In a dead-heat US Senate race against Ken Paxton, Democratic state legislator James Talarico leads with Scripture, invoking his faith against Christian nationalism from the floor of the Texas House. His actions play as something new. They aren’t.

Talarico stands in a long tradition of white Christian center-left activists who have shaped American politics for nearly a century. But the work of those who came before him has been mostly obscured and then forgotten.

The religious right, with all of its God talk, adopted a vocabulary that was once central to progressive activism. Then its leaders masterfully convinced Americans that Christianity had always belonged to conservatives.   

Talarico hopes to rewrite this story. He is not dressing progressive politics in religious clothes but making a deeply Christian and historically grounded argument against the right’s version of Christianity.

“Christianity is both spiritual and political because politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors,” he has preached. Adopting language that many conservatives use, he insists that “the separation of church and state should never be mistaken for a separation of faith and politics.”

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But then he pivots. Jesus, he claims, would push Americans to embrace a radical vision of democracy, advocating for more rights, more freedoms, and more opportunities for more people.

Talarico is not trying to persuade Texans to stop being religious. He is not asking them to compartmentalize their religious beliefs. He does not want them to keep their faith under a bushel—and neither will he. He is instead trying to persuade them that their own Christianity points toward different political conclusions than those championed by politicians and preachers on the right.

A seminary student fluent in historical theology, Talarico is willing to debate issues with his fellow Christians, even those condemning him to hell. He preaches a Christianity rooted in pluralism and tolerance, and he grounds both in the Bible.

The modern Democratic Party was built in large part by religious reformers like Talarico. Franklin Roosevelt recognized the central role that Christianity could play in his efforts to construct the modern liberal state. He claimed that there was no problem social, political or economic that a “spiritual awakening” could not fix.

Talarico’s ideas would have sounded familiar in FDR’s cabinet. To translate ideology into policy, Roosevelt recruited social gospelers—veterans of the early-20th-century movement to adapt Christian teachings to the ills of industrial capitalism—for his administration. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the architect of the Social Security Act, claimed to have come to Washington to work for “God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten plain common workingmen.” Assessing FDR’s many accomplishments, the liberal Christian Century noted that “the American people find in their President a religious leader.”

Progressives’ integration of public policy with religious faith continued after World War II. Christianity proved central to multiple human-rights campaigns, to the fight to limit nuclear proliferation, to the War on Poverty, to the crusade to reconstruct immigration policy, and to the sanctuary movement. Integrating religion—usually Protestant Christianity—into national politics was for much of American history unremarkable.

That all began to change after the 1960 presidential campaign.

Having Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy at the top of the ticket forced Democratic leaders to tread more carefully around religious issues. Many Americans worried that a Catholic in the Oval Office would take orders from the Vatican and disregard core American ideas about religious liberty.

To counter these fears, Kennedy assured voters that he believed “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” He promised to be a president “whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.” 

Kennedy normalized a new conception of religion in American public life—one that tended to confine religious observance to private life, and insulate it from overt political activism. His understanding of faith and politics was in many ways the opposite of Talarico’s.

Some progressives, especially at the grass roots, refused to separate their faith from their activism. Martin Luther King Jr. made Christianity central to the work of the civil rights movement, and in the West, many of the Mexican and Filipino leaders of the farm workers’ movement integrated Catholicism into their organizing campaigns.

But as the nation diversified in the 1960s, many white Democratic leaders followed Kennedy’s lead more than King’s. They cut God out of their politics.

Campaigning in 1976, born-again Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter opted, like JFK, to compartmentalize his faith. A staunch believer in the Jeffersonian school of interpretation holding that the First Amendment had erected a high wall between church and state, he did not think his personal convictions should shape his presidency. He believed faith was more about personal morality than public policy.

At the same time, the institutions of the Christian center-left were weakening. Mainline white Protestant denominations that had once supplied much of the intellectual and organizational energy behind liberal reform entered a long period of decline.

In the 1980s, the vacuum created by Democrats’ move away from explicit faith provided an opportunity for the nascent religious right. Sensing an opportunity, conservative political operatives became ever more adept at framing their ideas—ranging from foreign policy to taxes—in the language of Christianity. They worked to persuade millions that the GOP alone stood for God and traditional American values, over against the amoral liberal tradition of secular humanism. They depicted the Democratic Party as dogmatically hostile to religion.

President Ronald Reagan understood the political utility of this move. Vast majorities of the American people remained very religious and believed that their religious ideals should shape their communities and their country. They saw the United States as exceptional. During the 1984 campaign Reagan declared, “I’ve always believed that ours is a chosen land, that it was placed here by some divine providence.”

Rather than push back on the right’s growing monopoly over religion, many leading Democrats ceded the religious terrain to Republicans, just as they had ceded the language of “family values” to the right.

Some Democratic leaders understood what was happening and tried to push the party to reclaim faith. In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama pointed to polling data showing that religious identity, or its absence, had become one of the strongest predictors of political allegiance, with religious voters overwhelmingly leaning Republican.

“I think we make a mistake,” he argued, “when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives…. We first need to understand that Americans are a religious people.”

Like Talarico, Obama observed that Democrats had allowed their opponents to “fill the vacuum” in people’s lives, “cynically” manipulating Christianity to “justify partisan ends.” Meanwhile, he contended, “secularists” and party operatives “are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.”

Obama, however, undermined his own arguments at a 2008 private campaign fundraiser in San Francisco. Previous Democratic administrations had failed rural voters, he claimed. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

With this statement, Obama seemed to prove exactly what conservatives had been saying: Progressives didn’t take faith seriously; nor did they esteem the people for whom faith was a priority.

Democrats’ indifference—and occasional hostility—to religion in recent years has been a problem for the party. Although religious adherence is declining in a relative sense in the United States, Americans remain an extraordinarily religious people. The reflexive impulse shared among many progressives to ignore this central characteristic of the American electorate has necessarily limited the range of their movement’s mass appeal. Today, Americans who identify with the Republican Party are substantially more religious than those who identify with the Democratic Party—a major frustration for politicians like Talarico.

A majority of Republicans say they pray daily, while only about a third of Democrats do. Republicans are also nearly twice as likely to regularly attend religious services. Furthermore, electoral politics remains disproportionately shaped by highly religious voters because they participate at higher rates and are concentrated in key states—like Texas.

But some progressives, rather than follow the precedent established by Kennedy, have adopted the precedent established by King. They are reintegrating faith with mainstream Democratic politics.

Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, the pastor of King’s former church, has carried the old Christian progressive tradition into the US Senate. “I’m driven by the values in my faith,” he recently told an interviewer. “Love, truth-telling, justice-making, compassion, empathy, looking into the eyes of your neighbor and seeing a glimpse of your own humanity—that’s what drives my work.”

Warnock champions universal Medicare for all as a biblical mandate, and claims that the real war on Christianity is the conservative offensive against caring for all of God’s people and His creation.

Conservatives, in contrast, continue to claim the mantle of God and to paint progressives as hostile to people of faith. Donald Trump, although not personally very religious, promised during the 2024 campaign to champion a “Christian” policy agenda and even to establish a task force against “anti-Christian bias,” which he launched a few weeks into his presidency.

While progressives like Warnock can cite Scripture chapter and verse to support their political views, the majority of liberal political figures have had little success winning over religious voters. In 2024, 85 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, as did 64 percent of Hispanic Protestants, 59 percent of white Catholics, and 57 percent of non-evangelical white Protestants. Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, received the most support from Black Protestants (83 percent)—and, tellingly, from Americans with no religious affiliation (72 percent).

This is the problem Talarico is trying to solve. He understands that for him to win in a state like Texas, religion must be central to politics. He also recognizes that Democrats already possess a successful model for integrating faith and progressive activism: It exists in the Black church tradition and in older versions of progressive activism.

But infusing his campaign with faith has not been easy. Not only does Talarico have to win over those progressives who would rather keep God-talk entirely out of politics; he also has to overcome skepticism by mainstream Christians who worry that he may hold weird or unorthodox beliefs. Ken Paxton, his scandal-ridden GOP opponent, has christened him “Talafreako” for a reason.

Talarico has confused some voters in describing God as genderless—a claim that is not actually controversial among theologians but has furnished Paxton’s campaign with the opportunity to depict it as trans affinity run amok. He has also had to face questions about the views of his Presbyterian pastor, Jim Rigby, who seems in many ways to embody the stereotyped image of a liberal “woke” mainline preacher who can seem out of touch with many traditional people of faith.

Talarico recognizes this and has asserted that he does not see eye to eye with his pastor on all issues—stressing, for example, that he continues, unlike Rigby, to hew to the orthodox interpretation of the literal resurrection of Jesus.

Talarico has also had to challenge widely held ideas about how his faith informs specific policy positions that the Christian right has long prioritized, like opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Rather than running away from the Bible on these issues, Talarico leans in. Like Warnock, he relies on Scripture to explain his views. He regularly shows that the Bible is not as clear on issues like abortion or same-sex relations as some of his political opponents like to claim. Then he reminds his audiences that the Bible is very clear on questions of economic justice, turning the other cheek, and loving one’s enemy as oneself.

Talarico’s campaign rests on a simple historical claim: The American center-left once spoke confidently about God, Scripture, and moral obligation. It built institutions, won elections, and reshaped the nation while doing so. The religious right did not create faith-based politics; it simply captured a language that earlier generations of progressives had used for their own purposes.

James Talarico, like Raphael Warnock, is betting that language can be spoken again—and that indeed, in order for progressives to succeed, it must. Whether voters agree will help determine not only his political future, but also whether religion continues to be a bedrock source of support for the MAGA right.