Over the past day, the Daily Wire and the Blaze published twin interviews showing two pastors at Texas Senate candidate James Talarico’s home church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, disavowing Jesus Christ and Christianity in shockingly blunt terms.
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The first, from the Daily Wire, features the “nonbinary and lesbian” Rev. Babs Miller.
“Whether or not Jesus existed doesn’t really matter to me,” she said. “The fact remains that that message that was delivered by someone named Jesus, supposedly, and it could have all been made up for all I know.”
While the Rev. Babs maintained epistemic uncertainty as to Christ’s existence — “We have no way of knowing if Jesus really existed any more than we do of knowing that the original Buddha existed” — she was confident enough in His lack of love for us so as to conclude that He “didn’t die to save our sins.”
Quite clearly, much of the reason the Rev. Miller proclaims herself to be a pastor is that she is titillated by doing so while at the same time mocking God and His Church.
If the “nonbinary” pastor’s statements are unbelievably outrageous, the head pastor’s comments — obtained by the Blaze — are even more so.
The video interview starts off with the Rev. Jim Rigby (whom James Talarico has referred to as one of “the biggest influences on [him] as a Christian, as a human being”) being asked if he believes in the virgin birth.
His answer was clear: “I don’t.”
Rigby proceeded to deliver a crazed rant that amounted to concluding that Christianity is derived from other religions’ beliefs.
“The virgin birth stuff, you see it like in Hinduism … and it’s more like, it’s more like all human beings were born out of the transcendent,” he said. “There’s a cosmic process, there’s animals and stuff, so when the Christmas story is told, all of that’s in there.”
The virgin birth, Rigby eventually concludes, “came off of Plato.”
“‘Only begotten one’ and kind of stuff like that,” he said, “that’s in the writings of Plato. It’s about humanity and the cosmos.”
Like Miller, Rigby maintains there’s no way we can know anything about Christ and whether He is a real person.
Talarico has joined his pastors in partaking in blasphemy.
“There’s no way you can know what happened with Jesus or, you know, anything about the people from a long time ago,” he said. “But I think what it’s trying to do is reveal that you are a child of the stars.” With that, Rigby went off on a tangent about the “Christmas stories of baby Krishna.”
In a subsequent clip obtained by the Blaze, Rigby is shown theorizing that the Apostle Paul crafted Christianity in such a way as to appeal to a common belief at the time in animal sacrifices. This is the same man who cited the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha in a sermon this summer. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 244: Understanding the Democrats’ Weird Relationship With Islam)
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In yet another clip, Rigby casually says, when asked how he joined his church despite his lack of belief in the major tenets of Christianity, “We all got in by lying.”
These outrageous interviews are politically relevant given that these pastors hail from the church on which James Talarico has based his political career. Talarico decided to enter the seminary on the basis of attending St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church during his childhood and adulthood, and he has publicly stated its importance to who he is “as a human being.” Throughout his campaign, Talarico has made his progressive Christianity the center of who he is.
Earlier this month, Talarico gave a viral interview with Jimmy Kimmel in which he imagined what Christ would do if He showed up to the U.S. Senate. The video has now attained over 12 million views. (RELATED: James Talarico: The Wolf in Sunday’s Clothing
“I think he would tell the senators on the floor, ‘Depart from me,’ for I was hungry and you cut my food assistance. I was sick and you kicked me off Medicaid. I was a stranger and you deported me and my family. And then I think he would flip over those fancy desks on the floor of the U.S. Senate and demand that we take care of all of our neighbors, especially the least of these.” (RELATED: Everything Is Bigger in Texas — Including the Senate Stakes)
Talarico has joined his pastors in partaking in blasphemy. In 2021, he stated, “God is nonbinary.” (“God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary. Trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image.”) He has tried to justify abortion as biblically mandated by the Virgin Mary’s conception of Jesus. (“The angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do, and she says: If it is God’s will, let it be done. To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create.”) And in a 2022 sermon at St. Andrew’s, he asserted, “Our trans community needs abortion care, too.” He also tried to say that the book of Galatians’ assertion that “nor is there male and female” under Christ means that there are no differences between the sexes.
Talarico has this year tried to distance himself from some of these statements. Specifically in regard to his statement that “God is nonbinary,” Talarico said, “Ken Paxton is clipping my past cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption, as part of a ‘playbook’ of ‘distraction and division.’” (RELATED: Advice for Ken Paxton)
Talarico has also stated that he is not fully in alignment with the radicalness of Jim Rigby. He told the New York Times that, unlike Rigby, he refers to Christ as “Lord.” (Rigby does not do so “because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God,” per the Times.)
“He is my pastor in every sense of the word,” Talarico said of Rigby. “Not that we agree on everything.”
“I don’t believe in a progressive or conservative Christianity; I believe in a biblical Christianity,” Talarico also told the Times. “My faith is rooted in Scripture and the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
But a man who has chosen to make St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church his home church has in fact entered into a world that is hardly Christian. It is a place that professes a different religion, one where the existence of Christ is unknowable and all human spiritualities are equivalent made-up mythologies that attempt to understand man’s role in the cosmos. Each person is understood to be, as Rigby put it, “a child of the stars” — and not, in fact, a child of God.
James Talarico wants to make his “Christianity” the center of his Senate campaign. But this is very much not Christianity at all.
When you claim Christ’s Incarnation proves we should be able to murder unborn children, you can no longer claim to belong to His Church.
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