God Is Non-Binary and Other Things That Shouldn't Be Controversial
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If you've spent any time in evangelical spaces, or really, any time on the internet, you've probably noticed that the fastest way to get labeled a heretic these days is to say something that's been basic Christian theology for centuries.
That's what happened to James Talarico.
Who Is James Talarico?
Talarico is a Texas state representative who won the Democratic Senate primary last week, beating Jasmine Crockett for the nomination. Melissa has been following him since early last year. Matthew was pulling for Crockett. (He thinks she had more experience, and there's a larger conversation there about race and gender and electability that we touched on but didn't fully unpack. We might come back to that.)
But once Talarico won, the attacks started immediately. And they weren't about policy. They were about his faith.
The "Blasphemous" Checklist
A Christian Post article dropped listing six supposedly blasphemous theological takes from Talirico. The Senate Republicans' official account shared his quotes as if they were self-evidently damning. Conservative blogs started calling him a false teacher, a false prophet, a fake Christian.
So let's look at what actually got people so upset.
"God is non-binary." As in, God is neither male nor female. As in, what the vast majority of Christians have been taught in Sunday School since forever. God doesn't have a gender. God is spirit. That's not progressive theology. That's just...theology. The non-binary thing is a non-starter. A non-issue. The only reason it gets traction is because people hear "non-binary" and immediately connect it to transgender issues, which is the lever that gets the base riled up every single time.
"Christ is the immigrant deported without due process. Christ is the senior deprived of their social security benefits. Christ is the protester kidnapped in a military vehicle by plainclothes officers." The Senate Republicans posted this quote to show that Talarico is dangerous. Read it again. Jesus was a refugee. He was an exile. He cared for the poor, the disabled, the marginalized. He was arrested by the state and executed. How is identifying Christ with the vulnerable a controversial take? That's Matthew 25.
Atheists can be more Christ-like than Christians. Talarico said on a podcast with Al Hunt and James Carville that some of his atheist and non-Christian colleagues in the Texas legislature are more Christ-like than some of his fellow legislators who claim to be Christian. He said it's about how you treat other people. We know people like this. Melissa knows some atheists who act more Christ-like than most of the church people she has been around. The idea that someone outside the faith can embody the values of Jesus better than someone inside it isn't heresy. It's an observation that Jesus himself made — the Good Samaritan, the Roman centurion, the Syrophoenician woman. Over and over, it's the outsiders who get it.
The temple-flipping speech. In his victory speech, Talarico compared his campaign to Jesus walking into the seat of power and flipping the tables of injustice. The Christian Post writer called this framing the gospel in "Marxist economic terms." We had to stop and define Marxism on the episode because, as we've noted before, most people who throw that word around don't actually know what it means. But here's the thing — Talarico's point was that when the powerful few at the top hurt those at the bottom, you don't just sit in your room and pray. You walk into the system and challenge it. That's not Marx. That's the Gospel of John, chapter 2.
The "Counterfeit Faith" Accusation
A blog called Mere Orthodoxy wrote that the problem isn't Talarico bringing his faith into politics, it's that he's bringing "a counterfeit" that would be "completely unrecognizable to the global and historic church."
We pushed back on this hard. Who gets to decide what the "global and historic church" believes? Because if you actually read the history, the full history, not just Acts to Reformation to 1800s revivalism, you find that Christianity has always been broader, messier, and more diverse than any one tradition wants to admit. There are a thousand to fifteen hundred years of church history that most evangelical churches just skip right over.
An article in The Intelligencer pointed out exactly this. Daniel K. Williams, a historian, noted that Talarico's positions are fully in sync with his own Presbyterian (PC-USA) congregation and seminary. His home church, St. Andrew's Presbyterian in Austin, openly supports reproductive rights and affirms LGBTQ inclusion. The writer of the article said these views would be familiar to millions of Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Unitarians, and others.
But here's the kicker. Williams also noted that many evangelicals are "only dimly aware of liberal Protestant theology and lack a theological category for it." So they don't engage with it. They just label it "not real Christianity" and move on.
Sound familiar? If you've ever had a pastor rail against "progressive Christianity" without ever defining what it actually is, you know exactly what we're talking about.
The Gatekeeping Problem
This is what really got under our skin. The whole thing is theological gatekeeping. Country club church, as Melissa called it. Where in the Bible does it say we have membership rolls that dictate who gets in?
One of the attacks against Talarico was that his pastor allowed a self-proclaimed atheist to join the church. Think about that for a second. Someone shows up and says, "I don't believe, but I want to be here. I want to participate." And the criticism is that the church let them in? What is the church for, if not for that person?
The article listed six things Talarico is supposedly wrong about and labeled each one "dumb and blasphemous." They even went after his pastor. That's the checklist mentality. If you don't hit every mark on our list, you're out. You're a heretic. You're going to hell.
But here's what we keep coming back to: if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you love God, you love your neighbor, you exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, you live a life as closely aligned to Jesus as possible, do the details of where you land on two or three contested issues really override all of that?
We don't think so.
The Irony of It All
The people calling Talarico a false teacher are the same people who say theology should inform politics, until someone's theology leads to different political conclusions than theirs. Then suddenly it's "keep your faith out of politics" or "he's just using Christianity for his agenda."
Meanwhile, the entire Republican platform has been built on a religious base for decades. The moral majority. Anti-abortion. Anti-LGBTQ. That's the voting bloc. And if you remove those wedge issues, including the transgender panic they manufacture around roughly 1 percent of the population, people might start looking at actual policy. They might realize they're not voting in their own interest.
That's the real threat Talarico represents. Not bad theology. A different theology: one that calls out the hypocrisy, one that asks uncomfortable questions, one that reads the same Bible and reaches different conclusions.
Where We Landed
We referenced Matthew 7:15-20 on the episode, the passage about knowing false prophets by their fruits. If Talarico's fruits are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and understanding, then by what measure is he a wolf?
Jesus spent the entire Sermon on the Mount teaching about loving your enemies, giving to the poor, not judging others, and avoiding religious hypocrisy. And then at the end, he warns about false prophets. The "bad fruit" he describes? Hypocrisy. Injustice. Exploitation. Self-righteousness. The focus is on behavior and character, not on whether someone checks every box on a doctrinal checklist.
Jesus's harshest words were never aimed at people with different interpretations. They were aimed at religious leaders who used God's name to accumulate power. The Pharisees. The ones who burdened people with rules while neglecting justice and mercy.
That's worth sitting with.
As always, we're not theologians. We're two people reading, thinking, and trying to figure this out. If something we said resonates — or if you disagree — we'd love to hear from you.