The Passion of the Talarico

When scripture becomes a tool for advancing contemporary progressive politics, Christianity begins to resemble secular humanism dressed up in religious language.

I’ve called Texas Democrat James Talarico “Pastor Pornhub” because if I could create the living embodiment of Satan on earth, he would look just like Talarico, a leftist caricature of a Christian, smug, self-righteous and generously quoting Bible verses to justify his political positions.

The problem is not so much quoting of the Bible, but the heretical interpretations of those verses because Pastor Pornhub is a “progressive” Christian, which is to say he is not a Christian at all.

In recent years, the rise of what is called “progressive Christianity” has been celebrated by its advocates as a natural evolution of the Christian faith. According to this view, the church is simply adapting to new moral insights and social realities, much as it has done throughout history, but that description strikes me as deeply misleading. What is happening is not evolution, it is divergence.

For nearly two thousand years, Christianity has rested on a recognizable set of core beliefs. Christians across centuries, continents, and cultures have disagreed on many secondary questions—church governance, liturgy, the finer points of theology—but they have largely shared a common foundation. That foundation includes belief in the divinity of Christ, the authority of scripture, the reality of sin, the need for redemption, and the resurrection. These were not invented by modern evangelicals or any particular denomination, they were articulated early in the church’s history and affirmed in statements such as the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed.

Those beliefs formed the boundary lines of what Christianity was understood to be.

Progressive Christianity, however, increasingly treats those doctrines not as defining truths but as optional metaphors. The resurrection becomes a “symbol of hope.” The divinity of Christ becomes an “inspirational idea.” Sin becomes a social construct rather than a condition of the human heart. Salvation becomes collective political improvement rather than reconciliation with God.

At that point one has to ask an obvious question: if those beliefs are no longer essential, what exactly remains that makes the system Christian?

Advocates often insist that Christianity has always evolved, pointing to past moral developments such as the abolition of slavery or the expansion of civil rights, but those examples do not demonstrate doctrinal abandonment; they demonstrate moral application. Christians argued against slavery because they believed human beings were created in the image of God. They fought for civil rights because they believed in the equal dignity of souls before God. The underlying theology remained intact.

What we are seeing today is something quite different. The underlying theology is being reinterpreted—or more accurately, rewritten—to conform to modern secular assumptions and that distinction matters. Where interpretation attempts to understand a text within its original framework, rewriting changes the framework itself.

If this sounds like the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, it should because it is a close cousin of the tactic of stripping all meaning from a thing and reassigning a meaning that better supports a preconceived agenda.

Progressive Christians often claim they are simply reading scripture through the lens of compassion and justice. Yet compassion and justice were hardly invented in the 21st century. The problem is not that progressive Christians emphasize moral concern for the poor or marginalized - Christianity has always done that - the problem is that modern political ideology increasingly determines which parts of scripture are emphasized, which are ignored, and which are redefined beyond recognition. When that happens, scripture ceases to function as an authority. It becomes a symbolic resource that can be reshaped to match whatever the current cultural consensus happens to be.

In that sense, progressive Christianity begins to resemble secular humanism more than traditional Christianity. The moral framework is no longer grounded in divine revelation but in contemporary (and malleable) social values. Ethical goals like equity, inclusion, and social justice are defined primarily by modern political discourse. Government policy becomes the primary instrument for achieving those goals. The language may remain Christian, but the underlying worldview is largely secular and politicized.

This is why I am not alone in arguing that progressive Christianity is not a development of Christianity so much as a religiously flavored version of modern progressivism.

Many people sincerely believe that moral truth is best derived from human reasoning and evolving social consensus, but that approach is fundamentally different from the historic Christian claim that moral truth is revealed through God and preserved in scripture.

Blending the two systems inevitably changes both.

Once doctrine becomes infinitely flexible—once miracles become metaphors, sin becomes sociology, and salvation becomes public policy—Christianity loses the very elements that once distinguished it from other moral philosophies, and the faith becomes less a religion grounded in divine action and more a spiritual vocabulary for contemporary political goals.

Some may welcome that transformation, but it should at least be described honestly. We seem to be condemned to replaying the French Revolution over and over.

In my honest opinion, what is happening is not the organic evolution of Christianity. Evolution implies continuity with the past. What we are seeing instead is a gradual departure from the beliefs that defined Christianity for centuries and the replacement of those beliefs with politically useful narratives.

A faith that systematically replaces its historic doctrines with modern secular assumptions may still call itself Christianity but whether it remains Christianity in any meaningful sense is not a hard question to answer.

Talarico is an example of evil personified, and one must really consider what that means since the entire Democrat establishment is behind him in his run for the US Senate.