In a move reminiscent of Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath Hnderson being caught on tape, fund raising in Massachusetts for a congressional seat in the Bluegrass State, saying “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” Texas Democratic Senate nominee was caught on tape saying, in a 2022 state House of Representatives campaign, “I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”

Now Mr Talarico is telling us, it ain’t true, ’cause see, I is eating spare ribs and turkey drumsticks.

Battling rumors that he is a sexual neuter or homosexual, the 36-year-old Mr Talarico announced that yes, he has a girlfriend, saying “She is my rock. She is my best friend. I don’t know if I could have gotten through the last six months of this crazy race if she hadn’t been by my side.” She’s been “by (his) side” so much that no one knows who she is or has a photo of her with him.

Oh, we’ll eventually see a name and photo of her, a version of the fake dating books now popular for some reason, but she’s just as likely to be a beard to get him past election day.

A Presbyterian seminarian, Mr Talarico pretends to be tells us that he is a devout Christian, but he supports prenatal infanticide, using the story of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) as a supposedly Christian argument for it, supports “trans children”, and The Advocate, a ‘magazine’ which supports homosexuality and transgenderism, has said the candidate “has positioned himself as a fierce queer ally, even using the Bible to advocate in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.”

Well, at least Mr Talarico hasn’t lied about his position on that!

Colin Redemer wrote, in First Things, a conservative Catholic publication, that Mr Talarico “wants to ‘reclaim Christianity for the left,'” and:

The progressive mainline, whatever else may be said of it, has not possessed a vibrant, living Christianity in a very long time. That the New York Times would frame the question this way is, at least, an honest, if ironic, admission of defeat. That said, Talarico is clearly exceptionally gifted. He is one of the most naturally talented communicators to emerge from the progressive Christian world in a generation. He is warm without being saccharine, pointed without appearing mean, and fluent in the language of Scripture in a way that modern Democratic politicians and apparatchiks are not. He speaks of pistis^[1]Hyperlink not in original, but added by me. and the Greek New Testament with the easy confidence of a seminarian who has done his reading. Ezra Klein was plainly delighted by him. If progressive Christians are going to achieve political relevance in the coming decade, Talarico is precisely the vessel they would choose.

The trouble isn’t the vessel, it’s what’s in it.

Strip away the polish and the TikTok virality, and what Talarico is offering is the same program that has been on offer from the mainline left since at least the 1960s: a Christianity evacuated of its doctrinal substance and refilled with the priorities of the Democratic National Committee (if not the Democratic Socialists of America). He tells Joe Rogan that God asked Mary for “consent” before the Incarnation and presents this as proof that the Bible sanctions abortion. He tells Klein that “the Bible is all over the place when it comes to marriage,” that Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3:28 is “pretty woke for the first century,” and that all religions contain “the same truth” as Christianity. These are not bold new insights. They are the exact positions one might have heard in the Princeton Theological Seminary lounge in 1984, and they were as wrong then as they are now. The only thing new is the medium of delivery.

And here is where the irony thickens, because Talarico is himself a Presbyterian, a member of the PCUSA, the denomination that has served as the great experiment in what happens when you pursue this exact theological program to its conclusion. The results are catastrophic. The PCUSA peaked at 4.25 million members in 1965. It will drop below one million this year. It lost nearly 49,000 members in 2024 alone. Two-thirds of its congregations have fewer than one hundred members. A third of its membership is over seventy. It planted four new churches in 2024 in a nation of 330 million. The denomination is not declining; it is in institutional hospice. And it arrived there by doing exactly what Talarico now proposes: subordinating the claims of Scripture to the moral intuitions of secular progressivism, and calling the result “the gospel.”

How ‘progressive’ is the Presbyterian Church of the United States? They have supported abortion for decades, and said, on their website:

Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling striking down Roe v. Wade in 2022, the General Assembly passed a resolution affirming “that women and pregnant people are full moral agents, created in the image of God. Recognizing that God alone is Lord of the conscience, we support their moral capacity to decide whether to continue or end any given pregnancy.”

How can anyone take seriously a church which writes about “women and pregnant people”?

Meanwhile, the theological conservatives Talarico opposes are building. The Presbyterian Church in America^[2]Some poor prose by author Colin Redemer could lead to some readers not realizing that the Protestant Church in America is a separate Protestant denomination, much more religiously conservative than … Continue reading grew nearly two percent in 2024 and added twenty-two new congregations. The broader new Christian right (the world of classical Christian schools multiplying across the country, of institutions recovering Protestant social teaching and the theology of vocation) is constructing something real, addressed to the actual material conditions of twenty-first-century American life.

We have previously noted the slow but definite growth of the Catholic Church, including a third of Catholic ordinations to the priesthood in England were of former Anglican clergy, fleeing the far-left orientation of the Church of England now being led by a priestess as Archbishop of Canterbury. The feel-good social leftism of ‘progressive Christianity’ might not generate vitriol from the credentialed media or the Democratic Party, but what it has not generated is greater church attendance. When a ‘feel good’ Christianity is pushed, what feels better than staying home in a nice, comfortable bed on Sunday morning, as opposed to getting up and going to church?

Church attendance is a habit. When you’ve gotten up and gone to Mass last Sunday, it’s easier to get up and go to Mass the next Sunday, even if that bed feels really comfortable. The other side of that coin is that when you didn’t go to church last Sunday, it becomes progressively — pun most definitely intended — easier to not get up and go to church the next Sunday.

Our previous President, Joe Biden, was very famously Catholic, and he did get out of bed to go to Mass on Sunday mornings, or at least he did so before his mental status declined. But Mr Biden, like so many other Catholic Democrats in government offices, supported prenatal infanticide, homosexuality, and transgenderism, because, for them, it was far more important to be a Democrat than to be a Catholic; they are the product of the liberation theology of the 1970s and 1980s, and they are dying out. Though not Catholic, and of a different generation, Mr Talarico falls right into the same thing: it’s more important to be a liberal Democrat than a devout Christian.

In the scheme of things, Mr Talarico switching from a ‘vegan’ campaign to chowing down on barbecue is a small matter, on par with Senator John Kerry (D-MA) ordering a cheesesteak, in Philadelphia, with Swiss cheese, though it symbolizes the difference in campaigning among the left in Austin to statewide in Texas. At least Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made public and married his beard girlfriend. But it’s far more serious that Mr Talarico is lying through his scummy teeth about what Christianity requires, or, even worse, actually believes what he says.