Consensus (not conservative) Christianity.

Political operatives are counting on you not knowing something about Christian history.

If you’ve never heard of James Talarico, here’s the thirty-second version: he’s a Texas state representative and Presbyterian seminarian running for U.S. Senate, and he’s become something of a media darling — fawning coverage from the New York Times, a viral appearance on the Ezra Klein Show, a Joe Rogan interview that sent his follower count through the roof. He’s young, fluent in Scripture, and has made his “Christian faith” the centerpiece of his campaign. He bills himself as reclaiming Christianity for the left. This is the man who declared from the Texas House floor that “God is nonbinary,” argued on Joe Rogan that Mary gave her consent to God, and told the Ezra Klein Show that Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam are all “circling the same truth” as Christianity.

David French’s recent column praising Talarico as a model Christian political witness makes a specific argument that is worth spending time dismantling. French argues there is “a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism” — framing Talarico’s pro-abortion, pro-transgender-ideology politics as simply the progressive expression of an always-diverse faith. The idea being that Christianity has a conservative wing and a progressive wing, two equal and opposite political expressions of a tradition that has always made room for both.

That is not a description of Christian history.

It is a modern American invention, and it is being deployed intentionally and strategically to peel off religious voters from positions they have held for two thousand years.

Diversity: The Numbers Don’t Lie

Christianity is the most diverse religion on earth, present in 120 majority-Christian nations, translated into 795 languages, spread across every continent. No other faith has achieved this. Islam requires an untranslated Arabic Qur’an, tying adherents to seventh-century Arabia. Hinduism has never meaningfully left the Indian subcontinent. Buddhism remains concentrated in a handful of Asian nations. Christianity alone has repeatedly shifted its cultural center across multiple continents over two millennia, a distinction it alone can claim.

Yet while its cultural diversity is real… its theological diversity is not. Denominations representing 98% of the world’s 2.4 billion Christians — the Catholic Church, every Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction, every African denomination, Latin American Pentecostals, Asian evangelicals, historically Black churches in America — hold the same official position on abortion, gender, and natural marriage. The denominations that dissent represent roughly 0.5% of global Christianity.

Almost entirely white. Almost entirely Western. Almost entirely shrinking.

You can see now how absurd it is to call these near unanimous positions “conservative Christianity”. That decision projects two decades of American partisan politics onto two thousand years of unanimous global teaching. Teachings that predate left and right. They predate America. And the departure from them is far more recent than the diversity framing suggests. The broader liberal Protestant tradition of deprioritizing individual salvation in favor of social salvation (the closest thing to French’s framing) is approximately 150 years old, and was always a minority position within global Christianity. But even then, that movement embracing an affirming sexual ethic is an even smaller even newer innovation within that already-minority tradition, roughly fifty to sixty years old.

In short, the word for the majority position of two billion Christians across twenty centuries is not "conservative." It is consensus.

What the Framing Is For

The purpose of the diversity framing is nakedly political — to give religious Christians permission to vote for candidates who reject the core convictions of the global church without feeling like they have abandoned their faith.

It goes like this: “You don’t have to stop believing abortion is wrong. You don’t have to change what you believe at all. You just have to accept that Talarico is a different kind of Christian — one you might disagree with, sure, but disagreement is just what diversity looks like. You’re still voting your values. So is he. We’re all Christians here, just called to emphasize different things.”

That is the permission slip. It works because it asks so little. You haven’t become pro-choice. You haven’t affirmed transgender ideology. You’ve simply extended charity and kindness to a fellow believer with a different emphasis. Except that in agreeing to that framing, you have done something you may not have noticed: you have taken the majority position of two billion Christians across twenty centuries and reclassified it as one team’s optional preference. Your political vote for Talarico isn’t a departure from faith. It is just a broadening of it.

But Talarico and others like him are not Christians emphasizing different things. They individuals explicitly rejecting the core convictions of the global church (two thousand years of unanimous teaching on life and sexual ethics) while cherry-picking passages about kindness and the poor, and wearing the Christian label so that defection looks like diversity.

Yes, Christianity has thousands of denominations. They disagree on baptism, church governance, worship style, eschatology, and a hundred other questions. The church has always lived with that, because it has always known the difference between secondary disagreement and primary conviction. These same thousands of traditions that cannot agree on how to baptize, how to organize a church, or what the end times will look like — they agree on this. Every one of them. The Catholic Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox and the Southern Baptist and the Church of God in Christ and the Korean Presbyterian and the Nigerian Pentecostal cannot agree on hardly anything, and yet on the sanctity of unborn life, on marriage as the union of a man and a woman, on sexual ethics within that covenant — unanimous. Across every continent. Across twenty centuries. That unanimity is not an accident and it is not cultural coincidence. When traditions that disagree on nearly everything else refuse to budge on the same things, you are looking at a load-bearing wall. The church has a word for departing from it. It is not “a different kind of Christian.” It is heresy.

Which brings us to the detail French would rather you not examine too closely. The Christians he wants you to believe Talarico is heir to — the preachers who marched from Selma, the abolitionists who risked everything to call slavery what it was, the early church fathers who built the world’s first hospitals in a Roman world that left its sick to die — every one of them would have found Talarico’s positions incoherent, if not offensive. The Black church leaders who stared down fire hoses in Birmingham did not believe God is non-binary. The abolitionists who called slavery a sin against the image of God did not believe that image only existed after birth or that it should be surgically altered in a confused adolescent. The men who died rather than recant their faith and bend the knee to the Roman Empire did not believe their pagan neighbors were simply circling the same truth by a different road.

Talarico is not the heir to that tradition. He is a man who studied how those Christians spoke, twisted a few of the words that made them credible, and is now trying to use them to advance positions every one of them would have called a betrayal of the faith.

We must see him for what he is: an Impostor.

READ MORE:

---

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.