Undercover Video at Texas Rep. Talarico’s Church Fuels Christian Divide

Is James Talarico a heretic, a demon in human form, the False Prophet of Revelation—or even the Antichrist?

Such descriptions may sound extreme when applied to a soft-spoken, mild-mannered seminarian seeking office in Texas. Yet these questions are being raised not only in the farthest corners of the internet, but in mainstream religious and political debate.

Talarico, 37, has inspired Obama-style enthusiasm among Democrats during his high-profile Senate campaign. Supporters view his faith-centered message as their strongest opportunity to win a Senate seat in the Lone Star State since 1988—and perhaps as the beginning of a future presidential career.

At the same time, his campaign has alienated—and deeply angered—many evangelical Christians, a backlash that could ultimately damage his prospects.

For some voters, the contest against scandal-plagued Republican Ken Paxton represents more than the future balance of the US Senate. It is also viewed as a referendum on the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

By promoting a progressive form of Christianity that critics describe as “woke,” Talarico has become a central target of the religious right.

“I think what he teaches is evil,” Dr Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, a nationally prominent megachurch in Dallas, Texas, told the Daily Mail.

For his critics, the stakes extend well beyond ordinary political differences. They see the conflict as a theological battle rooted in the Bible.

Among Talarico’s most provocative statements are comments that “God is non-binary,” that “Jesus was a radical feminist” and that there are “six genders”—a claim he later walked back.

He has also argued that the Bible does not address abortion directly and suggested that Jesus would have supported universal healthcare.

His support for religious pluralism has drawn perhaps the strongest condemnation. The concept holds that other faiths can be equal to Christianity and that “God” may be another name for Yahweh, Allah or Nirvana.

Jeffress said: “I think if people accept his belief that all religions are the same and there are many ways to Heaven, he is leading people on a road that leads to Hell.

“Respecting people’s right to choose whichever faith they wish does not mean that every choice is correct. Those who teach that all religions are the same are, in my view, denying what Jesus himself said.

“I don’t think [Talarico] is misguided. I think he has made a deliberate choice to embrace error and reject the truth.”

Jeffress said some voters were being “taken in” by Talarico, arguing that his message may sound positive to people unfamiliar with the Bible. “But those who know their Bible know James Talarico is a fraud,” he said.

First Baptist Church does not endorse Senate candidates. However, its 16,000 followers have been encouraged to vote for “righteousness” rather than “unrighteousness” in the midterm election on November 3.

“I don’t know anybody in Texas who is a conservative Christian who’s saying they’re going to vote for James Talarico,” Jeffress said. “They may not vote for Ken Paxton, or they may simply stay home, but they are not going to vote for James Talarico.”

Evangelical voters account for an estimated 25 percent of Texas’ electorate, and opposition to Talarico among that group appears to be widespread.

On one Facebook site with over 250,000 members, a lively discussion kicked off with: ‘James Talarico has the antichrist spirit living in him.’

A YouTube video with tens of thousands of views suggested he should be called ‘555’ because he’s ‘not the Antichrist but man is he getting close,’ going on to explain with a detailed analysis of Scripture why he is a ‘heretic.’

Talarico was born in Round Rock, just outside Austin, Texas in 1989, the year after the Democrats last won a Texas Senate seat.

His name at birth was James Dell Collins but his mother fled from his abusive high-school dropout father, and he later took his stepfather’s last name.

After graduating from Harvard with a Master of Education, he became a middle school language arts teacher back in Texas and was first elected to the state legislature in 2018.

While in the legislature he also became a seminarian, training to become a pastor in the Presbyterian Church and pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Austin Theological Seminary. The degree is currently on hold while he campaigns.

He has made his faith central to his campaign, using the slogan ‘Love Thy Neighbor,’ and regularly quotes Scripture on the stump.

But what he, and Democrats, may regard as his greatest personal and political strength – his faith – is also turning out to be his greatest point of electoral weakness.

In a short space of time, he has built up a greatest hits album of controversial religious statements, including on transgender issues.

During a legislative hearing in 2021, Talarico said: ‘Modern science recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes – in fact, there are six.’

He voted against a Republican bill banning transgender children playing on sports teams aligning with their gender identity, making a reference to the Bible in the process.

And he pledged to ‘defend trans Texans’ every day in office, suggesting that parents who ‘deny their child’s gender identity’ are ‘abusive for sure.’

Another comment that landed badly with many Christians in Texas was that theirs has been the ‘most violent’ religion, having done ‘more damage’ than Islam, according to Talarico.

Talarico also asserted that ‘you can’t call yourself a Christian and destroy God’s creation with greenhouse gases,’ which had many Texans, Christian or not, shaking their heads while they filled their pickups.

During the Black Lives Matter era, he wrote about racism, referring to it as a ‘virus,’ on X: ‘White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go – through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms – like a white hood or a Confederate flag – to be contagious.’

He found an audience, though, repeatedly going viral on TikTok and attracting the attention of national Democrats intrigued by his faith. Republicans have been the unofficial ‘party of God’ since Ronald Reagan.

Here, Democrat strategists dreamed, was an opportunity to take back some of the Christian vote, and in deeply religious Texas. The tactic had already worked in Georgia where the left-wing Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock won a Senate seat in 2021.

Talarico won the support of many young people when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said: ‘This idea that to be a Christian means you have to be anti-gay and anti-abortion… there really is no historical, theological or biblical basis for that opinion.’

Rogan, an independent based in Texas, was impressed. ‘You need to run for president,’ he said. ‘We need someone who is actually a good person.’

However, Jim Agresti, author of a book about the Bible and president of the Texas-based think tank Just Facts, told the Daily Mail some of what Talarico has said is just flat wrong.

‘Talarico is not just twisting [the Bible], he’s completely perverting it,’ Agresti said.

‘He says that his agenda for universal healthcare, for instance, is Biblical because Jesus didn’t ask for a deductible when he healed the sick. Well, those were volitional acts of Jesus. No place in the Bible do you see anything about giving under the compulsion of government taxation.

‘The Bible has at least 50 passages about giving. None of them involve government handouts.

‘[Talarico] is not promising to give away his own money, which is what Jesus called us to do, but other people’s money.’

Agresti said Talarico’s argument that the Bible was silent on abortion was ‘absurd,’ and he was ‘Biblically illiterate.’

As for Talarico’s motivations, Agresti said: ‘I can’t read his mind, I don’t know what’s in his heart, that’s between him and God, but I do know that Jesus warned us to watch out for false prophets. He’s butchering the Bible.

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‘That is extremely damaging to people on a spiritual level, and especially in a Biblically illiterate culture where a lot of people don’t read the Bible.’

In a high-profile CNN town hall on Wednesday, Talarico walked back some of his more controversial positions.

He explained that, when he said, ‘God is non-binary,’ he was ‘being provocative’ and he meant that ‘we can’t define God using human categories,’ which many others, including the late Charlie Kirk, had also said.

However, following a lengthy explanation of why he believes the Bible does not talk about abortion, he was challenged by a Catholic voter.

‘I just want to add that the Bible is not silent on abortion,’ said audience member Jody Hunt. ‘There is the Ten Commandments, thou shall not kill.’

He responded to Hunt: ‘If I believed that abortion was murder, that it violated the Ten Commandments, then I wouldn’t support it, and so it’s OK that you and I come to different conclusions about that.’ 

Talarico has also called his previous statements ‘cringey.’ Last month, he told Fox News he does not believe there are six sexes and that transgender athletes should not be allowed in school sports ‘if it endangers safety or fairness.’

However, his opponent Paxton is still running TV adverts suggesting Talarico is ‘they/them, not you,’ and highlighting his vote against a Texas bill that banned gender-transition treatments for minors.

In a statement, the Talarico campaign said: ‘These ads are lies. As James has said, he opposes gender reassignment surgery for minors.

‘Billionaire-backed dark money groups are lying about James because they’re scared of the people-powered movement we’re building to fix this broken, corrupt political system.’

Some of the progressive positions Talarico has taken over the years echo those of pastors at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, which he has attended since he was two years old.

As he moderates some of those positions, last month, undercover video footage published by The Daily Wire showed a pastor at the church, Babs Miller, saying: ‘I can guarantee you that, once he gets elected, he’ll change his tune back to where he was.’

In comments that stunned evangelical Christians, Miller also said that ‘We have no way of knowing if Jesus really existed’ and ‘the virgin birth comes out of the pagan belief.’

Meanwhile, Republicans poured scorn on Talarico’s ‘nice guy’ image.

Steve Toth, a Republican candidate for Congress who served with Talarico in the Texas legislature, called him an ‘angry little man’ and the ‘darkest soul I’ve ever met.’

Amid it all, the baby-faced Talarico has unexpectedly become a national focal point for the midterms, and perhaps the biggest bane of the entire election for Republicans.

Texas was not supposed to be competitive after Trump won it by 14 points in 2024.

With the Senate currently held 53 to 47 by Republicans, a Talarico victory could end up tipping control to Democrats, which would mean Trump being embroiled in congressional investigations for the final two years of his presidency.

Consequently, Republicans are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in to boost Paxton, widely viewed as an imperfect candidate, and an imperfect man. The state attorney general has weathered allegations of corruption and infidelity over the years.

At the end of September, Talarico was struck down with flu, taking him off the trail for nine days. By the time he resurfaced at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, where he was seen greeting fans, there had been calls for ‘proof of life’ as rumors ran rampant.

It was a measure of his opponents’ desperation to stop him that his illness led to a conspiracy theory that he was being treated at a mental health facility.

A viral recording of a woman answering the phone at a facility in Ohio, and saying Talarico had been discharged, received over six million views on X. It was later debunked.

During the CNN town hall, Talarico said: ‘I opened up social media and learned that I apparently had dropped out of the race, had flown to a mental hospital in Ohio, that I had died… this is crazy.’

He blamed the ‘rage economy,’ adding: ‘They get clicks. The billionaires who own these platforms get rich. We all get angry, and nobody’s life gets any better. Conspiracy theories don’t put food on the table.’

During the increasingly vicious race, Talarico has faced a barrage of attacks from Republicans, with Paxton calling him ‘Low-T Talarico’ and ‘Six-Gender Jimmy.’

At one point, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said Democrats had ‘made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender Senate candidate,’ a dig at Talarico’s positions on transgender rights.

Last week, Republicans played their biggest card as President Trump himself arrived in Texas on Air Force One.

On stage in San Antonio, Trump erroneously suggested Talarico had got sick because he was a vegan, which he isn’t.

‘He’s sick because he’s forced to eat meat for political reasons and he’s throwing up all over the place,’ said Trump.

That drew a response from a Talarico spokesperson, who insisted: ‘James is not vegan.’

Talarico’s surge in red Texas comes after Beto O’Rourke came close to winning a Senate seat in 2018, falling by 2.6 percentage points to Ted Cruz.

Talarico currently leads Paxton by 3.6 percentage points in an average of polls.

However, in recent days, a UMass Lowell/YouGov poll had them tied.

‘With the race tied, anything can happen between now and the election,’ said John Cluverius, associate professor of political science at UMass Lowell.

‘Texas, a once-reliable rock, is starting to show some cracks. The last time Democrats won a US Senate race in Texas, Ken Paxton didn’t yet have a law degree and James Talarico wasn’t even born.’

The importance of the evangelical vote cannot be overstated.

In 2024, 82 percent of white evangelicals backed Trump, and he won only 40 percent among other voters.

Talarico has invested $25 million in reaching Black voters, who make up over 13 percent of the state population and could propel him over the finish line, appearing frequently in front of Black church hall audiences.

In a recent Fox News poll, Talarico won 79 percent of Black voters, along with 64 percent of Hispanic voters and 62 percent of people aged under 35. However, Paxton had 74 percent of white evangelical Christians.

And, with his faith-based approach to reaching Black voters, Talarico is swimming against the tide

In 2020, only 10 percent of the members of the largely Black National Baptist Convention voted for Trump but by 2024 that had increased dramatically to 29 percent.

And, in Texas, 22 percent of voters are Catholic, and many will vote Republican purely on the basis of Talarico’s stance on abortion.

Democrats are getting increasingly nervous.

One pollster told the Daily Mail: ‘Talarico is doing much better than Beto. Beto never led a single poll that was independent and nonpartisan, whereas Talarico leads them all virtually.

‘You could say that’s because you have that silent Trump vote… especially in Texas, that’ll come out (on Election Day.) That might be the case. There’s no way to tell because they won’t talk to pollsters.’