They Questioned His Faith. Look at Theirs.
The loudest defenders often act the least like it.
The loudest defenders often act the least like it.
On Sunday mornings, I run the soundboard at a little country church outside Sioux Falls. I’m not always sure I believe what comes through the speakers. I show up anyway.
So when someone announces that a stranger’s Christianity is fake, my ears prick up. I’ve spent many years wondering about my own.
And if you have faith but you’ve quietly given up on church, or you still sit in a pew arguing in your head the way I do, you are in an enormous crowd. Gallup found that for the first time in eighty years of asking, fewer than half of Americans belong to a congregation at all. Most of us are out here somewhere, holding something we can’t quite set down and can’t quite carry through the front doors.
Which brings me to James Talarico, Texas’ Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate.
The sentence, and the half they kept
Talarico is a Texas state representative running for the United States Senate, and he is studying to be a Presbyterian minister. A few days ago, a clip from an old podcast went around, and a good part of the internet decided he hates God. In it, he says, I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.
That is a real quote. Here is the part that the clip cuts off.
He kept talking. He said he keeps getting pulled back to the faith. Nowhere else, he said, in no philosophy or economic theory, does he find anything as radical as the teachings of that barefoot rabbi. The hatred is for the machinery, for the kind of church that climbs into bed with politics. The love is for the man at the center of it.
If you have ever loved something and been furious at what people turned it into, you already understand the whole sentence. They kept the angry half and threw away the half that explained it.
You can argue with Talarico’s theology. Plenty of thoughtful Christians do. He has said things about God and gender and other religions that land hard on traditional ears, and that’s a fair fight, and an old one. But being wrong about doctrine is not the same as hating God. Half the people in any sanctuary would flunk that test, and most of the saints with them.
So set the theology aside. I want to talk about the people holding the measuring stick.
Now look at the accusers.
The clip didn’t climb out of an archive on its own. It was handed to the press by a party operation in the middle of a dead-even Senate race, the same week a poll showed the two men tied. The timing is the tell. This was never theology. It was opposition research with a cross stuck on top.
So look at who lined up to throw it.
His opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, went on television and pronounced that Talarico doesn’t understand Christianity in any form or fashion. This is the same Ken Paxton who was indicted for securities fraud and impeached by his own party’s House before the Texas Senate voted to let him off. A man under that particular cloud, grading a divinity student’s walk with God.
Senator Ted Cruz declared that Texas will never elect someone who thinks God is nonbinary. The Republican National Committee reached into the Sermon on the Mount, pulled out wolf in sheep’s clothing, and hurled the verse at a man to win an election.
Picture that for a second. People who handle Scripture like a nightstick, lecturing a seminary student about whether he respects it.
Who is really emptying the pews?
Here is the part none of them will say from a stage.
The one time Jesus actually stopped to describe the final judgment, he did not hand anyone a theology quiz. He asked whether you fed the hungry, whether you took in the stranger, and whether you visited those in prison. That was the entire exam. And the officials now auditing Talarico’s faith are, more often than not, the same ones who cut the programs that feed the hungry and call the stranger an invader.
So, who looks more like the Christian here? The seminarian who keeps showing up for a faith that embarrasses him in front of his own friends, or the officeholder who wears it like a campaign button and governs as if the Sermon on the Mount were a clerical error.
I am not going to pretend that it is a close call.
And the performance is costing the church the very people it claims to want. When Pew asked Americans why they walked away from the religion they grew up in, roughly a third named scandals among religious leaders, and roughly a third named the faith’s politics. Read that again. The loudest defenders of Christianity are its worst advertisement. They are not guarding the faith against James Talarico. They are the reason the little building I sit in on Sundays keeps getting quieter.
If you left all of this behind, tired of people who shout about Jesus and act nothing like him, I want you to hear something. Your instinct was not a betrayal. It was eyesight. My own argument has never been with God. It has been with what people do with God, which is mostly to file him down into a weapon and go looking for someone to swing him at.
They questioned a man’s faith on a few points in a poll. If you ever want to know whose faith is the real thing, skip the press releases and watch their hands. Watch who actually feeds somebody.
That was always the only test.
Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.
References
Gallup. “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.” 2021. https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
Guo, Kayla. “Ken Paxton and James Talarico Are Neck and Neck in U.S. Senate Race, New Poll Finds.” The Texas Tribune, June 23, 2026. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/23/texas-us-senate-poll-ken-paxton-james-talarico-ut-austin/
Pew Research Center. “Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion While Others Stay?” December 15, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/12/15/why-do-some-americans-leave-their-religion-while-others-stay/
Pierce, Tony. “Austin’s James Talarico Is Running for U.S. Senate.” KUT (Austin’s NPR Station), September 9, 2025. https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-09-09/james-talarico-austin-texas-u-s-senate-2026-election-democrat
“Talarico Leads Paxton in Texas Poll.” The Hill, June 10, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5916384-talarico-leads-paxton-texas-poll/
“James Talarico Leads Ken Paxton in Texas Senate Race Poll After GOP Runoff.” The Hill, May 30, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5902035-texas-senate-race-poll/
D’Abrosca, Peter. “Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico Said He ‘Hates Christianity’ in 2021.” Fox News, June 24, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/talarico-says-hates-christianity-unearthed-interview-transgender-latinx-theologian
“Texas Senate Hopeful Talarico Under Fire Over Resurfaced ‘Christian Who Hates Christianity’ Remarks.” The Washington Times, June 23, 2026. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jun/23/texas-senate-hopeful-talarico-fire-resurfaced-christian-who-hates/