Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Rep. James Talarico

James Talarico was Texas’ youngest statewide elected official when he entered the Texas House in 2019. His mixture of bona fides — Democrat, devout Christian, former school teacher, Presbyterian seminarian — quickly attracted national attention, and many of his speeches and sermons have since gone viral. What appeals to so many — including people outside Texas and outside the church — is that Rep. Talarico calls out the moral failings of Christian nationalism and reminds us of our Christian responsibilities to our neighbor. I am so grateful for the chance to talk with him.

Greg Garrett: James, you’ve preached that “politics” is actually just another word for how we treat our neighbors and have talked about how your granddad, a Baptist preacher in South Texas, taught you early that Christianity was a simple religion. Not an easy religion, of course, but simple when you boil it down to its essentials: Love God. Love your neighbor.

James Talarico: That is what I mean when I use the word “politics.” Some of this is just a difference of definition, but essentially how you act out in the world is political, whether you know it or not.

James Talarico

There’s this quote that “Justice is love out in public,” and so that’s how I was raised to understand our calling as Christians. Our faith has to move us from the sanctuary to the streets. Our love for God should move us to love our neighbors, and then our love for our neighbor has to be grounded and sustained by our love for God.

There’s a kind of symbiotic relationship between those two commandments.

GG: You have made a name for yourself by standing in opposition to other Christian — and I’m going to put “Christian” in little air quotes here — notions of what it is we’re called to be and do and how we’re supposed to treat each other based on our faith. What do we do in response to the pervasiveness of white Christian nationalism?

JT: Well, I think it starts with speaking out. For too long, many Christians have allowed the powers that be to co-opt our faith tradition and use it to consolidate wealth and power for themselves. We’ve seen the results of that kind of silence.

“I’ve said before that Constantine was the first Christian nationalist.”

So many of us are just refusing to be silent now. There is so much power in Christians speaking out in defense of the gospel, in defense of Scripture against the powerful people who are corrupting our faith. And this is a story as old as Christianity itself. I’ve said before that Constantine was the first Christian nationalist.

So this has been a battle we’ve been fighting in our faith for thousands of years. Whether it was Constantine, whether it was Bull Connor, or Mussolini, or Adolf Hitler, powerful people have used Christianity to further their own self-interest or justify their destructive political views. And at every point in history, there have been Christians who have said, “No.”

I’m thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of Martin Luther King Jr. I’m thinking of the people who in dark times preached the true gospel and embodied a Christ-like love for God and neighbor. Those are the examples we should aspire to.

There always are going to be conservative Christians and progressive Christians, and that’s healthy. There’s wisdom in conservatism and there’s wisdom in progressivism. That’s a healthy conversation to have within the church. But conservative and progressive Christians alike need to unite and condemn the heresy of Christian nationalism because it is a perversion of the gospel and a subversion of our American democracy.

“Conservative and progressive Christians alike need to unite and condemn the heresy of Christian nationalism.”

GG: One of the early interviews I did for this series was with Russell Moore, who tells a story about how pastors are now confronted when they preach from Jesus’ teachings on peace and justice, how they’re met by a response like, “That doesn’t work anymore,” or “That’s too weak.” How do we communicate with people across those boundaries and those chasms if we’re not able to share the common language of our faith?

JT: This is why there is such urgency in preaching the gospel and why this is at core a theological crisis, not just a political crisis. This is the classic tension between Christianity and the culture. We are called as Christians not to conform to this world, and it’s because our faith is a countercultural one.

It’s counterintuitive, the idea that weakness is strength, that sharing is wealth, that equality is status. It inverts the power dynamics of the world that this bleeding man on a cross is the power of the universe.

It’s always boggled my mind that Christianity is such a popular religion, because it’s so countercultural. It is questioning all the values that are dominant in the culture and have been dominant in the culture for thousands of years, that power is everything, that wealth is everything.

So it’s really important that we don’t let our faith conform to the culture, that we don’t allow what’s subversive about Jesus and about Christianity to get watered down. That is the central task for us. I think the world needs Jesus now more than ever. Our faith has so much to offer the world at this moment of crisis, but we can’t do that if our faith is perverted and if we end up just preaching dominant cultural values from the pulpit.

I don’t know how loving your enemy became weak. I don’t know how loving your neighbor became woke. But it is antithetical to the life, death and teachings of Jesus. And every Christian, whether you’re a conservative or a progressive, has a moral obligation to speak out against this heresy.

“I don’t know how loving your enemy became weak. I don’t know how loving your neighbor became woke.”

GG: I know you’ve been working on the question of school vouchers in Texas. I wonder if you could maybe educate my readers why this is an issue that matters to you and how you’re bringing your faith to bear on your resistance to them.

JT: I call private school vouchers a scam because, like any scam, they sound good at first, but once you read the fine print, once you read the terms and conditions, you realize it’s a rip-off.

Private school vouchers are pitched as ways to help poor kids or help students in struggling public schools go to elite private schools. But all that is a political spin. The vast majority of the money ends up going to wealthy parents who already send their kids to private schools, because for working class kids, like the ones I used to teach in San Antonio, one, they won’t be admitted to the private school. It’s not school choice, it’s the school’s choice.

The private school gets to decide who comes in and who doesn’t. So, one, the private school denies admission, or the private school doesn’t provide transportation, doesn’t provide special education services, or the voucher doesn’t cover the full cost of tuition, which means again, working class, poor kids can’t even take advantage. A majority of counties in Texas don’t have a single private school. So rural areas, even if students could get admitted, there’s no private school to attend in those communities.

So for all those reasons, the vast majority of the money ends up going to the wealthiest families in the state so they can get a discount on their tuition bill. What I have said very clearly is that I can’t think of anything more un-Christian than stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

“We are defunding our public schools to give wealthy families a tax break.”

We are defunding our public schools to give wealthy families a tax break. And to me that that is the opposite of what Jesus calls us to do. I mean, there are more than 2,000 verses in the Bible about economic justice and serving the poor. I can’t for the life of me understand how any Christian can support private school vouchers when in practice these policies benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.

GG: One other question about Texas and education, I have here in front of me the February 14 letter from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights ordering all schools that receive federal funding, from preschools up to post-secondary institutions, to eliminate their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, and to stop teaching what they call the false claim that the United States is built upon systemic and structural racism. I wonder if you’ve got any particular insight from your time in the Lege why it is that state legislatures care so much about these issues that they’re willing to elevate these at the expense of other things Texans badly need.

JT: They are trying to divide us by race, by culture, by religion, so we don’t realize they are screwing all of us over by defunding our public schools or by cutting our health care. This is the classic strategy of people in power, which is divide and conquer.

They want us looking to our left and to our right at our neighbors rather than looking up at them because really, politics is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. We have seen just over the past few months that it is the wealthy, billionaire megadonors who are really running the state government and increasingly running our national government at the expense of working families. They constantly come up with culture war distractions to keep us from realizing all we have in common and to keep us from coming together across race and culture and religion to take power away from those at the top and bring power back into our communities.

I try to focus on a politics of unity rather than a politics of division, because the latter is their game, and it’s been the playbook of people in power throughout human history. Our challenge has to be different. We’ve got to show how much we all have in common so that we can come together and take back power for ourselves.

GG: Could you talk a little bit about where you’re finding hope and strength for the struggle? A lot of us feel worn out, and it is always wondrous to discover some ways we might climb back up on our feet and get back in the fight.

“There is something important in our tears.”

JT: Well, I want to be honest. Like many people, I’m feeling tempted by hopelessness. I think we should all be honest about that. But I keep thinking about the point in Scripture when Jesus says, “Blessed are those who weep.” There is something important in our tears. I think Jesus is trying to say that our grief is a sign that we are still human, that our heart is still beating, that we’re still alive, and we have to cherish that.

I’m feeling a lot of the same sorrow that so many people are feeling right now. But I do think sorrow is an important reminder we haven’t given up yet, that we’re not cynical, that we’re not nihilists. Our hearts are breaking, and this shows we still have hearts. That’s an important thing to cherish.

I find reasons to be hopeful all the time, even in a difficult place like the Texas Legislature. This afternoon I had a meeting with the families of Uvalde, parents who lost their children at Robb Elementary. They are continuing to fight to raise the age to buy a semiautomatic rifle from 18 to 21, policy supported by 55% of Texans. So they are, even through their unimaginable grief, still coming up to the Capitol to advocate for gun safety laws that could protect other people’s children.

That kind of strength, that kind of perseverance — that gives me hope and gives me the strength to keep going. If they can do that, then I certainly can do what I need to do each day to keep struggling forward. And I feel like I find those kinds of reasons every day.

It doesn’t mean I’m not still heartbroken. But that heartbreak shows there’s still a heart beating in my chest. And that’s something.

Greg Garrett

Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.

More from this series:

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Malcolm Foley 

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Jonathan Eig

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Greg Jarrell

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Robert G. Callahan II

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Andrea Russell

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Bishop Michael Curry

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Melissa Deckman

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Matthew D. Taylor

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Nancy French

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Robert P. Jones

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Brian Kaylor