It’s amazing how much mileage the two-word construct “Presbyterian seminarian” has gotten in the Texas Senate race.
That is invariably how James Talarico, the state representative who is the Democratic nominee and hoping to upset Republican nominee and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, is described when the left wants to burnish the man’s religious bona fides.
OK, they’ll admit: He’s said some strange things like “God is nonbinary,” but for real — he’s a man of faith, just like Texans want. A little kooky at times, but still such an ardent Christian that he studied the faith!
And with each passing day, we learn precisely how he studied and — most importantly — who he studied it with.
If you haven’t heard the name Jim Rigby, believe you me, I wish I hadn’t either. Woke pastors are an irritant and every time I’m exposed to the guy, my ears hurt like your eyes do when you walk into a smoke-filled room. But I get exposed to this guy on the regular, reader, so you’ll have to suffer with me as I continue to expound on his heresies — and why it matters in the Texas Senate race.
The latest heresy, which was unearthed by Christian outlet Protestia and publicized Monday, has Rigby, who is Talarico’s pastor, saying that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. During an Easter sermon. Where they were supposed to be celebrating Jesus rising from the dead.
Totally normal stuff. “Presbyterian seminarian,” remember!
“What lies underneath, what’s too big, what’s too deep, what’s too mysterious. But we’re human beings and we want to make it manageable. So we want to try to move the mystery into magic because you can control magic,” Rigby said during the 2023 sermon.
“It’s very possible that Jesus rose from the dead. It’s also possible the body was stolen, right?” he continued. “I mean, that’s possible. It’s possible the disciples stole it to keep the Romans from getting a hold of it. It’s possible the Romans took it because they’re afraid of a resurrection on the third day.
“The question I want to ask you is: do you want to live your life based on a maybe? Do you want to just bet your entire life on what somebody a long time ago told you because somebody told him that? Or is it possible that the symbols are calling you to a deeper understanding of the human condition?”
If you’re a Christian of any regular stripe, the answer is that yes, you want to bet your life on that resurrection, because that’s literally the substitutional sacrifice and the victory over sin that almost every form of regular Christianity upholds.
But no, according to Rigby — it’s just enough to have a symbol, or something.
“Light is not stronger than darkness. Darkness is essential to understanding your life. Maybe Jesus rose from the dead, but maybe not,” he said.
“Maybe the person I’m sitting next to is as close as I need to get. Religious symbols — if they’re healthy — are not symbols of something that happened. They’re symbols of the principles by which everything happens, if that makes any sense.
“I think it’s this: We need to see the sacred in every being on the face of the planet. I think animals, too, plants. But if we just love each other, wouldn’t that be good? But when we make the resurrection about Jesus, that doesn’t happen when it’s just about Jesus. The symbols were never meant to be taken literally. The resurrection is a symbol of trying to tell us that the sacred is everywhere. When it’s literal, you lose something.”
This is the kind of patter you usually hear from someone in the throes of an episode where they mixed psilocybin mushrooms and cough syrup, but apparently it passes for an Easter sermon at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas:
Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico’s pastor (PCUSA) preaches during his Easter sermon that Jesus NEVER rose bodily from the dead and that he does NOT believe in a literal resurrection. pic.twitter.com/Z6ZH7hMJXg
— Protestia (@Protestia) September 21, 2026
Well, at least it definitely wasn’t a “traditional message.” He got that much right. And as he pointed out at the top, he’s been spreading this message for years — so much so that in 2015 and 2018, at the very least, he made lengthy Facebook posts defending the position that just because Jesus rose from the dead doesn’t mean he’s divine.
“I asked my accusers if they would also follow Hitler if he were to rise for from the dead,” he wrote in one post from 2015, published Christmas Day no less. This accurately sums up why the resurrection matters to the whole framework of Christianity: Hitler didn’t rise from the dead, Jesus did. You idiot, you proved your accusers’ own point for them.
Now, look, I understand that trying to warn voters that what a candidate’s pastor says is a bad augury about them is a fool’s errand. We’re almost 20 years on from the Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama red flag and nobody seems to have learned from that.
The thing is, the two-word construct used to pitch Obama’s experience before seeking a seat in the Senate was “community organizer.” With Talarico, this matters quite a bit more because we hear the constant patter about him being a “Presbyterian seminarian,” presumably to woo faith voters. Yet here’s what Talarico himself has said about the faith he says he represents:
- “God is not a Christian.”
- “[My campaign manager] and I talk about how Judaism is Season 1 of the show, Christianity is Season 2, and Islam is Season 3. I’m Season 2 — the most violent season. My religion has done more damage to both of those religions than they’ve done to each other.”
- “Modern science recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes — in fact, there are six.”
- “We caught some attention by letting an atheist join our church in the 2000s, and then in the 2010s, again stirred some controversy by housing an undocumented family — a mother and son who were close to being deported by ICE. And so again, the idea that Christianity is just another word for causing trouble.”
- Hindus and atheists are prone to being “more Christlike than some Christians.”
Talarico himself says that he doesn’t agree with everything that Rigby says, although would you attend a church like this? From a New York Times piece on Rigby in June, titled, “Are Texans Ready for Talarico’s Kind of Christianity?” In short, this guy makes Jeremiah Wright sound like Billy Graham:
Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service. He does not use the word “Lord,” because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God, he said. For that matter, he added, he does not much care for the word “God.” He uses it on occasion, he said, but he tries to use synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”
In his sermon that morning, he had referred to “the creative impulse of the universe,” which “can be called God, but it doesn’t have to be called God.”
Gosh, you’d think a “Presbyterian seminarian” would know enough to walk right out of a church like that, especially given that it seems to be made up of atheists and universalists.
This is all part of the package, people. The American left isn’t only trying to sell James Talarico, they’re trying to sell the rest of us on the morality of Christian apostasy. We shouldn’t buy either.
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