James Talarico and Progressive Protestantism

I’ve been watching with interest the rise of James Talarico. His victory in the Texas Democratic Senate primary earlier this month brought his statements about Christianity to national attention.

A former middle school teacher and seminarian who is also a member of a liberal congregation of the PCUSA, Talarico symbolizes the ongoing efforts of liberal Protestants to impact American politics. He routinely references Jesus and claims that Christianity supports liberal Democratic talking points: LGBTQ issues, abortion, open immigration, and tax and spend social welfare. All of this occurs in the context of what he calls a politics of love. 

This is not your momma’s social-gospel liberalism. It’s a newer version that has emerged primarily in the western United States over the past five decades. It’s a riff on the Western progressivism that combined environmentalism, radical individualism, identity politics, and a kind of vision-quest pagan spirituality. In many ways, this new progressive Protestantism is Burning Man meets Jesus, or, better, Jesus is Burning Man.

Talarico’s various dictums (“God is non-binary”) are what you expect from a young seminarian (he has finished an MA in Theological Studies and is working to complete an M-Div.). Like a child learning to talk, he utters them without reference to the broader language and culture they represent. This is not to say Talarico is unaware, but that his statements reflect a broader liberal theological framework that took root in places like the Claremont School of Theology, which was sponsored by the United Methodist Church.

Let me offer two quick examples: Talarico attends St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin. The church lists the five points of progressive Christianity on its website. These five core values stem from Progressive Christianity, an organization originally founded in 1994 by the Episcopal priest James Adams. In 2006, the United Church of Christ minister Fred Plumer became the president of the organization, which is now headquartered between Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Since Talarico won the Democratic primary, access to Progressive Christianity’s website has been spotty at best. 

A quick comparison between the principles of the Burning Man Project and Progressive Christianity shows how closely aligned they are. Burning Man’s principle of radical inclusion parallels Progressive Christianity’s call to “seek community that is inclusive of all people.” Burning Man’s principle of immediacy, which includes “contact with a natural world exceeding human powers,” becomes Progressive Christianity’s recognition that “the Spirit moves in beneficial ways in many faith traditions.” This is the framework that informs St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and shapes Talarico’s view of the world.  

A second example is Talarico’s claim that different religious traditions are different languages to describe a singular divine reality. Talarico is popularizing John Hick’s model of religious pluralism. Hick spent fourteen years at Claremont Graduate School before retiring to Birmingham, England in 1992. Now named Claremont Graduate University, it is a separate institution from Claremont School of Theology, but both are located in the greater Los Angeles area.

For Hick, the infinite is only partially glimpsed through religious experiences. These experiences and the beliefs generated by them within world religions all point toward what Hick calls the “Real.” In other words, religious traditions are languages that attempt to describe the divine using metaphors. By getting behind these metaphors (including the metaphor of God incarnate), one can glimpse how each tradition offers a path from self-centeredness to other-centeredness—a path of love. Such is Talarico’s politics of love.

These two examples only scratch the surface of the theological framework behind Western progressive Christianity, and they form part of a larger network of institutions that advance the same ideas. Claremont School of Theology became ground zero for a new liberal theology known as process theology. John B. Cobb, Jr. (d. 2024) and his best student, David Ray Griffin (d. 2022) started the Center for Process Studies at Claremont in 1973 (since then it has moved to Portland, Oregon). 

Another scholar who embraced parts of process theology was Marcus Borg. Borg may be best remembered for his role in the Jesus Seminar in 1985. This group of scholars argued that only a small percentage of the words and deeds of Jesus in the Gospels were authentic. Upon his retirement from Oregon State in 2007, he became the canon theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, where he continued to write until his death in 2015. Progressive Christianity advocates for Borg’s theology, which is also advanced by the Marcus J. Borg Foundation in Oregon.

While Talarico’s St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church only mentions progressive Christianity, pulling that thread opens up a network of seminaries and centers that have advanced a new vision of liberal Protestantism since the 1970s. To this line-up, one might add the Methodist scholar Schubert Ogden (d. 2019). An advocate of process theology, Ogden taught most of his career at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology before retiring in 1993. Cobb and Ogden influenced an entire generation of United Methodist ministers in the West. 

Although progressive theology was connected to Dallas in the eighties and early nineties, most of these organizations are now based on the West Coast, with a high concentration in Oregon. From their locations, they have reflected and reinforced the liberal politics one now finds in California, Oregon, and Washington. 

By examining the common characteristics of this network, one can discern the theological framework that undergirds Talarico’s politics of love. Its primary components are a view of God as empathetic love who suffers and grows with the world, a view of Christ as a special embodiment of this love, and an eco-spirituality that seeks to follow Christ in encountering God and practicing the inclusion of everyone. 

Back in 2006, Jim Rigby, the pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, let avowed atheist journalism professor Robert Jensen join the church on the basis of building bridges. Reading Jensen’s defense of joining the church, it’s clear why Rigby thought it was fine. In Jensen’s creed, God means the “mystery of the world,” and Christ is “a way into that mystery.” The Holy Spirit is the connection to other humans. 

After an initial skirmish with the PCUSA, Jensen was ultimately allowed to be a member. He explained to Sojourners that his claim in his book All My Bones Shake that “more than ever we need to serve the One True Gods” meant a commitment to the people we love and to universal values. Those are “gods.” 

It’s not that this new version of Christianity has evacuated theology from the faith. Rather, the theology has been fundamentally altered to make way for a rather expansive reinterpretation of the Protestant dictum that the Church should always be reforming.

This progressive view takes “God is love” as its starting point. While God has a stable character, God’s love is sympathetic and responsive. God’s love changes in light of God’s experience with humans. God is divine empathy who suffers and feels deeply the suffering of others. A God who changes is a God whose existence is contingent on the world. Therefore, God is not immutable, or even all-powerful or all-knowing in the traditional sense. God only knows the present and past, not the future, because it’s not knowable. The future is open to the choices and actions of everyone. 

God’s power is the power of persuasive love. God seeks to direct and partner with humans to bring about an ideal world. In his book Jesus’ Abba, Cobb views God as a divine parent whose love seeks to guide, influence, and relate to man. Cobb ultimately decides that he must “re-gender God,” by which he means claiming that God is male and female so that “pronouns of both types will become natural references.” It’s an easy move from this to Talarico’s claim that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is non-binary.” 

Process theologians also reject the traditional Christian doctrine of creation from nothing. In their telling, God brings order to chaos. God directs an evolutionary process from the simple to the complex. God is the one who shapes the world, which becomes the body of God, so that God is in the world and the world is in God. Captured by the term panentheism, God does not become the world (pantheism) but is interconnected with the world and grows as the world grows. Since God is present in all things, there must be a respect for the environment and the life of animals.

While Scripture is an authority insofar as it is a record of religious experiences and practices, it must be interpreted through myth and metaphor. The term myth underscores the use of symbols to convey ideas and values. Marcus Borg argued for what he called a historical-metaphorical approach, in which one extracts the meaning from the stories by seeing them as symbolic. When Talarico talks about Mary’s consent as supporting a pro-abortion position, he has in mind the way Mary’s story functions as a symbol for human experience. This interpretation does not require the historical veracity of the story, only its symbolic significance in pointing toward something about life and experience.

As one might imagine, there is no traditional doctrine of incarnation. Instead, the term incarnation points toward the way the human person of Jesus embodies God’s love and intentionality. Jesus of Nazareth is not “God in the flesh,” but a human who has consented to God’s love and acts on that love in the world. Some process thinkers, like David Ray Griffin, will go so far as to claim that Jesus is a unique embodiment of God’s loving presence. One can speak of love being incarnate in Jesus, but this is not the same as God becoming flesh. 

This perspective on Jesus focuses on his words and deeds. Jesus’ prophetic voice is his using God’s love to critique the Roman empire and all forms of empire (including the American empire). Jesus’ death has value as an example of love willing to be martyred for the oppressed. In other words, Jesus is the greatest example of human existence.

God does not “save” in the traditional sense. God persuades by his presence in all things, but the outcome is left to the myriad choices of individuals over time. In this framework, Christianity is reduced to a set of practices determined by the community in dialogue with the words and deeds of Jesus. As Marcus Borg once put it in an essay collection called The Emerging Christian Way, “The belief-centered paradigm is the single biggest reason for the decline of mainline denominations over the past 40 years.” Instead, Borg calls for a transformation-centered paradigm in which one is changed by participating in God’s presence and following Jesus.

Back in 2011, Anthony Sacramone criticized CNN in First Things for bringing Borg on to explain Christianity. He wondered: 

The mission of the Church centers on the cultivation of an inclusive community in which all are welcome to follow Jesus. The Church’s mission in the world is through prophetic critique of all forms of coercive power (empire, war, etc.) and a political activism that seeks to build an inclusive community. 

While the way of Jesus remains a guide, ethical decisions are directly related to determining good or bad consequences. When John Cobb wrote Matters of Life and Death, he argued for euthanasia, gay marriage, and other liberal talking positions on the basis of loving consequences. He wrote, “Love can usually be expressed best by allowing that other human being to realize his or her own projects so far as these do not prevent other persons from realizing their projects also.” Cobb’s position is yet another version of Joseph Fletcher’s situational ethics in which an act is ethical through its loving consequence in the immediate context. 

Empathetic love means allowing a person to take her own life before succumbing to Alzheimer’s, even when the emotional trauma to family members may be immense. This is because the consequences of suffering and lack of quality of life are worse than taking one’s own life or the emotional consequences for the family. In this sense, death is an expression of God’s compassion and our compassion.  

Such is the theological framework behind Talarico’s politics of love. I am not claiming that Talarico holds every one of these positions. I rather doubt Talarico has a grasp of process theology, but these days, process theology goes under the warm and inviting description of “relational theology.” Since God grows and experiences suffering, God enters into real relationship with human persons, or so the theology goes. This relational theology is being advanced by Progressive Christianity. Like the Wizard of Oz, this new form of liberal Protestantism resides behind the curtain of Talarico’s claims. The connections to the church he attends are clear. 

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Richard John Neuhaus set off a firestorm with his editorial “Is Mormonism Christian?” He asked the question because members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) were actively working with First Things and the Institute on Religion and Public Life to advance certain moral positions. Neuhaus found much to appreciate among the LDS, but he wondered “what it means to be Christian if one rejects the two-thousand-year history of what in fact is Christianity.” Even though one cannot explain the history of Mormonism apart from the unique features of Protestant Christianity, one can ask whether the LDS have gone so far down a path that they stand outside Christian tradition. The same can be asked of this new form of Western liberal Protestantism Talarico represents. 

H. Richard Niebuhr became known for his description of theological liberalism in the 1930s: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” An updated version in light of Western progressive Christianity might be: A non-binary God shaped a world to grow alongside of and suffer with so that innocent victims could realize their selfhood in an inclusive community (a kin-dom) of all identities by following God’s empathic love in Jesus.

Progressive Christianity is certainly a product of the Protestant mind. It uses the same basic language. But the meaning applied to the common vocabulary is not the same. If Jesus is Burning Man, who really needs Jesus? All we are left with is experiencing the divine in a community that allows us to work for a better future as we together challenge “empire” and preserve the environment. I can see why becoming religiously unaffiliated is so attractive. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Richard John Neuhaus, “Is Mormonism Christian?”

Anthony Sacramone, “Why CNN Still Can’t Speak Christian”

Michael Schwartzentruber (editor), The Emerging Christian Way: Thoughts, Stories, and Wisdom for a Faith of Transformation