Apostasy: Talarico Pastor's Perverted Christianity - Calling God 'Him' Is Violent, St. Paul Is a 'Creep,' and Mary's a Myth?
For those of you unfamiliar with how media tropes work, there’s something called “Betteridge’s law of headlines.” Put simply, the law is this: If a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always “no.”
I mention this because I can only assume that the folks at The New York Times — which, remains the newspaper of record in and from these United States, despite all evidence that it shouldn’t be — know about it, if not at the authorship level than at least at the editorial one.
Hence, what does it tell you that the semi-official mouthpiece of the Democratic Party published a piece last Monday that went largely under the radar, titled “Are Texans Ready for Talarico’s Kind of Christianity?”
At least they already know the answer.
Talarico, as you probably know, is described very, very frequently using the two word construct “Presbyterian seminarian,” mostly to launder him as the “faith and values” candidate in the 2026 Texas Senate race.
(Republican nominee Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, has a much longer record of supporting causes dear to Christian voters, but also a record of personal behavior that invariably gets reported as spotty, especially as regards his wife seeking divorce against him last year “on biblical grounds.”)
“Presbyterian seminarian” is not precisely a statement of morals, however, or of biblical orthodoxy. This is made clear by the lede to the Times’ dissection of Talarico’s congregation and faith leader:
On a recent Sunday morning at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, Jim Rigby asked his congregation to share what came to mind when he mentioned the Apostle Paul, the major Christian figure to whom 13 books in the Bible are attributed. They cheerfully complied:
“Villain!”
“Homophobic!”
Advertisement - story continues below“He’s a jerk.”
Paul’s attributed writings include passages seen as encouraging wives to submit to their husbands and instructing them to be quiet in church, and others condemning same-sex sexual behavior as sinful.
Amazing, this version of Christianity. In Soviet Presbyterian congregation, God doesn’t judge you, you judge God!
How did Rigby reconcile his congregation’s heresy with reality? By, um, citing other religions.
Mr. Rigby acknowledged the trouble. But in a sermon that also cited the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha, he nudged his congregation to reconsider the apostle, one of the most important in the early Christian church. “Aristotle and Plato, they were creeps, too, in modern times,” Mr. Rigby said. “But do we want to learn from our ancestors or not?”
The apostle Paul has written roughly half of the books in the New Testament, which means if you can’t defend his writing as canonical and binding on its own terms, you’re already in trouble. But when you decide that you need to get Buddhism and Hinduism and ancient Greek philosophers to make him look all right, there are, to put it mildly, issues.
And therein lies the problem for Talarico: Rigby, who began leading the congregation roughly 40 years ago and remains “a well-known activist locally,” is now “a key to understanding Mr. Talarico, a candidate who aims to be the first Democrat to win statewide office in Texas in a generation.”
“He is my pastor in every sense of the word,” Talarico has said of Rigby. “Not that we agree on everything.”
“I think every Christian disagrees with their pastor. And the beautiful thing about Dr. Jim is that he welcomes and encourages that.”
Even Mr. Betteridge, the British journalist who lent his name to the concept when he wrote about it in 2009, might be impressed by the aplomb which the Times delivered on that “No,” in bold, underlined, size-72 font. Because Talarico would effectively have to disagree with basically all of Rigby’s operative concepts of biblical morality in order to answer that question in the affirmative.
For instance, take this passage in which we learn, if by proxy, where Talarico got his “God is nonbinary” prattle”
Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service. He does not use the word “Lord,” because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God, he said. For that matter, he added, he does not much care for the word “God.” He uses it on occasion, he said, but he tries to use synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”
In his sermon that morning, he had referred to “the creative impulse of the universe,” which “can be called God, but it doesn’t have to be called God.”
If that last part sounds conspicuously like crypto-atheism, let me also note that atheists are apparently just fine with the congregation, too.
His efforts as an activist are closely entwined with his steering of the church. St. Andrew’s has sheltered a Guatemalan woman and her son from ICE, hosted a naming ceremony and baptism for a transgender man, and welcomed a self-described atheist as a member. (The church also does uncontroversial work, including hosting weekly meals where homeless people can also shower and do laundry at facilities the church installed in one of its wings.)
“The church also does uncontroversial work.” Next time there’s an air disaster, I would like nothing more to see “the plane flew most of the time” somewhere in the New York Times’ coverage to excuse away the time it plunged into the ocean. Really, just grade-A journalisming here.
Oh, and what about the annunciation of Mary, which Talarico says provides a biblical defense for abortion because it means God “cannot force someone to create”?
Mr. Rigby recalled preaching on the passage in the past. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that in the text, the angel does not, in fact, “ask” Mary if she accepts the pregnancy, as Mr. Talarico framed it, but rather tells her it will happen.
“It’s mythological, not historical,” Mr. Rigby said.
Advertisement - story continues belowWhat makes the story of Mary really radical, he said, is that she was poor, and the Scripture records her calling for the rich and mighty to be brought down from their thrones.
There you have it: Christianity is useful myth, not the Word of God, for the stripe of “Presbyterian seminarian” Talarico embodies.
Fittingly enough, in Romans 1, Paul himself describes the situation fairly accurately:
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Advertisement - story continues below“21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
“24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”
Just so.
Texas shouldn’t be ready for Talarico’s form of Christianity because it’s not actually that, just a convenient tool.
In spite of The New York Times soft-pedaling the apostasy of Talarico’s faith, you do have to give the newspaper kudos: They took Betteridge’s law of headlines and put it to work.
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