James Talarico Questions the Texas Republican Bill Forcing a Display of the Ten Commandments in Public Schools
Joe Rogan Tells James Talarico: "You Need to Run for President"
James Talarico is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Texas. He will be running against either John Cornyn or Ken Paxton. Amazingly, recent opinion polls suggest that he could defeat either of them. If he does win, this would be the first victory for a Democrat in a state-wide race in Texas since 1994; and this would signal the beginning of the collapse of Trump's Republican Party. If they can't win in Texas . . . ?
Talarico has been a member of the Texas House of Representatives since 2018. Prior to that he was a middle school teacher. While serving as a state representative, he earned a Master of Divinity degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He has a B.A. in Government from the University of Texas and an M.A. in Education from Harvard. He was born in Round Top, Texas. His family roots in Texas go back for 8 generations to when Texas was part of Mexico.
What is most distinctive about his political career is that he cites his Christian faith and devotion to the teachings of Jesus as the prime motivation for his political service. He says that Jesus simplified God's laws as reducible to two commandments: Love God and Love Your Neighbor. He obeys the commandment to love God through his theological studies and his preaching. He obeys the commandment to love one's neighbor through his governmental service, which he sees as serving his constituents.
In contrast to his Republican colleagues in the state legislature who are devout Christians and advocates for Christian Nationalism, Talarico condemns Christian Nationalism as an unchristian denial of the teachings of Jesus. Christian Nationalism, he argues, is "worship of power, not worship of Christ." Unlike many of his Democratic colleagues who also condemn Christian Nationalism, Talarico justifies his rejection of Christian Nationalism as an expression of his Christian faith. (He laid out his general line of thinking in talking with Joe Rogan last summer, particularly in the first half of the two-and-a-half-hour interview.)
What I see here is a renewal of the debate between Roger Williams and John Winthrop, in which Talarico speaks for the Christian liberalism of Williams against the Christian illiberalism of Winthrop. As I have said in previous posts, this was the original debate between liberal America and illiberal America, and ultimately liberal America prevailed. I will argue that in this new debate, the stronger argument is still on the side of liberal America. One sign of this is that even the leading proponents of Christian Nationalism--like Douglas Wilson--cannot really defend the Christian illiberalism of Winthrop, and they actually--at least implicitly--embrace the Christian liberalism of Williams.
Talarico recognizes that he belongs to the Baptist tradition of Williams that affirms religious liberty and rejects theocracy. His grandfather was a Baptist preacher. And he often speaks about the Baptists who settled America early in the 17th century as they fled from persecution in Europe.
Williams originated the phrase "wall of separation," which was later used by Thomas Jefferson. And like Williams, Talarico argues for separation of church and state not because he's hostile to religion but because he believes the entanglement of religion and government is corrupting for both.
Talarico agrees with the proponents of Christian Nationalism in worrying about the decline of religious faith in American life. "We're conducting an experiment on humanity in real time of what happens when you take this believing species and rob it of any community to make sense of the world," he says. "I honestly believe that's why we see higher rates of anxiety and depression, especially among young people, because they're growing up in an incoherent universe." Notice that in talking about "this believing species," Talarico suggests that the desire for religious understanding is innate in human nature.
This doesn't sound like the typical Democratic politician. Indeed, Talarico admits that most people aligned with the Democratic Party don't take religion seriously, and many are actively hostile to religion. There are some exceptions. For example, the only active clergyman in the U.S. Senate is Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia and the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Martin Luther King's church. The black church has often been a spiritual influence in the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party.
But since in general Republicans are more likely than Democrats to talk about the importance of religion in America, and particularly American Christianity, you might wonder why Talarico has not joined the Republicans. His answer is that too many Republicans, particularly those in the Texas State Legislature, have mistakenly embraced Christian Nationalism and thus rejected the separation of church and state. Their mistake is in thinking that religious faith can be promoted by legal coercion. So, for example, Republican state legislators believe that legislation mandating that every public school prominently display the Ten Commandments on a poster will instill in school children a respect for God's law. What's more likely to happen, Talarico has argued, is that for many school children, this will confirm their cynical view of politically established religion as more about power than faith.
Like Williams, Talarico traces the history of this mistaken Theocratic Christianity back to the fourth century. During the first three hundred years of Christianity, the early Christians formed churches as voluntary associations of believers who never sought the political power to coercively enforce their faith. The New Testament shows that churches could punish disruptive members by excommunicating them, but there was no violent persecution of anyone for having the wrong beliefs.
But then in 312 AD, the Emperor Constatine gained control of the western part of the Roman Empire, and he converted to Christianity in the same year. He made Christianity a legally recognized religion. And he sponsored councils of Christian church leaders to settle theological disputes. Most notably, he called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to resolve a dispute over the doctrine of the Trinity. That council approved the Nicene Creed as the preeminent statement of Christian orthodoxy, and anyone who denied any part of that creed was declared a heretic. Then in 393, Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Empire.
From that point on, the Catholic Church could call on political rulers to punish heretics, apostates, and unbelievers--anyone who denied Christian orthodoxy as defined by the Church. After the Protestant Reformation, the Church declared all Protestants heretics who should be persecuted. Even many of the Protestant churches persecuted Catholics or other Protestants who were not regarded as orthodox. Only those Christians like the Baptists resisted this tradition of persecution and argued for religious liberty and toleration of religious pluralism, which they saw as expressed in the teachings of Jesus and in the rest of the New Testament.
But while Theocratic Christianity has no grounding in the New Testament, it can find some support in the Old Testament, particularly in the Mosaic law that governed the Hebrew people from their exodus from Egypt to the kingship of Saul. Indeed, the very word "theocracy" is the translation of the Greek word theocratia that Josephus (the first century Roman Jewish historian) coined as the term for ancient Israel as ruled by the Mosaic laws.
But the point made by those in the Baptist tradition--from Williams to Talarico--is that Jesus and New Testament Christianity supersede the Hebrew Law of the Old Testament. Jesus simplifies the Law into two commandments: Love God and Love Your Neighbor. And he makes clear that the punishment of sinners comes not from any earthly government in this life but from God in the next life.
But still, the proponents of theocracy today like the Christian Nationalists say that God wants governments to punish sinners, and He's particularly angry about two kinds of sin--abortion and homosexuality. As Talarico observes, the Christian Nationalists are obsessed with sexual misconduct that impedes reproduction--abortion, homosexuality, and perhaps also transgenderism. It is remarkable, however, as Talarico says, that Jesus says nothing about these issues.
Not only does Jesus say nothing about abortion, but there is also nothing clearly said about abortion anywhere in the Bible. (I have written previously about the abortion debate.) Now, of course, the Bible does condemn murder; and the opponents of abortion insist that abortion is clearly murder. That assumes, however, that an embryo or a fetus is a "person" because human life begins at conception. But the Bible never says that. And for thousands of years, particularly in the common law tradition, it was assumed that life begins later in a pregnancy, perhaps at "quickening," when the mother feels movement in her womb. Moreover, it's clear that most of the opponents of abortion don't believe life begins at conception because they make exceptions to the ban on abortions for cases such as rape, incest, or saving the life of the mother. These exceptions make no sense if all abortion is murder.
The Bible does have a few somewhat obscure references to homosexuality. (I have written previously about homosexuality.) Two references are part of the Mosaic law: "You will not have intercourse with a man as you would with a woman. This is disgusting" (Lev. 18:22). Also: "The man who has intercourse with a man in the same way as with a woman, they have done a hateful thing together; they will be put to death" (Lev. 20:13). Notice that nothing is said about lesbians. Are they free from condemnation? Notice also that this is a capital crime. And indeed homosexuality has been a capital crime in Western European and American law until early in the 19th century. It's strange, therefore, that the Christian Nationalists have not argued for reinstating this Biblical law for executing homosexuals. Is this too extreme even for them?
The one passage in the New Testament that seems to refer to homosexuality is in the first chapter of Pauls Letter the Romans. He speaks of God's retribution against the Gentiles, who should have known God as revealed in nature's laws, but they turned away from Him. "That is why God abandoned them to degrading passions: why their women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural practices: and the men, in a similar way, too, giving up natural relations with women, are consumed with passion for each other, men doing shameful things with men and receiving in themselves due reward for their perversion" (Romans 1:26-27).
Notice that here Paul includes lesbians, unlike the Leviticus passage. But notice also that unlike the Mosaic law in Leviticus, Paul does not say that they should be legally punished with death. Instead, they are left to suffer the self-inflicted punishment that comes from living in their perversion. This fits with the rest of the New Testament, which condemns the sins of disobeying God's laws, but does not identify these sins as crimes that should be punished by government.
The Hebrew government in the Old Testament was a theocracy because it punished sins as if they were crimes. But in the New Testament, government has the authority to punish crimes that inflict physical harm on people, but it does not have the authority to punish sins that inflict no harm on others. (See Romans 12:14-13:7. I have written about this previously.)
Actually, even the advocates of Theocratic Christian Nationalism recognize, at least implicitly, the distinction between sins and crimes, and that a government that punishes sins as if they were crimes is tyrannical. In other words, they are not truly theocrats because they are on the side of Williams' Christian liberalism rather than Winthrop's Christian illiberalism.
In my next post, I will show that to be the case for one of the most influential of the Christian Nationalists--Douglas Wilson.
No comments:
Post a Comment