Right-Wing Attacks on James Talarico Are a Reminder That Christian Extremism Is Official Republican Policy

On Tuesday, the official NRSC account on X representing Senate Republicans posted a clip of Texas Democratic candidate James Talarico, quoting him verbatim:

[siren emoji] JAMES TALARICO: “Christ is the immigrant deported without due process. Christ is the senior deprived of their Social Security benefits. Christ is the protestor kidnapped in an unmarked vehicle by plain clothes officers.”

The purpose of the post, dutifully understood by thousands of right-wing accounts on X, was to mock Talarico’s interpretation of Christ as radical and absurd. The replies and quotes flooded in. 

“To be clear: This is blasphemy,” wrote infamous Christian nationalist William Wolfe. White supremacist and Christian influencer C. Jay Engel argued that Talarico is merely peddling a left-wing version of Christian nationalism where social justice issues dominate. Chris Goble, a Colorado-based organizer with TPUSA Faith, which “exists to unite the Church around primary doctrine and to eliminate wokeism from the American pulpit,” offered a more impassioned condemnation: 

This is the dumbest, most patently absurd on its face drivel imaginable. It's also horrifically evil.

If he does not repent, this man will one day face transcendent wrath. If we're dumb enough to fall for this crap, he will be our judgment.

Since breaking onto the national scene, Talarico has become an object of intense scorn among America’s right-wing Christian extremists. Josh Howerton, the pastor of massive Lakepointe Church in Dallas, has described Talarico’s promotion of an open, social justice–oriented Gospel as an existential threat, warning, “Progressivism will hollow out your religion and wear it like a skin suit. That's exactly what James Talarico does.” Howerton also referred to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, the LGBTQ-affirming congregation where Talarico preaches, as the “synagogue of Satan.”

If you’re wondering how exactly to square Howerton’s vision of Christ with well-known Gospel stories about Jesus helping the poor and the sick, this post by Howerton from February is illuminating:

Jesus was unvaccinated
Jesus fed the poor without raising taxes
Jesus told people to buy self-defense weapons
Jesus was majority-culture in his region
Jesus only selected men for leadership positions

You can selectively-edit Jesus to be a mascot for virtually any cause, but he is a Lord not a mascot.

The extremists attacking Talarico do not all hail from the same exact theological corners of reactionary Christianity. Howerton’s church is tied to the Southern Baptist tradition. Lakepointe, and Howerton himself, have been accused of cultivating a fratty, misogynistic, and aggressive atmosphere of unapologetically right-wing ideas, as Eric Killelea reported for the Houston Chronicle in 2024. Engel, an unapologetic white nationalist, draws on Reformed Christianity, which traces its roots back to John Calvin, and is part of a burgeoning network of male supremacist, white supremacist and otherwise radical Reformed Christian extremists, including Joel Webbon. I don’t want to dwell on denominational nuances, even less so to get bogged down in the different styles of Christian nationalism that exist on the right. But it’s important to note that these people and groups do differ about what exactly they want to see happen and hold different theological ideas about why.  

What unites the condemnations for Talarico is a view of the Gospel as essentially an exclusionary text. To offer a blunter assessment, I think this is about underwriting contemporary far-right misogyny and racism. And what the NRSC post shows is the naked embrace of a far-right set of interpretations of Christianity as the institutional position of the Republican Party. 

And there is a curious and dangerous obfuscation of power at work here. It is Talarico who is presented as both a danger to the country and, perhaps more importantly, to Christianity itself. It’s Talarico’s calls for compassion and humility that will put both the viability of American society and the integrity of the Christian faith at risk. 

Consider the framing of this post from Townhall editor Jeff Quarles:

Is Christ the person who was thrown in a cage even though they engaged in no violence on Jan. 6?

Is Christ people like Dexter Taylor, who is serving ten years in prison simply for manufacturing firearms?

Is Christ the person struggling to make a living when their money is being stolen to be used as the government chooses?

@jamestalarico's answers to these questions would show whether he believes what he says he believes.

Quarles subverts Talarico’s call to Christ’s example by positioning extremist right-wing Christians as the subjects of state abuse. This strategy of claiming persecution is not new among American evangelicals, but Quarles doesn’t mention anything about more traditional conservative Christian concerns like abortion or public prayer. Instead, he inserts January 6 rioters and illegal gun manufacturer Dexter Taylor into the position of the persecuted. In this sense, the very people attempting to apply an extreme, authoritarian politics on those around are actually victims for having been thwarted. 

This makes Howerton’s description of Christ more legible. Howerton’s Christ wasn’t the stranger and outsider the Gospels show us dining with prostitutes and healing lepers. Nor was he the welcoming and open-hearted preacher who defied the existing enmities of his day. And he was not the peacemaker who urged Peter to sheath his sword in the garden. Instead he occupies the place of a kind of white, patriarchal, crusading cowboy of the American West. He’s entirely of the dominant power structures, a rebel and outsider only the sense that he’s willing to do what must be done while weaker, lesser men waiver. 

It gets at the core of the ever-stronger fusion between extremist right-wing Christianity and the Republican Party, an renewed institutionalization of white nationalism and male supremacy as the doctrine of an entire party, and given a theocratic bent. The attacks on Talarico highlight just how far down that road we now are. 

What I’m describing is a political image perhaps best captured in Kristin Kobes DuMez’s magisterial book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Writing about evangelical support for Trump in 2016, DuMez argues:

Evangelicals hadn't betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn't afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn't let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson's William Wallace. 

It’s in that same spirit that the NRSC followed their attack on Talarico with an image of him in a BETO sweatshirt photoshopped to read “BETA.” 

The Republican Party is wholly captured by this thinking, one that sees the Gospel as a story of masculine dominance and power and an authorizing narrative for a politics of misogyny, racism, and tyranny. Only the weak fail to see this. And only the heroes, the protagonists of the story, can ever be wronged. Their job is to exert their will, like cowboy crusaders, and it’s the world’s job to accede to this. This is how Christians become both persecutors and persecuted. It’s how the Gospel becomes a tool for exclusion. And it’s what this Republican Party seeks to impose on the nation. 

Featured image is St. Peter Cuts Off Malchus' Ear, by Lippo Memmi