Christian right calls James Talarico “demonic” — for quoting Jesus
James Talarico has been found guilty of quoting Jesus. The sentence he uttered, according to right-wing media, was “demonic” and “blasphemous,” exposing him as a “fake Christian.” Talarico is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas on a platform The New Yorker recently described as basically the New Testament. One Newsmax host accused him of using fake Bible passages.
The passages in question are familiar ones, found in Matthew 22 and Matthew 25. Love God and love your neighbor. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger. They are, in fact, in the Bible.
The right’s attacks on Talarico aren’t about him, or at least not entirely. They’re about a much older argument — one progressive Christianity has been losing in public for 50 years — about whose version of the faith gets to count as real. The answer to that question has consequences far beyond any Senate race. When Christianity becomes a tool of power rather than a challenge to it, it doesn’t just damage the church. It destabilizes democracy. We are watching that happen in real time.
Talarico calls his approach a “politics of love.” What does he mean by that, exactly? Well, it’s among the most demanding and disruptive political frameworks ever articulated. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. That is drawn, of course, from the Sermon on the Mount. It is not ambiguous, and every empire that has ever heard that message has tried to kill the person saying it.
The Christian right spent decades narrowing the Gospel down to two issues, abortion and gay marriage. Talarico told Stephen Colbert something that’s obvious to anyone who has read past the cover of the Bible, rather than carrying it around for show: Jesus never mentions either of those things. But in Matthew 25, words in plain language, attributed explicitly to Jesus, tell us we will be judged by how we have treated the hungry, the sick, the stranger and the imprisoned.
Talarico put it this way at a Lubbock campaign rally, with the matter-of-factness of someone who learned this before he learned politics: “Politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors.” That is basically the entire Sermon on the Mount. It is also the most theologically orthodox thing said in recent memory by a Senate candidate in a state where the Christian right has long since decided it holds the copyright on Jesus.
Talarico put it this way at a Lubbock campaign rally: “Politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors.” That is basically the entire Sermon on the Mount.
Talarico didn’t invent that politics. He inherited it. Dorothy Day built it into the Catholic Worker movement. Martin Luther King Jr. preached it from Birmingham. Clergy showed up at ICE detention centers and got arrested for it. Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde stood a few feet from President Donald Trump and asked him to have mercy on the people his policies were terrorizing. He called her a radical. She was quoting Jesus, too.
What is new, or newly visible, is that this tradition is at last finding a political voice that mainstream America can hear. Progressive Christians are thriving, precisely because so many people have watched the Christian right trade the Sermon on the Mount for a seat at the table of power, and noticed that Jesus wasn’t at that table. The ferocity of these attacks on Talarico confirms what his attackers fear most: The Gospel they’ve been weaponizing is being reclaimed by people who read and heed the genuine teachings of Jesus.
I have spent the last decade of my ministry watching Christianity get used as a facade for fascism against immigrants, the poor and anyone else who doesn’t fit the preferred demographic of a particular political coalition.
Jonathan Rauch, who describes himself as an “atheist homosexual Jew” and therefore has no dog in this fight, sees it more clearly than most Christians do. As he writes in “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” “Christianity is a load-bearing wall; its failure places dangerous stress on democratic institutions.” But what we are watching today is not just failure. It is a controlled demolition.
A politics of love is a democratic ideal in the deepest sense, rooted in the conviction that every person bears the image of God and is therefore owed dignity, justice and care. It asks what we owe, not what we can take. It asks who our neighbor is, and then refuses to draw the boundary anywhere short of everyone.
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The Christian right is panicking because that question, asked seriously, dismantles every policy built on exclusion. It has no deportation list. It has no means test. It has no preferred ethnicity. It has only this: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.
That is the most demanding thing anyone has ever said about politics. And some of us are finally saying it out loud, in Lubbock, in every town with a church on the corner and a food bank down the street, and in every faith community that has decided the Gospel is worth more than a hall pass to political power.
The Christian right can call that demonic if they want. Jesus called it the kingdom of heaven.
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