Thursday, January 15, 2026: Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves, Christian nationalism kills - James Talarico

Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left? This is a transcript from the Ezra Klein Podcast provided to us by Katie, Ed FitzGerald's daughter. It's a gift for all of us -- and it's only Part 1 of a lengthy interview. Stay Tuned: There is Hope!

Ezra Klein and State Representative James Talarico of Texas discuss his faith, his politics and his Senate race.

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

We’ve talked a lot about how the Trump administration uses attention, how Zohran Mamdani uses attention. But somebody who has been breaking through over the past year in a very interesting way is James Talarico, a state representative from Texas.

Talarico is a little bit unusual for a Democrat. He’s a very forthright Christian politician. He roots his politics very fundamentally in a way you don’t often hear from Democrats in his faith.

Quote: James Talarico: “Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.”

But Talarico began emerging as somebody who was breaking through on TikTok, Instagram and viral videos where he would talk about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools, as a bill had proposed:

Archival clip of Talarico: "This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional, it’s not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian. And the ways in which the Bible’s emphasis on helping the poor and the needy had been perverted by those who wanted to use religion as a tool of power and even greed:

Talarico Quote: Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves, Christian nationalism kills.

What was really surprising to many people is that he ended up on Joe Rogan’s podcast — the first significant Democrat that Rogan seemed interested in, in a very long time.

Quote of  Joe Rogan: You need to run for president. [Laughter]. Because we need someone who’s actually a good person.

Now Talarico is running for Senate in Texas. He’s running in a primary with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett for what will be one of the most important Senate elections in the country.

So I wanted to have Talarico on the show to talk to him about his faith, his politics and the way those two have come together in this attentional moment to allow him to say things in a language and within a framework that people seem to really want to hear, that people seem hungry for: a language of morality, and even of faith, at a time of incredible cruelty. And at a time when the radicalism of faith seems to have been perverted by the corruption of politics.

Ezra Klein: James Talarico, welcome to the show.

James Talarico: Thanks for having me. (in Blue)

So I wanted to start with your faith, because your politics is so rooted in your faith.

For you, what is the root or the experience of your belief? Is it learned for you? Is it embodied? Cerebral? Is it something you’ve always had? Or something you had to struggle to find?

All the above. [Chuckles.] So my granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, in Corpus Christi and in Laredo, where my mom grew up. When I was real little, he told me that Christianity is a simple religion — not an easy religion, he would always clarify, but a simple religion — because Jesus gave us these two Commandments: To love God, our source, and to love our neighbors.

And so those two Commandments have really guided my life at its best moments, and it’s why I’m in public service. I was a public-school teacher, and now I’m a public official. That’s “loving my neighbor.” And it’s why I’m a seminary student studying to become a minister one day — that’s the “loving God” part. And both of them sustain each other, challenge each other, reinforce each other on a daily basis.

But you just slipped into how you live your faith, not what it is for you.

Yeah.

Has belief come easily to you?

Part of being a seminary student is studying Hebrew and Greek, so you can actually read Scripture in its original language. And one of the mind-blowing things that happened to me my first year of seminary is I was studying this word “faith.” In many translations, it is “belief” — the idea of believing in a concept or an idea — which makes sense in English, Western, translations.

But it can also be translated as “trust,” which to me is much more experiential: Trusting that love is going to get you through the hour, through the day, through your life. That love is going to carry all of us forward. That love will ultimately prevail, even when it’s temporarily defeated.

To me, that’s what my faith feels like. It feels like trust. Almost like when I learned how to swim at our neighborhood pool, and I remember my swim teacher telling me: Don’t fight the water. Let the water carry you.

There’s so much temptation in our lives to control our surroundings and control other people, and I think the opposite of that control is faith — that kind of trust, letting the universe hold you up — and not fighting it. That’s what it feels like for me, again, when I’m most faithful.

It’s a struggle on a daily basis to feel that trust and not to fight the water.

Ezra: Was it always there for you, or did you have a period as a college atheist reading Chris Hitchens?

[Chuckles.] I was really lucky that I grew up in an incredible church community. I didn’t grow up with my granddad as my pastor. I grew up in a Presbyterian Church, actually, in Round Rock, Texas: St. Andrew’s. Shout-out to our church!

And our pastor, Dr. Jim Rigby, married my parents. He baptized me when I was 2 years old. He’s a unique religious leader and thinker. He got in trouble a lot when I was in elementary school: He was ordaining gay and lesbian clergy. He was blessing same-sex unions, which now doesn’t seem controversial.

Well, in some traditions it certainly is.

That’s true. But I think it’s hard to remember just how controversial universally it was, how radical and dangerous it was. We almost lost our church because of those actions by our minister and our congregation, and the national Presbyterian Church put him on trial. And so these early memories were kind of seared into my brain.

So I was brought up in a very countercultural faith that didn’t sound like everything I heard at school or at work or in the media. I feel like I was given a really healthy tradition and one that has worked for me, partly because Dr. Jim, my pastor, always said that religion shouldn’t lead to itself — religion should lead you deeper into your own life. To me, that is such a gift that you can give a young person.

Can you say more about what that means to you?

Yes. I’ll just speak about my tradition. The genius of Christianity — the miracle of Christianity — is not the claim that Jesus is God. It’s that God is Jesus, meaning that Jesus helps us understand the mystery. A mystery can’t help us understand Jesus. So this idea that ultimate reality, the ground of our being, the cosmos, however you want to define God, somehow looks like this humble, compassionate, barefoot rabbi in the first century, someone who broke cultural norms, someone who stood up for the vulnerable and the marginalized, someone who challenged religious authority — that, to me, is such a revolutionary idea, and it leads you to challenge organized religion.

The Gospel just inherently tries to break out of some of these religious dogmas and orthodoxies and challenges religion itself.