Christian right calls Texas Senate candidate ‘demonic’

Christian right – James Talarico, a Texas U.S. Senate candidate, is facing backlash from Christian-right figures who denounced his use of two Bible passages from Matthew after he linked Christian ethics to politics. The fight has ignited debate over which version of Christianit

A Texas Senate campaign has turned into a culture fight over who gets to define what “real” Christianity looks like.

James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, has been found guilty—at least in the eyes of right-wing media—for quoting Jesus. The sentence the movement handed down was not subtle: his quoted words were branded “demonic” and “blasphemous. ” and he was attacked as a “fake Christian.” One Newsmax host accused him of using fake Bible passages.

The passages in question are familiar ones, drawn from Matthew 22 and Matthew 25. In Matthew 22, the call is clear: love God and love your neighbor. In Matthew 25, the language is just as direct: feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger. The attacks, Talarico’s critics insist, are about what those verses mean in modern politics. Talarico’s campaign insists they’re about something else entirely: whether Christianity is allowed to remain a moral challenge—or whether it becomes a tool used to secure political power.

The controversy sits inside a larger, long-running argument that progressive Christianity has been losing in public for decades: whose version of the faith gets to count.

Talarico frames his political approach as a “politics of love.” He has pointed to the Sermon on the Mount as his blueprint. including “Blessed are the poor. ” “Blessed are the peacemakers. ” “Love your enemies. ” and “Do good to those who hate you.” He described this as part of how Jesus demanded people act. not how they perform belief. The argument. as Talarico tells it. is that the message is not ambiguous—every empire that heard it tried to kill the person delivering it.

In his remarks. Talarico also took aim at how the Christian right has narrowed the Gospel down to two issues: abortion and gay marriage. He told Stephen Colbert that Jesus never mentions either of those things. Instead. Talarico says. Matthew 25 includes words attributed explicitly to Jesus about judgment based on care for the hungry. the sick. the stranger. and the imprisoned.

That message was delivered in a campaign moment in Lubbock, where Talarico put the relationship between faith and government into a single line: “Politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors.” In his telling, it’s essentially the Sermon on the Mount translated into civic life.

The attacks, though, are not only about those Bible verses themselves. The sharpness of the backlash suggests something more fundamental: a scramble over authority—over who gets to sit at the table and decide what counts as orthodox.

Talarico did not invent the “politics of love” tradition, his supporters say. They trace it to Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement and to Martin Luther King Jr. who preached a version of love and neighborliness from Birmingham. They point to clergy who showed up at ICE detention centers and got arrested. They also cite Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde. who stood a few feet from President Donald Trump and asked him to have mercy on the people his policies were terrorizing—while being labeled “a radical.”.

The dispute has now taken a more visible form. supporters argue. because progressive Christians are finding a political voice that mainstream America can hear. Attacks on Talarico. they say. reflect what his critics fear most: the Gospel they’ve weaponized is being reclaimed by people who read and heed what they describe as Jesus’s genuine teachings.

That reclaiming has personal stakes for clergy and activists who have spent years watching Christianity used as a facade. One ministry account within the source material describes a decade of seeing Christianity employed against immigrants. the poor. and anyone who doesn’t fit the preferred demographic of a particular political coalition.

The debate is not limited to believers. Jonathan Rauch—described in the source material as an “atheist homosexual Jew”—argues in “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy” that Christianity is a “load-bearing wall. ” and that its failure puts dangerous stress on democratic institutions. In that view, what’s happening now is not merely democratic breakdown but an effort to remove the wall.

At the heart of Talarico’s pitch is a democratic promise: a politics of love as a civic ideal rooted in the conviction that every person bears the image of God and therefore deserves dignity. justice. and care. It asks what people owe one another—not what they can take. It asks who counts as a neighbor, and refuses to draw boundaries short of everyone.

To critics on the Christian-right side, that is precisely why they are pushing back. The source material says the Christian right is panicking because the question of “neighbor” dismantles policy built on exclusion. It says the resulting politics rejects a deportation list, rejects a means test, and rejects any preferred ethnicity. What remains. in that telling. is a moral standard tied to Matthew 25: whatever someone did for “the least of these” was done for Jesus.

Talarico’s defenders argue the language is demanding by design—an insistence on how human beings are treated, not a formula for winning power. If the Christian right wants to call it “demonic,” the source material counters, Jesus called it the kingdom of heaven.

By the time Talarico’s opponents named his quoting of Matthew 22 and Matthew 25 as blasphemy, the campaign argument had already moved beyond theology. It had become a test of whether a Bible passage meant for judgment and care can still be heard as a political compass.

James Talarico Texas Senate Christian right Matthew 22 Matthew 25 politics of love Stephen Colbert Lubbock campaign rally Newsmax host