Begging your pardon, but you will need cowboy boots for the Texas U.S. Senate race between James Talarico and Ken Paxton. As a character in the short story, “Roadside Resurrection,” says, “I’ve been to three county fairs, two goatropings, and one horse breeding, and I ain’t never seen something like that.”
Rodney Kennedy
The evangelicals are stirred up over Talarico. Their outsized reliance on vitriolic rhetoric smells of political mistrust, animosity, and outrage. You need a small guidebook to get your bearings, know where you are, and what claims are being made. In the evangelical mind, Talarico — a Presbyterian Church (USA) seminarian— has no right to say anything about faith, the Bible, and Jesus.
But Evangelicals have a strange relationship with the Bible. Once known as “the Good News,” the Bible, for many conservative evangelicals, has become a blunt instrument, a weapon in the cultural war wielded by Christian crusaders.
I can’t recall an election with more rhetoric about the Bible. Evangelicals are waving the Bible as a sign of outrage. “Bible,” in this case, means usage as a symbol. The best image of how the Bible is used was provided by President Trump as he held up a copy of the Bible at the Episcopal Church where he had sent police to disband a peaceful protest.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick sounded the alarm: “It’s James Talarico who decided to bring the Bible into this election. And let me tell you, that’s not a Bible I’ve ever read.” Patrick makes an absurd claim of Talarico reading a different “Bible.” He can’t fathom the thought of “truth” different from his coming from biblical texts. This underscores the evangelical sense of ownership of the Bible.
The Bible, in the evangelical mind, serves as a sacred image, a talisman, a charm against evil spirits to be waved around and shouted about in times of crisis. If an evangelical believes something is wrong in America, he also assumes the Bible will agree with him. Evangelicals seem to believe the act of waving the Bible in the air is sufficient proof of how right they are about everything.
Evangelicals are aghast at the idea of Talarico interpreting the Bible. They are convinced he is not a “man of the Bible.” Like their fundamentalist precursors, they can’t imagine unbelief originating in their tribe. Today’s evangelical can only assume the same and maybe worse for Talarico. It’s as if they are unaware of 20 centuries of biblical interpretation not related to fundamentalist and evangelical belief.
Al Mohler claims that “Talarico wants to stand on the Sermon on the Mount and selected texts including the parable of the good Samaritan, while quickly directing attention away from the rest of the Bible.” I think Mohler unwittingly gives Talarico a compliment. I can’t think of a higher ground on which to stand than the Sermon on the Mount, which is the form of Jesus’s life.
Paxton has sounded the alarm by saying that “Talarico threatens everything we hold dear.” I think he’s telling an accidental truth. The problem with what MAGA holds dear is that the values they hold dear are not shaped by the gospel. By relocating American politics to the Bible, MAGA evangelicals recast their political opponents as anti-God, anti-patriotic, wholly evil, devoid of humanity, and dangerous.
And Robert Jeffress claims Talarico is “twisting the Scripture.” That is a mouthful for the preacher who has managed to twist a “rapture” out of the Bible. Denny Burke also thinks Talarico is “completely antithetical to Scripture.” By mixing Bible and nation, these leaders have all become the worst kind of Christian Nationalists.
Photo by viswanath muddada on Unsplash
When evangelicals make outrageous charges against Talarico, it exposes a weakness. They don’t use such excessive language against every politician, only politicians who make Christian claims and biblical claims. Above all, though, evangelicals can’t stand to be told they don’t have the only truth contained in the Bible.
Evangelicals have changed the meaning of “character.” It no longer means moral integrity but the political power to carry out evangelical goals. The previous evangelical love of moral character, truth, and integrity has crashed into a limit: evangelical love of political power. These former lovers of the Ten Commandments, the Holiness Code of Leviticus, and the precepts of truth and justice have been driven to deny the necessity of integrity and morality in our nation’s leaders.
MAGA evangelicals don’t care if Paxton has lied, stolen, and committed adultery; they only care if he can be positioned as better than Talarico. The only recourse open to evangelicals is to make Talarico look as if he is worse than Paxton. And this is why they are willing to fabricate charges. With a “bad” candidate, the only recourse is to make Talarico look worse. So they reach for the most awful charges you can bring against a fellow Christian: blasphemer and heretic.
“Here’s the truth,” said Senior Pastor of Lakepointe Church Josh Howerton. “I would rather vote for almost anyone else who is going to at least advocate for conservative policies over a literal heretic who wears my faith like a skin suit, advocates for policies that harm children, endorses immorality and generally harm society.”
And Denny Burk, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, thinks Talarico is the worst kind of heretic: He accuses Talarico of “encouraging people to believe in a false god that looks nothing like the God of the Bible.”
When the smoke clears in Texas, perhaps evangelical rhetoric that consists entirely of vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, and is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism will be revealed as “bearing false witness.”
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio — which is an American Baptist Church — for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is out now from Cascade Books.
