, every party, every candidate, and every one of us. The moment a politician tries to make Jesus into a mascot for his agenda, voters should recognize what’s happening.
Leftists want us to think that Talarico is bringing Christianity back into politics. But what he’s really doing is bringing politics into Christianity and expecting Christians not to notice.
The left loves Christianity when it can reshape it into a permission slip for progressive politics. James Talarico is the latest example, and the media are practically swooning over him.
But faith doesn’t work that way. Christianity judges every ideology — left, right, and otherwise — and when politicians try to turn Jesus into a campaign mascot, Christians ought to notice.
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