Divinity student James Talarico is fighting for the soul of Texas. It’s a battle between two distinct factions of Christianity.
In one corner: Fundamentalist Christians
One of the factions, led by fundamentalist Christians, is possessed by demonic spirits who believe that men should have full control of women’s bodies. They believe that citizens should rat on women who have abortions. They condemn homosexuality (Jesus never said a word about it, and the Episcopal and United Methodist churches welcome gay priests as clergy).
They have the receipts, too. In 2021, they helped institute a draconian reporting system right out of the worst of authoritarian playbooks that encourages people to report women who have abortions to authorities.1
That’s supposed to be North Korea, not the United States, but fundamentalist Christians don’t care, because it all comes in the name of their twisted interpretations of the Bible and bizarre passages like this:
When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity.
— Deuteronomy 23:11–12
The Laws of Waffle House Fighting According to Moses
Sometimes we get lost in the glassy-eyed delirium of trying to keep up with the malfeasant maneuverings of the orange grove of live pus that has seeped out of the Oval Office, infested the White House Rose Garden, and spread into the brains of 77 million Americans and the entire media infrastructure of the U.S.
The law added to an already long list of Texas laws restricting women’s bodily autonomy.
Fundamentalist Christians also believe in deep-seated racism, an affliction of the soul that has no competitor in modern history when it comes to human atrocities:
They have buried Jesus’s teachings about wealth inequality, which was one of his most frequent topics.
They have eaten away at the teachings of Christ to such an extent that they support a president who was convicted of sexual assault in civil court and still has a queue of more than 20 women praying for a society in which they, too, can find justice.
One reason they can’t is that fundamentalist Christians have seized the Oval Office by proxy in the form of someone a majority of Americans consider evil in a truly Biblical sense.
Fundamentalists support a president who almost certainly is guilty of sexual predation against kids,2 a man who famously flirted with tween girls on an escalator and publicly craved his own daughter, and whose best friend (a man like this is not capable of friendship in a form most of us understand) was Jeffrey Epstein until it became inconvenient.
Some of them, when faced with their hypocrisy, pull out their Bible and furiously flip its pages until they reach the last book, the Book of Revelation.
Like fundamentalist Muslims who send their kids in suicide vests to blow up Baghdad cafés, telling them a bevy of virgins await them in the afterlife, these fundamentalists say Trump is fulfilling his destiny as the anti-Christ. We’re all gonna die, but we’ll be met at heaven’s gate by a smiling Christ wearing a swastika on his white robe.
They support the money changers who have eagerly backed a monster whose lies are so common that even his most ardent supporters shrug when he spits them out of his forked tongue.
This crew has done the same for U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton of Texas, who, as Attorney General, has presided over such an impressive list of criminal behavior that it’s almost impossible to keep track of it all, and whose own wife sued him for divorce on, get this: “Biblical Grounds.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Wife Reveals "Recent Discoveries"
This is the story about a very religious political couple in a very religious state named Texas, which is famous for stripping away the rights of women and urging its citizens to send each other to prison for attempting to preserve one’s bodily autonomy.
Take a minute to read that little ditty. I need to make some pancakes, so I’ll be back when you’re done.
Finished? Great, let’s continue our sordid tale (the pancakes were delicious — I always use genuine maple syrup. From Canada).
The most recent battlefield for the soul of Texas, a Biblical battle that is quite literally a battle of good versus evil, was the Texas primary for a U.S. Senate seat, when reliably conservative U.S. Senator John Cornyn was asked to leave the premises.
“GET OUT!!!” the fundamentalist clergy screamed as they raced to their Sunday pulpits to urge their flock to vote against him.
Why? Despite Cornyn voting for Trump’s agenda nearly 100% of the time, Trump screeched that he was “VERY disloyal.” And why did he do that? Because he held a grudge for Cornyn taking too long to endorse Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Trump then endorsed Paxton during a Texas primary runoff. Texas fundamentalist clergymen always do what Trump tells them to do. It’s a special kind of sick.
The flock, many of them church ladies who often protect their own male predators, rushed to the polls and gave Paxton a double-digit victory, despite an extensive criminal background that the justice system has miraculously, so far, been unable to call to account. Being Attorney General, as current U.S. Attorney General and Trump’s personal attorney Todd Blanche can attest, has its perks.
In the other corner: James Talarico
Enter four-term Texas state representative James Talarico.
This poor guy decided to take on the Texas fundamentalist establishment almost on his own.
Unlike Biblical hero Daniel walking into the lion’s den, no King Darius stood in Talarico’s corner when he decided to take on the Texas fundamentalist industrial complex.
Sunday Bible Study: King Darius was a Persian king in the Book of Daniel who reluctantly sent Daniel to the lions’ den because lawyers convinced him that he must. He rooted for Daniel, a Jewish prophet, behind the scenes, and later discovered that Daniel tamed the lions with his faith.
As The New Yorker magazine aptly puts it, “Talarico has a novel platform for a progressive Democrat: the New Testament.”3
In Texas.
Like I said. Lions den.
Another quote from The New Yorker sums up Talarico’s approach in his bid to claim the first Democratic U.S. Senate seat within the boundaries of Texas in decades, when he says:
“The closest thing we have to the Kingdom of Heaven is a multiracial, multicultural democracy.”
Wait. There’s more, this from a campaign event held by Senior Pastor Amos Disasa at First Presbyterian Church in Dallas:
Disasa, a soft-spoken Ethiopian immigrant, asked Talarico, “What kind of welcome are you getting from evangelicals?”
Talarico blinked and widened his eyes, gauging the room. “We think we can make real headway with Christians,” he said. “Evangelicals . . .” He shrugged.
Talarico isn’t shy about stating what should be obvious: Evangelicals (or fundamentalists) are not real Christians in any sense of the word.
But the problem is that they account for 25% of Texas voters. Of those voters, 90% voted for the king of the orange demon Klan.
Unlike the former great white hope, Beto O’Rourke, Talarico isn’t trying very hard to woo them. He understands that they are lost souls. Beto helped him there. In 2018, Beto took a Facebook tour through almost every county in Texas in an attempt to convince evangelicals in ranch country that Ted Cruz was a dick. He failed, but not by much.
The lessons of Beto’s campaign were not lost on Talarico. These people are lost, so see if you can gain enough of a majority among sane-minded people to overcome the handicap.
Talarico has some credentials for doing battle with fundamentalists. He’s in the throes of a different kind of battle: He’s one year away from a PhD in Divinity Studies from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
When Talarico met with former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings at the aforementioned campaign event, Rawlings promised to put him in touch with Black pastors throughout the city. This organically leads to the next item on our agenda.
Black America has a long familiarity with the Christian Left
Meanwhile, Black America has once again been leading a movement in America, this time one quietly led by its clergy.
In the Black community, this is nothing new. Black clergy has been a bastion in the Black community and a reliable bulwark against oppression for hundreds of years. But lately, it’s gaining relevance across traditional color boundaries.
How powerful is the Black clergy movement, a force that is basically ignored by the white mainstream press? Powerful enough that a Black clergyman took a Senate seat away from a rich white family in Georgia. Of all places.4
You may have heard of him. He’s Raphael Warnock, who is now one of the two Democratic U.S. Senators who are helping turn Georgia purple, and possibly blue.
Warnock, when he was a pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York during the 1990s, refused to hire workfare recipients to protest then mayor Rudolf Giuliani’s workfare program. Eventually he found his way to Georgia, where he became senior pastor of Douglas Memorial Community Church in 2001.
He’s still a staple in the Georgia Black clergy community, and, like his fundamentalist counterparts, invokes God on the regular, but his God isn’t what the Bible refers to as The Enemy.
The Black clergy movement is powerful enough, just possibly, to change the entire justice system in the United States from one focusing on punishment to one focusing on rehabilitation. Away from police patrols designed to hunt down Black people, and towards a police system geared toward actually solving crimes.
Despite the cruel and ghastly presence of the Trump regime, these things are already happening. In Chicago, Black clergy recently played a vital role in eliminating bail bonds in Illinois for all but the most heinous crimes.
Black clergy’s influence is felt all across the South.
A typical example was in North Carolina, where Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, led the charge in 2021 against an entire police department for shooting yet another young Black man.
42-year-old Andrew Brown Jr. was shot and killed by police during a traffic stop. In the aftermath, Rev. Dr. Barber helped shake things up:5
On Friday, Sheriff Wooten told 10 On Your Side seven deputies are on administrative leave following the shooting.
Another three deputies have resigned since Wednesday, he added. One of them was nearing retirement.
In many ways, this is just another Monday in the world of the Black clergy in America’s South.
But what I am beginning to wonder is this: What other possibilities lie on the horizon? Will the Black church, with its emphasis on compassion and civil rights, herald an eventual transformation of some white churches that might be on the fundamentalist fence, peering over to see if maybe there’s really something to all this “Jesus was not a misogynist tyrant” stuff?
We may get an idea during the current battle for the soul of Texas between James Talarico and the Texas evangelicals supporting the demonic career criminal Ken Paxton.
Remember that during the Civil War, many white Christian churches led the voices for abolition. This might be a good time to remind them that they’re on the wrong side of the afterlife.
Today, white evangelical churches are collapsing under the weight of their hypocrisy and immorality, from Jerry Falwell Jr.6 to the collapse of Baptist clergy morals in the wake of a child predator scandal rivaled only by Catholic clergy.7
The Talarico hope
A recent poll in Texas gave Talarico a six-point lead over Paxton in the race for the U.S. Senate seat involuntarily vacated by Cornyn.
Newsweek, in typical mainstream media fashion, headlined the news of this poll with a headline that puts New York Times sanewashers to shame:8
“Talarico suffers double poll blow as Texas undecided voters decide”
What was the double blow? Talarico lost one point in two small polls compared to previous polls. Instead of a headline reading, “Talarico continues his commanding lead in Texas,” Newsweek ran with “double blow.” Because of a one-point change in a survey of one thousand voters.
This, folks, is what we are up against.
If Trump were our only foe in this war for the soul of America, it would be an easy victory. He’s an idiot.
But the Trump propaganda network is vast, from Fox News to the lowly and mostly discredited, these days, Newsweek.
But hey, maybe God is on our side, after all.
A Chicago cardinal becomes Pope.
Black churches fight for justice.
Talarico fights for the soul of Texas.
Their influence, eventually, could transform religion in America.
If Talarico wins, the money changers won’t be happy.
But God just might be.
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Footnotes
ACLU of Texas. “A Recent History of Restrictive Abortion Laws in Texas - ACLU of Texas,” September 3, 2021. https://www.aclutx.org/recent-history-restrictive-abortion-laws-texas/.
The reason people who write a line like this won’t be sued for defamation is that Trump knows that would force evidence proving his predatory ways into the open.
Friend, Tad. “James Talarico Puts His Faith in Texas Voters.” The New Yorker, February 23, 2026. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/02/james-talarico-profile.
Wikipedia.org. “Kelly Loeffler - Wikipedia,” 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Loeffler.
Ayo, Julius. “Local NAACP Chapter Calls for Pasquotank Co. Sheriff’s Resignation; Sheriff’s Office Ask for Internal Investigation.” WAVY.com, April 24, 2021. https://www.wavy.com/news/north-carolina/family-of-andrew-brown-jr-holds-press-briefing-in-elizabeth-city/.
Redden, Elizabeth. “Liberty Sues Former President Jerry Falwell Jr..” Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs, April 18, 2021. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/19/liberty-sues-former-president-jerry-falwell-jr.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “Widespread Sexual Abuse in Southern Baptist Churches.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., February 11, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_cases_in_Southern_Baptist_churches.
Bickerton, James. “Talarico Suffers Double Poll Blow as Texas Undecided Voters Decide.” Yahoo News, September 26, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/talarico-suffers-double-poll-blow-as-texas-undecided-voters-decide-12492400.
Born and reared in Texas (I'm now in California), I have absolutely *loved* what Talarico has been doing, and seeing the rise of Black pastors (and, in Kansas, a pretty cool white 1) has been amazing. It's almost as if I can hear again the words to probably the first "hymn" I ever learned, that 1 about "red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight".
African American clergy can certainly do more.