Jesus is not your campaign surrogate.

By Spyridon Andrews

don’t normally comment on political races, but when I see someone who is as fundamentally full of sh-t as James Talarico, I believe it is my duty to say something about it. James Talarico is now the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Texas, having defeated Jasmine Crockett in the 2026 primary. He has discovered a political instrument more powerful than a Super PAC, more versatile than a focus group, and considerably harder to interview: Jesus Christ. After generations of right-wing Protestant pastors hijacking the message of Jesus and turning him into some kind of political football, you have to hand it to James. After all, he is shameless enough to say, why not me?

Down in the backwater leftist stronghold of Austin, Texas, Talarico is selling progressive politics with a halo. He has shamelessly transformed Jesus into a mouthpiece for leftist progressivism. But that same feeling that we used to get when we watched the PTL Club pervades his aura. I have to hand it to American Protestantism; despite its amazing versatility, it can still make you feel dirty, cheap, and used.

Talarico’s maneuver is a simple one for the simple-minded. He selects biblical passages that he can bastardize and put into the service of leftist progressivism, as if it were a direct command from the Lord Jesus Christ to the White House and the U.S. Senate. Jesus becomes a mouthpiece for the massive expansion of government, open borders and illegal immigration, and NGOs. However, the clarity of his stance rolls into the fog the moment that the fate of an unborn child enters the discussion.

It would be too simple to call him a political whore. But I have to say that hearing him speak makes me nostalgic for Jasmine Crockett. Talarico has shamelessly peddled the God-loves-abortion argument that was vomited out by his professors at the far-left seminary he attended in Austin. Just a quick review of the course catalogue puts the “seminary” in the same political hotbox as any American progressive propaganda center these days. As a survivor of Harvard Divinity School, I can recognize all the usual fluff: Activism and the Old Testament Scriptures, Womanist and Feminist readings of the New Testament, Immigration and the Old Testament, Communication for Ministries of Social Justice. At Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, there is not even a pretense to read the Bible through anything other than a Marxist, feminist lens. The historical texts never stood a chance.

The faculty includes Cynthia Rigby, who is a constructive theologian, as in “makes sh-t up.” I studied under a “constructive theologian” named Gordon Kaufman all the way back in 1980, back when “constructing the concept of God” was an off-the-wall idea posited by professors desperately trying to be provocative to obtain tenure. Now it’s mainstream. It’s the same old eggheads treating the Christian tradition as oppressive and patriarchal and all the usual crap, using a version of analysis that posits that everything they believe now is wonderful, and everyone else in the entirety of human history is simply not as smart or as evolved as they are. It’s aggressively stupid.

One of the other professors over there is a guy named Gregory Cuéllar, whose books include Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border: A Borderland Hermeneutic and Empire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century: Archival Criticism. His research concerns Global Justice within the framework of border enforcement. What the hell any of this has to do with the actual proclamation of Christ, who was decidedly apolitical and steadfastly refused to get into politics, we’ll never know. But Cuéllar, like his colleague Rigby, seems to like to make stuff up.

What is especially loathsome about these seminaries is that they seem to barely read the printed word and have no real interest in what the Gospels actually say. Their efforts have been directed toward “demythologizing” the gospel (Rudolf Bultmann), finding the secular meaning (Paul van Buren), secularizing the message (Harvey Cox, The Secular City), or drawing a picture of God to their liking, literally conjured up from thin air (God the Problem, Gordon Kaufman). Then there are the feminist wackos like Mary Daly, the “theologian” who despised all men, would not accept men into her classroom, and would only refer to God as “Goddess.” For any serious scholar who actually wants to study Augustine, Aquinas, Athanasius, Luther, or the actual Bible, stay the hell away from a mainstream Protestant seminary. They wouldn’t know a Bible if it fell off the shelf and hit them over the head. They haven’t even lifted their heads out of Das Kapital for the last 75 years.

So this helps explain Talarico, who wandered out of this environment into progressive politics, which is tame by comparison. Talarico is what we would call a “liberation” theologian, which means that he accepts as true all the presuppositions of Karl Marx and Lenin and then mixes in a few Bible passages as necessary. We are all supposed to be one big global community with no borders, with a bunch of bureaucrats running everything, splitting everyone’s candy bars into perfectly equal geometric squares so no one person gets more than another, before they are sent back to live in their climate-controlled cube.

The point they miss is that giving to the poor, loving your neighbor, and loving your enemy does not mean that a nation cannot police its borders from drug cartels and rapists who traffic children. I might even agree, as I have written before, that we should find a way to welcome law-abiding, hard-working families into the country in a way that does not penalize those who played by the rules. 

But there is nothing in the Bible that exhorts us to ensure that federal agencies lose contact with hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors at the border, some of whom end up involved in sex trafficking or worse. Moreover, I must have missed the part about the Bible prohibiting showing a government ID when voting.

All of this would be enough to call Talarico a fraud and a demagogue, but his argument on abortion is even more astounding for its duplicity and lack of shame. Talarico has now engaged in an acrobatic sleight of hand that advocates a “double consent” on the part of the woman before giving birth. For Talarico, the original sex act is not consent to give birth. How he arrives at this, f-ck if anyone knows. Perhaps in Austin they are still figuring out whether the act of coitus has anything to do with conceiving a child. I suppose that’s entirely possible. No, even after having sex, now the woman has to consent to have the child. The only one in the whole deal who never has a choice is the kid whose life is up in the air while his mother is determining whether to conceive the child or kill him so she won’t have to miss a month or two of yoga.

How does Talarico come to the conclusion that this is “biblical”? Well, in one of the biggest asshole moves of all time, he decides to pollute the story of the Annunciation of the Virgin—one of Christianity’s most sacred narratives—and turn it into a decision point as to whether or not to have an abortion. Because Mary is informed and delighted that she will bear God’s son, Talarico makes the leap to argue that this reaction demonstrates that she “consented” to have God’s son. Luke 1 does contain Mary’s response—“Let it be with me according to your word”—which Christian traditions frequently understand as assent to a divine blessing. The narrative does not say Mary was choosing between continuing or terminating an existing pregnancy, and such a reading is ridiculous. A “divine right to abortion” isn’t even remotely what is offered in the Gospel of Luke. And this interpretation is so extraordinarily half-cocked that I would bet anyone a Starbucks Venti Latte that he heard this kind of idiotic argument from one of his professors over at the seminary.

We could be cruel and say that Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary likely contains no learning, no faith, and no serious Christians. But let’s be charitable and say that it has a roving theological imagination that appears to be uniformly one-directional. Finding a conservative in the place is probably even more difficult than finding a conservative in Austin. Or better yet, they are in the business of trying desperately to translate leftist progressive Marxist politics into the Christian vocabulary. Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is about as far away from teaching the Christian proclamation of love, life, and sacrifice as the white-shoed preachers who proclaim that the promises of God will make you rich. It is a factory that produces biblically illiterate, historically illiterate arch-leftists who preach a message as alien to Christianity as Mao’s Little Red Book.

I would be remiss if I did not also call out Talarico’s fraudulent claim that he is a champion against billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians. Despite his claim that it has all been done with $100 donations, there is the little matter of the widely reported $6.2 million his Senate campaign raised in its first 20 days, along with significant outside spending by super PACs supported by wealthy donors. Talarico has accepted donations from the Texas Sands PAC, linked to who else, billionaire arch-abortion advocate and casino owner Miriam Adelson. The Texas Tribune reports that Texas Sands PAC was funded by Adelson; the verified figure is $59,000 from that PAC during Talarico’s 2024 Texas House campaign.

Talarico wants voters to believe that he has rescued Jesus from the Republican Party, but what he really did was recruit Jesus for the Progressive Leftist Democrats, assign him a communications director, and limit his personal appearances to approved campaign stops. Talarico directs Jesus to what desks he wants him to overturn in the Senate, and you can bet it won’t be Chuck Schumer’s. He may be the first candidate in history to turn the Annunciation into an abortion brief, but he won’t be the first candidate who has turned the Gospel into campaign literature. That’s been done before.

This guy is nothing new. He’s just a little sneakier than some of the others.

American Greatness

About Spyridon Andrews

Spyridon (Don) Andrews is a Greek American writer, lawyer, and lifelong jazz musician. In his writing, he draws on his Hellenic roots, as well as his love of Renaissance Humanism. A graduate of Harvard, he writes works that blend history, travel, philosophy, and comedy. Most recently, he wrote Manuel and Me: Looking for the Soul of America in the Heart of Italy.