James Talarico wants to “reclaim Christianity for the left.” That’s the title of the New York Times interview with Talarico—currently running for Senate in Texas—and the phrasing is revealing. One does not reclaim what one currently possesses.
The progressive mainline, whatever else may be said of it, has not possessed a vibrant, living Christianity in a very long time. That the New York Times would frame the question this way is, at least, an honest, if ironic, admission of defeat. That said, Talarico is clearly exceptionally gifted. He is one of the most naturally talented communicators to emerge from the progressive Christian world in a generation. He is warm without being saccharine, pointed without appearing mean, and fluent in the language of Scripture in a way that modern Democratic politicians and apparatchiks are not. He speaks of pistis and the Greek New Testament with the easy confidence of a seminarian who has done his reading. Ezra Klein was plainly delighted by him. If progressive Christians are going to achieve political relevance in the coming decade, Talarico is precisely the vessel they would choose.
The trouble isn’t the vessel, it’s what’s in it.
Strip away the polish and the TikTok virality, and what Talarico is offering is the same program that has been on offer from the mainline left since at least the 1960s: a Christianity evacuated of its doctrinal substance and refilled with the priorities of the Democratic National Committee (if not the Democratic Socialists of America). He tells Joe Rogan that God asked Mary for “consent” before the Incarnation and presents this as proof that the Bible sanctions abortion. He tells Klein that “the Bible is all over the place when it comes to marriage,” that Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3:28 is “pretty woke for the first century,” and that all religions contain “the same truth” as Christianity. These are not bold new insights. They are the exact positions one might have heard in the Princeton Theological Seminary lounge in 1984, and they were as wrong then as they are now. The only thing new is the medium of delivery.
And here is where the irony thickens, because Talarico is himself a Presbyterian, a member of the PCUSA, the denomination that has served as the great experiment in what happens when you pursue this exact theological program to its conclusion. The results are catastrophic. The PCUSA peaked at 4.25 million members in 1965. It will drop below one million this year. It lost nearly 49,000 members in 2024 alone. Two-thirds of its congregations have fewer than one hundred members. A third of its membership is over seventy. It planted four new churches in 2024 in a nation of 330 million. The denomination is not declining; it is in institutional hospice. And it arrived there by doing exactly what Talarico now proposes: subordinating the claims of Scripture to the moral intuitions of secular progressivism, and calling the result “the gospel.”
Meanwhile, the theological conservatives Talarico opposes are building. The Presbyterian Church in America grew nearly two percent in 2024 and added twenty-two new congregations. The broader new Christian right (the world of classical Christian schools multiplying across the country, of institutions recovering Protestant social teaching and the theology of vocation) is constructing something real, addressed to the actual material conditions of twenty-first-century American life.
Which brings us to the most important inversion in Talarico’s presentation: the claim that his politics represent solidarity with the vulnerable while his opponents serve the forces of domination. “Concern for the poor . . . is such a core part of our tradition,” he says, “and it’s nowhere to be seen in Christian nationalism or on the religious right.” This is backward. Talarico’s coalition has, for decades, pursued a labor policy that systematically undermines the American working class. The fact is the bipartisan consensus on trade, which runs from NAFTA, to China’s WTO accession, to the offshoring of manufacturing, is something the new Christian right has repented of, but the progressive cosmopolitans who now applaud Talarico’s sermon sound bites have not. These policies exported millions of jobs to countries where workers labor under conditions that would be illegal in any American state: no meaningful right to organize, no safety protections, no recourse against abuse.
And the same coalition has pursued an immigration policy whose principal economic function is the creation of a domestic labor underclass—millions of workers who exist outside the protections of American labor law, who cannot unionize, cannot complain to regulators, cannot insist on minimum wage, or in many cases get the benefits they pay taxes toward. This does not create justice, nor demonstrate a “concern for the poor.” It creates a shadow workforce that depresses wages for working people, both immigrant and native-born, while enriching the managerial class that progressive Christianity so faithfully represents. A Christianity that ignores this, one that waves away the decimation of manufacturing communities as a regrettable side effect of a higher moral vision, is one that has lost its capacity for moral reasoning about economic life.
The new Christian right actually does have a holistic vision of justice. It insists that trade policy must account for the dignity of the American worker. It insists that immigration policy must be ordered to the common good of the existing political community before it looks to the good of neighboring political communities. It draws on the deep wells of Protestant social teaching: the Reformation’s insistence that the magistrate protect the poor under his care as a father protects his sons, the Reformed theology of vocation, the natural law tradition’s understanding of the common good—all of these have been marshaled already to articulate positions that are neither libertarian nor progressive but are, in the proper sense of the word, Christian.
Talarico recommends Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited as a worthy book about how Christianity can serve as a wellspring for nonviolent social change in the pursuit of justice. But the disinherited of our time are not waiting for a progressive Presbyterian to liberate them with a viral TikTok. They are the forgotten men and women of deindustrialized America, the families hollowed out by opioids, the young people, underemployed and drowning in debt. They are not asking for a Christianity that tells them all “religions of love point to the same truth.” They are asking for a Christianity that tells them the truth. Truth about God, about themselves and their salvation, about the meaning of human bodies, and about the moral order of the world. And a truth that fights for their material dignity with the same vigor it brings to its theological convictions. The new Christian right, for all its imperfections, is trying to be that Christianity. The whitewashed tomb of Talarico’s alternative is not.
