Is James Talarico Really a Christian X-Ray?

When all is said and done, history is not likely to remember David French as a great political commentator or a particularly insightful opinion journalist or even as a good man who endured considerable public opprobrium for taking principled but unpopular positions on important issues. Indeed, history is not likely to remember David French at all. Like most of us, he will be entirely forgotten by all but a handful of friends and family.

That’s not to say, however, that French is unimportant or irrelevant to the broader public discourse in the West today. He actually matters a great deal—albeit not for any of his own intellectual contributions. Rather, French is important because his personal/professional/moral arc demonstrates the pervasiveness and perniciousness of the moral misconceptions that dominate our civilization and help explain its proverbial “fall from grace.”

Last week, French used his prominent Sunday morning New York Times column to shill for James Talarico, the Democrat running to unseat incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn in Texas. Like Beto O’Rourke and Wendy Davis before him, Talarico is the “great blue hope,” the dream candidate who Democrats believe will smash the Republican stranglehold on the state and return it to its partisan roots. And like O’Rourke and Davis before him, Talarico shares far more in common with coastal Democratic elites than he does with his fellow Texans, which is to say that he faces a difficult uphill climb. Enter David French. French thinks that because Talarico is an open and outspoken Christian who graduated from a Presbyterian seminary, he has the opportunity not just to reconcile Texas and the Democratic Party but to reconcile the Democratic Party and Christianity as well. “If the primary American divide is between decent and indecent,” French wrote, then “Talarico shines.” He continued:

Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian, he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years....