WATCH: Forgotten Video of Talarico Giving a Heretical Prayer Resurfaces, Confirms He's a Total Fraud
In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “Presbyterian seminarian” has done a lot of heavy lifting for Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico.
In much the way “devout Catholic” did so much work for Joe Biden — a man whose private faith may have indeed been deep, but whose antipathy toward public policy that favored the faithful didn’t seem to have much in common with the Bible or the Vatican — the fact that he attended Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is supposed to make him the Christian candidate, somehow.
The reason for Talarico drawing attention to himself this way is even more evident when you consider why he’s doing it: His opponent, Ken Paxton, has been assailed for public and personal lapses by both the left and establishment right during his time as Texas’ attorney general.
How much of this is true and how much of this is mudslinging is your estimation alone, but the fact remains that Paxton’s wife filed for divorce “on biblical grounds” last July.
However, the idea of imagining Talarico as a retail politician looking for values voters to buy into is, or should have been, farcical on a number of levels. In this vein, I present to you our “Presbyterian seminarian” delivering a Texas House invocation in 2021, recently unearthed on Reddit by the pundit who goes by DataRepublican on X.
It’s difficult to categorize all the ways this short prayer is blasphemous, but see if you can circle them as we go along:
Let us pray. Holy mystery, you have so many names: The Torah calls you ‘Creator,’ the Quran calls you “peace,” the Gita calls you “destroyer,” the dharma calls you “truth” and the first epistle of John calls You perhaps the most beautiful name of all: “Love.”
Based on the lies and inaccuracies in his prayer, do you think Talarico is truly following Jesus?You are the strange love, uniting all the things. The love that drew elements together after the big bang. The love that drew life itself from those primordial oceans. The love that drew us all to this exact moment. The love we were born of. The love we exist in. And the love we will one day return to.
In my faith, you expressed yourself through a barefoot rabbi who embodied your perfect love. A crucified carpenter who gave only two commandments: Love God, and love neighbor, because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Help us love not just in word but in action, help us honor not just the name of Jesus but the way of Jesus. Help us free the oppressed, feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, release the prisoner, welcome the stranger, forgive the enemy, and — above all — protect your creation.
The prayer rambles on for a while after this, but you get the point. The only other major problematic point was at the end, he used the phrase “build a new world in the shell of the old world,” a dog-whistle to the far, far left.
🚨 VIDEO: Texas state Rep. James Talarico opened a legislative session with a heretic prayer, invoked old Communist-adjacent phrase
h/t @reddit_lies who spotted it on Reddit; I tracked down the original video.
The prayer addresses God as “holy mystery” with “so many names” —… pic.twitter.com/eobF2LLQkU
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) May 28, 2026
“By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old,” the phrase in the preamble of the radical Industrial Workers of the World — a group commonly known as the “wobblies” — read as written in 1905.
Also, there was the closing incantation: “In all your many names we pray, amen.” Coming amid all the rest of the pantheistic rhetoric here
Other than that, the heresies come like an Obama-era gun-walking scandal: fast and furious.
Perhaps the most glaring fallacy, if not the first fallacy chronologically, is this one: Jesus “gave only two commandments: Love God, and love neighbor.”
Well, let’s start with the fact that Jesus certainly kept a lot of commandments: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them,” he said in Matthew 5. In the Old Testament, I seem to remember a list of more than two commandments. It was somewhere above nine and below 11.
And then, it’s worth noting there were plenty of other commands Jesus gave in the New Testament: “Go and sin no more.” “Get thee behind me.” “Shake the dust off your feet.” “Give unto Caesar.” “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” “Follow me.” “Believe.” “Deny yourself.” “Do not worry.”
Yes, Jesus said of “love the Lord your God” and “love your neighbor” that “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets,” as enumerated in Matthew 22, but that was hardly the only commandment Jesus gave. In fact, he was pretty full of them.
Then there is the open. Remember that list of commandments between nine and 11 items long that’s also in the Bible and which Jesus said he came to fulfill? The first one on that list: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
These include, but are not limited to:
- Allah, or “peace,” in the Quran
- “The destroyer,” or what Krishna called the ultimate force in the Bhagavad Gita
- The concept of dharma in Buddhism.
Including this pap in a prayer also doesn’t pass muster. Acts 4:12: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Or Galatians 1:8: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”
Oh yes, while pointing out the most obvious one, let’s focus on “above all, protect your creation.” Let’s consult Romans 1:22-25, shall we?
Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Advertisement - story continues belowTherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!
Perhaps the talk about God uniting atoms after the big bang and dragging life out of the primordial ocean seemed a bit like sloppiness, but this makes it clear he subscribes to a form of soft panentheism at the very least. (At least give him credit for hitting the two theisms that begin with the prefix pan-, for Presbyterians anyway. Don’t they teach you that’s not biblical at seminary, though?)
I could go on, but you get the point: If you are a voter of faith and you think that “Presbyterian seminarian” makes this man holy or moral, consider the fact that this is hardly exhaustive in regards to this speech, and even less so in Talarico’s library of heresies. In fact, forget Stephen Miller’s joke about Talarico being the first trans Senate candidate; Talarico might just be the proudest, most openly heretical Senate candidate ever.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
