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Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico is rapidly building a national profile for his brand of progressive Christianity — leveraging viral media appearances to promote a left-leaning interpretation of the faith. Earlier this week, he visited The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to argue that abortion should be deemphasized by Christians because Jesus never mentioned it in the Gospels.
Speaking of the Christian Right, Talarico said, “They convinced a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage. Two issues that aren’t mentioned in the Bible. Two issues that Jesus never talked about.”
And thanks to the controversy surrounding his appearance on The Late Show — CBS lawyers blocked the broadcast, citing fears of violating the Federal Communications Commission’s “equal time” rule, which caused millions to view it on YouTube — his left-wing Christian views went viral.
Talarico’s claim that moral concern applies only to problems explicitly named in the Gospels is, of course, absurd and contrary to millennia of Christian belief. It would sideline countless grave matters the Bible doesn’t spell out, from gambling and suicide to simony. To suggest Jesus lacked strong views on these matters, or that he was some kind of moral relativist, flatly contradicts everything we know about his character and teachings.
Indeed, Jesus’s teachings on other moral matters, such as divorce, lust, and theft, were not only explicit but uncompromising, raising the bar far beyond the law’s letter. On divorce, Jesus warned that man cannot separate what God had joined together. He equated lust with adultery and urged offenders to pluck out their own eyes if they wandered. On theft, and sin more broadly, he commanded cutting off the offending hand and casting it away.
“It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into eternal fire,” Jesus concluded.
Does this sound like someone who would be indifferent to ending the life of a baby in the womb? Talarico would have you think so.
Yet going back to the 1st century, Christians have consistently taught that abortion is morally evil. Even though Jesus didn’t mention it specifically, just as he didn’t mention suicide or simony, believers throughout the centuries have extrapolated firm positions from his clear moral guidelines, including his command to “keep the commandments,” the first of which is not to kill.
The Didache, an early Christian teaching document dating to around 70 AD, explicitly condemns abortion: “You shall not procure an abortion, nor destroy a newborn child,” it reads. Talarico’s claim that moral concern over abortion is some invention of the Christian Right plays well before audiences such as Colbert’s, who are often ignorant of Christian history and theology. But such claims crumble under even basic scrutiny.
Talarico’s Late Show appearance is merely his latest high-profile venue for pushing superficial and demonstrably false biblical interpretations. In January, on Ezra Klein’s podcast, Talarico diminished the unique primacy of Jesus, characterizing him as merely one important religious figure among many. When asked by Klein whether Christianity is truer than other religions or if they are incompatible, Talarico replied, “I believe Christianity points to the truth. I believe other religions of love point to the truth.”
One major Christian figure who would sharply disagree with this characterization of Jesus is, of course, Jesus himself. In the Gospel of John, Jesus declares, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Similarly, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus claims a unique divine sonship, saying, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
Additionally, no church father nor any major Christian thinker over two millennia believed Jesus to be anything less than God incarnate, not merely someone who “points to the truth” along with other religious figures. The only person inventing a new interpretation of the faith here is Talarico.
Perhaps Talarico’s most egregious theological claim surfaced in a clip from his 2025 interview with Joe Rogan, during which he invoked the biblical event known as the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive Jesus, to defend abortion rights.
“God asks for Mary’s consent, which is remarkable,” he says. “The angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do. And she says, if it is God’s will, let it be done. Let it be. Let it happen. … To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create.”
Here, Talarico once again bungles the basics. To begin, the angel Gabriel in Luke’s Gospel does not ask Mary for her consent to become pregnant with Jesus. He declares it as a brute fact.
“Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you,” Gabriel says to Mary. ”Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.”
The language here is imperative and definitive. There is no question implied. Suggesting that Gabriel is “asking Mary if this is something she wants to do” diminishes the profound mystery of the Annunciation to something resembling a freshman orientation skit on sex etiquette. Christians have never interpreted the Annunciation this way. To do so now is a grave distortion of the Christian tradition.
Equally misguided is the portrayal of Mary’s fiat — “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” — as an assertion of bodily autonomy rather than humble surrender to God’s will. Talarico seems to imply that without her consent, God would have imposed the Incarnation upon her, rather than extending a gracious invitation into the greatest miracle in history.
To be certain, Talarico is correct to identify Mary’s decision to surrender to God as a key moment in salvation history. Pope Benedict XVI was fond of characterizing the Annunciation as the moment “Heaven held its breath.” That God chose to make Himself dependent on a human “yes” is one of the most profound mysteries of the faith, and it partially explains why Catholics revere Mary as they do.
Talarico fundamentally errs by elevating the mere fact of Mary’s choice above her decision to make the correct one. This flawed reasoning implies that Mary’s “yes” is the moral equivalent of a hypothetical “no.” For Talarico and many Democrats, the freedom to choose supersedes any other moral good, including the nature of the choice itself. Thus, aborting Jesus would have been a morally valid exercise of personal autonomy.
Talarico’s interpretation illustrates the fundamental problem with “pro-choice” Christianity: It is forced to ignore that God came to Earth as a baby in the womb.
It’s not an insignificant detail. God could have come down in the form of a musclebound superhero, shooting through the clouds with thunderbolts in his hands — that is perhaps the choice you or I might have made to inspire obedience. But God chose instead to inspire tenderness and compassion by Incarnating as a helpless baby. He didn’t want to force us to obey His will — He wanted to change our hearts so that they might resemble His.
Among the verses progressive Christians are most fond of quoting is Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.” They justifiably cite this verse to combat bigotry of all kinds. Every human person bears the image of God and therefore deserves sacred, equal dignity — that the verse immediately proceeds to say God made them “male and female” is a matter for another day. But when it comes to human beings in the womb, just as Jesus was in Mary’s, that dignity is withheld and subordinated to the altar of “choice,” just as Talarico insists it should be.
Often, when prominent Democratic Christians speak about their faith, it seems as if they just haven’t taken the time to think things through. But with Talarico, there appears to be a dark logic at play. His relativization of Jesus on Klein’s podcast, as merely one “pointer toward the truth” among many, fits neatly with the idea of the baby Jesus being expendable. Jesus being born isn’t a big deal if other great “pointers toward the truth” walk among us.
Being an abortion-rights Christian requires willful ignorance about who Jesus is and how He came into the world. What’s left is a faith so emptied of its truth claims that it might as well never have come into existence in the first place.
Talarico’s biblical interpretations are profoundly misguided — the product of a dumbed-down, self-loathing liberal Christianity that seems to wish it never existed. How else to explain a logic that would inevitably excuse aborting its own Savior? It is incumbent upon all faithful Christians to dispel Talarico’s counterfeit Christianity. His political fortunes will doubtless suffer from his direct appeals to religious authority — the public nearly always sours on politicians who resort to theological justifications for policy positions.
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But there is more on the line here than politics. False witness endangers souls. Talarico might recall the fate Jesus promises to those who mislead the innocent.
“Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the one through whom they occur,” Jesus declares in Luke’s Gospel. “It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.”
