James Talarico is a Mirror
...not an x-ray.
Welcome to the annual Holy Week Jackal. I have actually had this in my head for a while, but wanted to save it for this week. We were silly on Wednesday, but things get very serious now.
A few weeks ago, David French wrote a piece about James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas. Talarico is making waves nationally because he is polling well, open to debating the other side, and is a professed left-wing Christian. French gets asked about him a lot:
These days, I’m asked more about James Talarico than I’m asked about any politician not named Donald Trump. […] [I]f the primary American divide is between right and left, then Talarico isn’t that interesting. There’s a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism. White evangelicals might be overwhelmingly Republican, but American Christians are remarkably diverse politically, and we’ve been arguing with one another for a long time. Yet if the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.
Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian, he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.
French’s column - like many of his others - caused an uproar in the “conservative” Christian crowd, and with some of its adjacent members.1 In his piece, French outlines the reason he gets so many questions about Talarico: He actually sounds like a Christian. He is calm, patient, and speaks kindly of people opposed to him. If you watch Talarico’s Jubilee debate,2 this becomes even more clear; he engages with people who clearly want to trigger him and never takes the bait. Truly impressive in the Year of Our Lord 2026. If I lived in Texas, he would easily get my vote.
French goes on to note that Talarico’s Republican opponent will either be John Cornyn (the current Texas Senator) or Ken Paxton, a man who professes to be a Christian but who is also in the middle of a nasty, public divorce (over adultery) and who was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives for corruption. French’s whole point is that Talarico embodies the fruits of the spirit while professing to be Christian, whereas Paxton - who also professes to be one - does not. And he ultimately longs for a Talarico vs. Cornyn matchup, because he thinks both are decent men who better-reflect Christianity than Paxton.
It’s a good, insightful column on the state of what passes for Evangelical Christianity in America, but it got some Very Big Christians™ super mad.
French’s piece calls Talarico a “Christian X-ray,” which is fighting words for the Christian Nationalist crowd. A good chunk of them called French a borderline heretic. Here is Megan Basham:
Twitter’s search function is now busted, but by my count Basham has tweeted about David French 21 times since he wrote his article, almost once a day. She tweets more about French than she does about Jesus. As a bonus, she had this tweet from just before his article went live:
Spoiler: David French was right and Megan Basham was wrong, and not only about Iran.
Tough truths.
I think one of the reasons that Christian Nationalists/Pro-Trump Christians had such a visceral reaction to French’s article is because they know he is correct. Here is French again:
One reason politics has been so exhausting — and even so frightening — is that we often know that opposing politicians don’t just disagree with us but that they hate us. And if politicians hate us, then we know they won’t listen to us, they won’t care about us, and they may well actively try to harm us when they’re in office. This is what MAGA Christianity has become. In that world, cruelty in the name of Trumpism is no vice, and kindness in the name of progressivism is no virtue.
A couple weeks ago, after Robert Mueller died, Trump openly celebrated his death and hoards of Trump’s “Christian” supporters backed him up. Those celebrations came only a few weeks after French wrote, “Cruelty in the name of Trumpism is no vice.”
A set of Christian Nationalist pastors even said that they hoped God “killed” Talarico. Of course, they tried to couch their statements in deniability, but it is clear what they meant:
Father, we thank You, Lord, for Your justice.
We thank You, God, that You are not mocked.And Lord, we lift up James Talarico to You right now.
God, I pray that You would kill him.
Lord, I pray that You would kill him—
that You would kill his influence,
that You would kill his platform,
that You would kill his voice.And Lord, ultimately, that means killing his heart
and raising him up to new life in Christ.But God, if it would not be within Your will to do so,
I pray that You would stop him by any means necessary.
Suffice it to say, this is a demonic “prayer” from two men who are LARPing as Christians. All they are doing is proving that David French is right and his critics are wrong. And to drive the point home, Talarico responded to them in the way you’d expect:
“Jesus loves. Christian Nationalism kills. You may pray for my death, Pastor, but I still love you. I love you more than you could ever hate me.”
This isn’t to say that Talarico should be immune from criticism. Andrew Sullivan wrote a great piece about Talarico, equating him to a left-wing version of the classic Christian scold. He nails it here:
According to Talarico, Jesus would have been particularly upset by the end of Roe vs Wade: “This summer, more than half our population became second-class citizens. Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the state. And nothing — nothing — is more un-Christian than that.”
Really? This is the same Talarico who says that Jesus said nothing about gays and so we should not bring him into the discussion. But Jesus didn’t talk about 20th century American judicial philosophy either, did he? In another amazing tidbit, Talarico used the Annunciation — God’s telling Mary she would bear His only son — as a teaching moment about “consent” in sex. That’s a scene from Portlandia.
It might have actually been too much to satirize on Portlandia. In the same way that the Bible does not support you praying for someone’s death because they hurt your feelings, it does not support an argument for abortion. That is laughably bad theology from Talarico, and a sign that his heart is more closely aligned with his own personal leftism than the Gospel.
But that makes his response to Christian Nationalists who want him dead all the more humiliating for the Nationalists: The dude who thinks God told Mary she could abort the Savior of the world if she wanted to is closer to the Biblical definition of a Christian than they are.
American Christianity is in decline.
A wild phenomenon is happening across the globe: The rise of atheism/agnosticism has stalled and people are turning back to faith. In the United Kingdom, there are some reports that church attendance has now quadrupled amongst younger Brits.3 It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
Gen Z entered into adulthood with a world of promises: Technology is making our lives easier and better. The Internet has created endless opportunities and limitless fun. You will never be bored. You will never be more connected to people. And A.I. is going to make our lives just like the movie Her, except without the bad ending.
But that all feels like a lie. We have access to everything, but we feel even more empty than before. Social media connects us to people but simultaneously makes us feel more distant. So, The Youths™ are turning back to the OG formula and there is some evidence it is happening across Europe.
But it’s not happening here. In the U.S., Gen Z is still the most un-churched generation, and overall church attendance is declining. For every new convert to Protestantism, four people are leaving the church. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this decline and failure to replicate what is happening elsewhere also comes about with American Christianity’s alliance with Trump. Americans are watching people (like Basham and the two LARPers mentioned above) who explicitly call themselves Christians go on to defend easily the most un-Christian man in public life, and are deciding that they want out. But Basham is markedly different from the Paula Whites of the world.
In his first term, a lot of media figures observed Trump’s connections to Charismatic circles (something that is still going on), but they have spread into more Reformed circles as well. A few years ago I wrote a piece on Christian Nationalism, and said that it wasn’t real because it is an oxymoron. That is still true, but I feel that Christian Nationalism as an ideology has surged since I wrote it, and it has a creeped into the “higher church” circles associated with Reformed Christianity.
Charlie Kirk was an obvious Christian Nationalist on the Right, and his popularity was only growing before his tragic death last year. Now, there are others who are mainstreaming it, like Basham (mentioned above) and Allie Beth Stuckey, who appears regularly on Fox News and openly refers to herself as a Christian Nationalist.
Years ago, Stuckey agreed with French and called him “one of the most thoughtful & respectable people I’ve read.” Now she’s a critic, and thanked Basham for her relentless attacks on French. It shouldn’t be hard to see why all these people have changed their tune: Being closer to Donald Trump is more important to them than being closer to God.
To be a Christian Nationalist is to openly say, “I don’t understand the Bible.” It negates any claim to real Christianity. But I think worse than that is that it has started a downstream effect, where even someone like Nick Fuentes - who celebrates rape, murder, and genocide - is able to call himself a “Christian” Nationalist.
The problems for what I’ll call “soft” Christian Nationalists like Basham and Stuckey is that there will be always be someone to out-Christian Nationalize them, like Nick Fuentes or…Dale Partridge.4
The Reformed movement now has a grifter problem.
It is perhaps fate that the New York Times has a write-up on Dale Partridge out this week, a “pastor” who takes Christian Nationalism to its logical endpoint. He says women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, serve as judges, or really do anything aside from being a homemaker:
On social media, the Partridge has attracted a following by posting incendiary commentary: railing against feminists, Catholics and gay people, describing immigration as “national suicide,” and labeling Islam and Hinduism “demonic.” He also calls for erasing women’s suffrage, which he lists as one reason “the world is falling apart.”
The New York Times is actually being kind: Partridge also engages in overt racism and anti-Semitism. It is easy to guess what he will tweet next, because he closely follows whatever Joel Webbon - a Christian Nationalist pastor who has called “all” Jews subversive and “all” blacks lazy5 - decides to tweet about. When Webbon tweeted that interracial marriage was against God’s design, Partridge followed and agreed, even though Patridge himself is in an interracial marriage. It led to a great degree of humiliation for him, mostly because one of the best satire accounts on Twitter mocked him relentlessly for it.6
Why would Partridge debase himself and his own wife for Twitter clout? Because Partridge is a grifter. It is extremely funny that the New York Times did a write-up about him, because he has been an expert in getting media outlets to write about him for a long, long time.7
Over the years, Partridge has moonlighted as a:
Star baseball player
Professional skateboarder
Photographer
Entrepreneur
Motivational speaker
Millionaire8
Rock climbing gym owner
Software developer
Reality TV star
Founder of a t-shirt website
“Health and wellness advocate” (huge surprise here)
Partridge has been accused of plagiarism and lying about his credentials. He has consistently lied about his own personal history, and has left in his wake lawsuits and accusations from former business partners. There is an excellent breakdown of his changing personalities and his timeline of deception here, and it is exhaustive.
Partridge is a con-man, and he has now conned his way into declaring himself a pastor and getting a write-up in the New York Times. He has been able to do so because Christian Nationalism now has a huge spotlight on it, thanks to people like Stuckey and Basham. The worst part is that he will not be the last one to use this model to gain popularity.
Every Christian Nationalist in public life is going to be outflanked by someone willing to go more Handmaid’s Tale than they are, and that should show us the poison inherent in the ideology.
The genesis of the poison.
When you go through all the men I mentioned above, there is a lodestar for the Christian Nationalist movement, and he’s mentioned in the Times’s write-up of Partridge:
Though it has roots in older thinking, biblical patriarchy was popularized in the 1990s and early 2000s by Doug Phillips, the influential founder of Vision Forum Ministries, who also championed household voting. He later resigned over an infidelity scandal.
These days, its best-known spokesman is Doug Wilson, the pastor who built Mr. Hegseth’s denomination and believes America should be a theocracy. Mr. Wilson’s books on marriage form a spiritual road map for King’s Way and kindred churches.
Webbon, Partridge, and the two pastors fantasizing about Talarico’s death - Josh Haynes and Brooks Potteiger - are all acolytes of Doug Wilson. He is the poisonous tree from which a lot of this fruit has fallen.
It is important to note from the outset that Wilson is not even a Christian in the orthodox sense: He does not believe in the Trinity and believes in Baptismal Regeneration (i.e., baptism isn’t just a sign of faith but is itself a form of grace).9
He is closer to a cultist than a Christian, which could help explain his support of Christian Nationalism. But he has a host of other sins (and this list isn’t exhaustive):
He has presided over and hidden multiple episodes of abuse within his church, including ones where underage girls were raped.
He calls himself a “friend of pedophiles,” because he arranged a marriage between a known pedophile and a woman in his church. When the husband confessed that he was aroused by his own child upon its birth, the wife filed for divorce. Wilson said this man was not a rapist because he was only convicted of “one count of lewd act with a minor under 16.”
He has said that men who conquer women have a right to rape them.
He infamously said that slavery was not that bad and was, in fact, the “peak” of the Black family, and Christians have a duty to defend slavery.
In the same way that Partridge has left a lot of scandal in his wake, Wilson has left a collection of abused women in his own. He rabidly defends the abusers who have emerged from his church, because Wilson’s real god is male dominance over women. I have no doubt that, one day, the same scandals that involved Doug Phillips will eventually be learned about Doug Wilson. You are not writing things like this in public and not thinking things that are infinitely worse in private:
Women inescapably need godly masculine protection against ungodly masculine harassment; women who refuse protection from their fathers and husbands must seek it from the police. But women who genuinely insist on ‘no masculine protection’ are really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape […] Men are designed by God to initiate and lead, and women are designed to respond.
Wilson says things like this and does things like defending the Confederacy because he has a depraved mind. Anthony Bradley has a great piece condemning the Reformed movement for tolerating Wilson:
[Wilson’s] ideas themselves were never hidden. They appeared in books, pamphlets, conference lectures, blog posts, and, critically, on platforms belonging to some of American evangelicalism’s most significant institutions. The Pentagon prayer invitation did not create a new problem. It made an existing problem visible in a context that could not be managed by editorial decisions or quiet departures from conference lineups.
The real question, therefore, is not why Doug Wilson holds the theological and political commitments he holds. The real question is institutional: why did so many evangelical organizations spend years creating the conditions under which those commitments could be treated as acceptable contributions to Christian public discourse? And what does the answer to that question reveal about the institutional culture, the theological frameworks, and the social dynamics that made such amplification not only possible but, within certain communities, unremarkable?
As Bradley notes, a lot of the same evangelical organizations that promoted or featured Wilson’s writings are now quietly removing them. But they’ve had lots of time and lots of evidence to work with. Wilson is not the originator of Christian Nationalism, but he is one of the biggest reasons it is so popular right now.
Christian Nationalism is literally Satanic.
In the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus is in the desert for 40 days, Satan arrives to tempt Him. Satan attacks Christ’s hunger and Christ’s faith in the Father, but also explicitly tempts Jesus with power:
Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”
The belief that Christians can create their own kingdom and dominate others is literally a temptation from Satan, and Christian Nationalists will tell you that they actually read their bibles. Erick Erickson had a great tweet about this, which I’ll quote because it’ll get cut off:
Today, in the United States, a group of Christians want a political savior. They advance the notion of “Christian Nationalism” and want some sort of so called Christian prince to lead us. They would turn Christ into a political project. That is the thing the crowd in Jerusalem wanted and did not get, so they went with Barabbas instead.
Just last week, in Finland, two Christians were found guilty of crimes against humanity because, over a decade ago, they published a pamphlet on Biblical sexuality that, quoting scripture, mentioned homosexuality is a sin. The crime of which the Finnish court found them guilty was originally a war crime. Finland has a state church with the power to collect taxes. In Britain, the new female Archbishop of Canterbury spoke in favor of abortion rights in the House of Lords. Britain is a Christian nation.
Nations co-opt churches. Christian nationalists look on the United States today and think it could not get worse with a national church, so we might as well have one. In this country, Christians are not going to jail for quoting scripture. In Nigeria, China, and elsewhere Christians are actually dying for professing Christ as Lord. In this country, too many people believe the gates of Hell will prevail against the Church unless they themselves lead the church into political power.
Jesus Christ rejected the political enterprise of the church in Jerusalem and the crowd turned on him and the Romans executed him, declaring him the “King of the Jews.” He went in a tomb. For many historians who consider the execution of a Jewish carpenter in Jerusalem two thousand years ago a turning point for history, they stop there at the tomb. But the death of a carpenter would not have changed history had that carpenter not risen from the dead.
Christ rose and will return. In the mean time, Christians need not eschew politics. Vote and participate. If you feel strongly, run for office. We should have more people with Christian convictions in office. But Christianity and the church are not political projects and, should they become political projects, the American church would wind up like the Finnish or the British churches — sclerotic, impotent institutions doing the will of a state hostile to the things of God.
I disagree with Erickson about a lot of things (including his harsher criticisms of Talarico), but he is on the money here; Christian Nationalism is a lie from Satan, and anyone who supports it has been deceived. We really don’t have to go much further than that, but it is notable that most of the men associated with it (like Wilson) have other glaring faults.
Talarico is a mirror.
For years I attended Tim Keller’s church in Manhattan, and so much of his teaching has helped shape me into the Christian I am today. He regularly advocated for Christians to find a “third way” to engage in politics, simply because the bible does not explicitly lend itself to left-wing or right-wing positions.
The Christian Nationalist crowd now hates Tim Keller because of that “third way,” but they really hate him because they love their own politics more than they love God. Keller is right and they are wrong, and I suspect they will always be mad about it.
Similarly, I think the big reason Talarico is getting implicit death threats from Christian Nationalists is because they look at him and hate what he is showing them about themselves: They actually don’t know God, and Talarico just might.
In the book of Jonah, the author reflects on his own commands from God and his refusal to listen. In two instances (almost like a mirror) God uses unbelievers to show how they are closer to God’s own will than Jonah himself:
God used the pagans to show Jonah - an “Israel First” nationalist who saw no point in reaching out to nations opposed to God - how his heart had turned away from God. In the same way, Talarico - again, a dude who seriously said God might be pro-choice - is a mirror who should show guys like Haynes, Potteiger, and Wilson that they don’t actually love God.
The upside of Jonah is that because he himself wrote his book, we know that he understood the lesson God intended to teach him. Call me crazy, but I don’t think we’ll see the same sort of reflection and repentance from the Christian Nationalist crowd.
I’ll hit you with my takes on birthright citizenship early next week. Have a blessed Holy Week and a wonderful Easter.
Weirdly enough, this should include David French himself, but his membership is now explicitly rejected by the same people.
I linked to it above, but in the “debate” Talarico sits in the center and offers different arguments. Then, the members sitting around him have to sit down and debate with him about the merits of his arguments. Jubilee’s format has its critics, but they are engaging videos.
It’s worth noting that the evidence on this is mixed. One major report on Gen Z church attendance in the U.K. was withdrawn. But there is some evidence that there has been a shift, especially among younger men.
One of the great ironies here is that the more overt, patriarchal Christian Nationalists like Webbon openly criticize Stuckey and Basham because they are women who speak about politics and theology, spaces he believes should be reserved for men.
He did this during a friendly conversation with Nick Fuentes, no less.
In fairness to Webbon, he has pretty openly disassociated himself from Partridge, which is saying something. But my guess is it’s because Webbon doesn’t like the competition.
Disclosure: One of those outlets was run by a relative of mine.
At one point, Partridge’s big brand was being a millionaire before he turned 25, and was giving advice to help others do the same.
Catholics and the Orthodox Church adhere to this, but it conflicts with almost all Protestant biblical teaching.