Could a Politician Help Rekindle My Faith?

For most of my adult life, Christianity was central to how I understood the world and my place in it. I spent over three decades serving as a Presbyterian pastor—preaching and teaching, baptizing and burying, marrying couples, working for justice, and trying, in my own imperfect way, to live out the Gospel entrusted to me.

Long before my retirement, my understanding of faith changed dramatically. I used the word universalist, but that fails to encompass my experience. There’s a line from a piece I wrote years ago that still resonates. “For me, this knowing, this waking up, is more than just living in the moment. It’s an awareness that Presence, Tao, Spirit, God—whatever term you use—surrounds us with love, encouragement, and serenity. It is like inhaling sustenance and light, letting our Source heal us in the deepest recesses of our spirit.”

This awakening happened even as American Christianity fell prey, once again, to a repulsive mentality that has always poisoned our collective consciousness. It’s a cultic appropriation of Jesus that is less interested in his teachings than in power, cultural dominance, and political tribalism. Its language is incestuously entangled with nationalism. It’s downright antichrist, embracing cruelty toward immigrants, contempt for the poor, hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, and suspicion of anyone who does not fit its preferred definition of an American “believer.”

My own evolution, combined with what I have watched happening in America, has led me to say that I no longer consider myself a Christian in any traditional sense. I have no desire to outsource my salvation, recite creeds, or cling to doctrines. And after a lifetime in the church, I have little patience for ecclesiastical politics or institutions that seem more interested in preserving themselves than serving others.

And yet, I have never been able to shake Jesus.

This is where a politician named James Talarico enters the story, a Texas State Representative running for the United States Senate. A native Texan, his grandfather was a Baptist preacher. He got his education at the University of Texas, then Harvard, served as a public-school teacher, and has now been in the Texas House of Representatives for eight years.

He is also a Presbyterian seminarian who speaks openly about his Christian faith, not as an accessory to his politics, but as the core of what drives him to seek office. Here are some things he has said.

• “My faith is why I’m in public service. It’s why I try to make life easier for my neighbors, which is what I’m called to do as a Christian.”
• “For too long, many Christians have allowed the powers that be to co-opt our faith tradition and use it to consolidate wealth and power for themselves. Conservative and progressive Christians alike need to unite and condemn the heresy of Christian nationalism.”
• “I choose to put my faith in love, which sometimes the evidence suggests is not going to work.”
• “I always try to remember that everyone I come across is the expression of a divine source. Every person that I meet is the bearer of a sacred image. And I forget that all the time. We all forget it all the time.”
• “My granddad taught me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments: love God and love neighbor. Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred; every single person is holy, not just the neighbors who look like me or pray like me or vote like me.”
• “Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and every one of our fellow believers, how we’re going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church. Nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people.”

These statements and others caused me to say “Amen!” The fact that they come from a politician running for the US Senate in a red state is remarkable to me. More personally, they have made me fall in love again with the faith I tried to communicate throughout my career. They have reminded me how much I still love Jesus. Not the Jesus of political scorekeeping or culture-war outrage, and certainly not the Jesus who seems perpetually angry about who is using the wrong bathroom or reading the wrong book. I mean the itinerant Nazarene preacher who told us to love our enemies, who said that whatever we do for the least in our midst, we do for him. The man who took an elaborate religious tradition and brought it back to something as simple and demanding as loving God and loving our neighbor.

Talarico is not arguing that America should become a Christian nation. He defends the separation of church and state and sees Christian nationalism as a betrayal of the faith he professes, a distortion of Jesus’ teachings that turns Christianity into an instrument of political power.

I’m not naive. I’m aware of how power corrupts. If Talarico wins, I don’t know whether I will agree with everything he says or does in the future. Politicians are politicians, after all. They seek votes. They compromise. They often disappoint.

But I’m surprised at how deeply Talarico’s faith has affected me. It has made it clear to me that I never really left Jesus. What I rejected was the machinery that grew up around him, the arguments over doctrine, the certainty that one group possesses the truth, and the temptation to turn faith into a weapon.

What remains for me, as it does with Talarico, is much simpler: the call to love God and love my neighbor, to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, care for the sick, and remember the prisoner.

Talarico has reminded me of something I spent a career trying to tell other people. Whatever we call the presence that surrounds us, we encounter it not by mastering it or giving it the right name, but by the way we live and serve.

I didn’t leave faith behind. I simply had to find my way back to the Jesus I loved in the first place.