A few months ago, I shared a video clip of a Christian Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives, James Talarico. I was impressed because he’s a rare example of a Democratic politician who leads with his Christian faith and who clearly views it as central to his worldview. He’s certainly not the only openly Christian elected Democrat, including at the national level. But it’s unusual to hear one so clearly and articulately connect their faith to their politics.
I also appreciate Talarico because he is a moderate, at least temperamentally, and I believe this too is a reflection of his faith. Most important of all, he is a rare example of a Christian politician whose actions I believe further the Christian witness. All too often, I see Christian politicians behaving in ways or supporting policies and politicians which are overtly contrary to the teachings of Jesus. Talarico is a refreshing example of someone who genuinely seems to be led by his faith, not his political priors.
So, when I heard that Joe Rogan had invited him onto his podcast, I made a point to watch out for the episode. I’ve never actually listened to an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, but I did this one. I highly recommend that you do, too. Especially if you’re a Christian or a Democrat. My reactions below the video.
Culture War Issues
The episode begins with Talarico’s position on the recent legislation in Texas to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Despite his faith, Talarico strongly opposed this legislation. It boils down to the fact that our nation was explicitly founded with the purpose of avoiding any establishment of a state religion, that a religion that finds it necessary to mandate its teachings in public institutions is doing so from a place of weakness and will be ultimately ineffective (if not counter-productive) in doing so, and that blurring the line of church and state is dangerous because if you give fallible leaders the ability to claim divine support, you give them dangerous power. I agree with all of this, but Talarico’s explanation is worth hearing as he was highly involved in this debate.
I must confess that I didn’t find his attempts to argue that the Bible can be seen to condone homosexuality or abortion as convincing, but to his credit, Talarico didn’t claim this was the only reasonable interpretation. What I do strongly agree with, though, is Talarico’s more emphatic point that of all the topics the Bible addresses, and especially that Jesus himself speaks to, these are way down the list and the Christian right’s focus on them is wildly out of proportion to the Bible’s. I am of the opinion that the biblical position on homosexuality and abortion is fairly ambiguous. I can understand how one can see condemnation in certain verses, but I also believe that an understanding of the larger context of these verses (and other verses) can make those interpretations uncertain. In contrast, the Bible and especially Jesus are unambiguous about many other issues, such as the importance of loving God and our neighbors, lifting up the poor and weak, compassionate self-sacrifice, the danger of wealth, etc. As Christians, these are the issues we should be the most confident about and take Jesus’s lead in focusing on. Talarico shares this opinion, which leads him to be most passionate about policies that, in his view, further these values that the Bible is clearest about.
He also makes an interesting point I hadn’t heard before about the abortion issue, which is that far more unborn babies die of miscarriages than abortions, and yet we see relatively little from Republicans or Christians pushing for policies that would reduce their rate of occurrence. Improved access to healthcare for the poor, education, employment protections for expectant mothers, etc. are all things that can reduce the risk of miscarriage. Yet pro-life conservatives generally oppose policies that would further these goals, as evidenced by the cuts to Medicaid in the “Big Beautiful Bill.” I’m not making a moral equivalence between miscarriage, which is almost never intentional, and abortion, which almost always is, but if the goal is saving babies, why only focus on one? This ties into a related point, which is that if the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement is to save unborn lives, they should take seriously the fact that the number of abortions has been on the rise since the first Trump administration and the subsequent overturning of Roe, in contrast to the previous downward trend. No, correlation does not prove causation, but the relationship should at least prompt some reflection and humility on the part of those convinced that government bans on abortion are actually saving lives rather than endangering them.
AI and Human Meaning
I haven’t written much about AI but I may at some point. I have thoughts, but none that I’m very confident about. In general, I agree with Talarico that AI will likely neither usher in utopia nor apocalypse but will be impactful in ways that are hard to predict - many of them negative.
Their discussion mainly focused on the meaning that humans find in productive work and meaningful careers, and the need to ensure that whatever happens with AI, we find ways of continuing to meet this human need. Universal basic income, which is a possible remedy to the potential (but still highly uncertain) mass-unemployment effect of AI may be part of the solution, but both Rogan and Talarico see it as insufficient. Talarico notes that this is where religion can play an important role in providing a foundation of meaning, and both agree that human community is critical as well.
This prompted a thought in my mind regarding the West’s competition with China. China is currently out-investing the U.S. in areas of science and technology and is far ahead of us in the manufacture of critical new technologies like renewable energy, electric vehicles, drones, batteries and much else. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is cutting its funding for science and research, propping up the fossil fuel industry, and reversing incentives for the adoption of renewable energy. One area where the U.S. still leads is in (private) AI investment, but on this it has arguably placed too much reliance. Maybe the current investments in datacenters and LLMs will inexorably lead to advances in productivity and innovation that leave other nations in the dust. But it’s not at all clear that, for all our investment, we’re so far ahead that China won’t quickly catch up or that these companies will be very profitable. So far, the trend instead appears to be rapid commoditization and relatively little differentiation between competitors, which is not a recipe for long-term business success.
I say all of this to simply point out that the U.S. is no longer the obviously dominant player in technological innovation that we once were, and our trajectory is not positive. But I do think Talarico touches on something that, if the U.S. rediscovers it, could nevertheless give us an edge over countries like China, which is the philosophical underpinning of our values of freedom, individual opportunity, private property, rule of law, etc. All of which, Talarico points out, owe a lot to Christianity’s influence on the West. Currently, our culture has forgotten much of this and is running on the fumes of that waning influence. We can see this in where so much investment goes these days - not toward technologies that improve people’s lives but those which feed addiction and outrage. If we continue to ask only “can we” rather than “should we” as the philosophers of the past called us to, we will have no better foundation for human flourishing than secular Communist China. Given our shrinking commitment to the other elements of our success, this does not bode well. But if we can rediscover that heritage, maybe we can rediscover what once made us special.
Circle of Concern
The next part of the interview was to me the most compelling. It begins with James Talarico sharing the experience that led him to public service. Talarico was a middle-school teacher in a poor, Title 1 school on the West side of San Antonio. He had a student named Justin who had previously threatened a teacher with a knife, but who James treated with compassion and respect. Justin had a very hard life experience but became engaged in class and at Christmas break, bought Talarico a Christmas gift he’d purchased from a dollar store. After the break, Talarico heard a commotion and saw this boy being carried out of school. He had been involved in a fight, and this was his “third strike.” He was expelled. Turns out, he’d formed a connection with a counselor at the school who - along with James - had been a key source of stability in his life. At the time of the fight, he had just found out that this counselor’s job had been eliminated by budget cuts at the state level.
Talarico had seen first-hand the impact of seemingly dry policy decisions made far from his school and was inspired to run for office to do something about it. I found this story very moving and both inspiring and enraging. It is so frustrating that so much policy is made by people who do not understand the impacts of their decisions. I know that sometimes hard decisions must be made that can have negative consequences, and that budget decisions involve tradeoffs, but I believe that most of the time voters and often even lawmakers themselves do not take the time to understand the likely consequences of their actions.
This connects to a helpful concept that Talarico mentions, which is “circle of concern.” Rogan asks why so many politicians and voters seem so callous or unconcerned about how their policies affect people like Justin. James explains that the people who vote for these policies are generally decent, kind people who love their families, are there for their neighbors, serve at their churches, etc. But they are simply ignorant of the lived experience of entire communities affected by their voting decisions and have not intentionally expanded their “circle of concern” to include them.
On one level, this is entirely understandable, at least at the individual voter level. It’s impossible for any one person to understand or spend their energy caring about every bad thing that happens in a vast and diverse country like ours. And in a democracy, they aren’t expected to. The idea of a democracy is that everyone votes according to their interests and concerns, and in aggregate, this should result in roughly proportional representation in the making of laws. It’s not perfect and inevitably some will receive unfair benefits while others are disadvantaged, but it’s still the best system we have for equitable treatment of citizens.
But I believe Christians in particular are called to go beyond this baseline expectation of self-interest. We have a responsibility to have a wider “circle of concern” than others because this is precisely why Jesus came to earth. Jesus’s coming was about expanding salvation from a specific people-group to the entire world. His circle of concern covered everyone and as Christians, we are called to follow his example. So, I do not believe it’s enough for Christians to simply vote in their own interest and that of people close to them and to let others worry about needs or impacts they don’t understand and won’t experience. Jesus calls us to not only love those who love us (e.g. our family and friends) but those beyond, including even our enemies. For Christians in a democracy, I believe this confers a responsibility upon us to do due diligence in understanding the effects of our voting behaviors on those in different circumstances. Especially “the least of these,” like Justin.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of Christians do expand their circle of concern, but only selectively. They expand it to include unborn children across the entire country, and kids getting stories read to them by drag queens in California. But too often, they turn a blind eye to the consequences of other policies like the gutting of USAID or adding benign-sounding work requirements to Medicaid which in the past has resulted in many eligible people losing health insurance due to difficulty complying with the paperwork.
Non-Partisanship
Although he’s a Democrat with fairly conventional Democratic policy views, Talarico does not come across as a partisan. He shared the Dorothy Day quote “you only love God as much as you love the person you love the least” as a valuable reminder to avoid becoming too tribal or partisan in our thoughts. He also had a number of criticisms of his own party.
The first was a critique of cancel culture, which he acknowledged has been a major problem on the left (though I’d argue it has migrated to mostly afflict the right these days). He argued that the idea of “cancelling” someone is antithetical to the Christian belief in the value of all people and reflects a lack of compassion and grace. He also described it as anti-empathetic, which is an insightful point I hadn’t heard before.
He also shared an observation that life generally follows a three-phase pattern: order, disorder, then reorder. For example, most people experience this progression in their worldview: starting with an orderly and confident worldview as instilled by their parents, followed by a period (often in college) during which they experience new ideas and people which leads to questioning and exploration, followed by later life when they usually tend to land on a set of beliefs or views that are truly their own. But he also connected this to leftism, which he said has a tendency to stop at the “disorder” stage. Many on the left are quick to throw out old ideas, traditions and philosophies as outdated or foolish, but haven’t figured out how to rebuild (I’d argue because they’ve jettisoned much of the wisdom of our forebears).
As an example, he makes the point that many things have the potential to be toxic but are not inherently so. Christianity and religion can be toxic but are not inherently. Masculinity can be toxic but is not inherently. Patriotism can be toxic but is not inherently. The left is right to criticize the toxic forms of these things but often fails to recognize that this is not essential to their nature. As Talarico put it, “there’s a baby in that bathwater.” As a result, people who rightly recognize that there is goodness there worth defending often find the only people making this argument are on the right.
Talarico also gave an example of a time he changed his vote - on a bill to allow homeschoolers to participate in public school sports - because of the arguments a Republican colleague and friend made in its favor. He received flak from Democrats for this but voted for it anyway because he had an open mind and had enough humility to hear out the opposing view.
Texas Government
Talarico spends quite a bit of time educating Rogan on the influence of a few oil billionaires who are very active in Texas politics, Tim Dunn and Farris and Dan Wilks. He describes them as extreme Christian nationalists who have been behind many campaigns to undermine public education, prevented non-Christians from taking leadership positions in Texas government (including conservative Jews) and funded highly partisan right-wing media organizations like The Daily Wire.
I must confess, this was the first time I recall hearing the names of Wilks and Dunn, but after a bit of research it does appear that much of what Talarico was saying holds up. What their ultimate motives are I’m not sure, and Talarico may have overstated the extent of their control (he basically describes them as owning the Texas legislature and even alludes to possible manipulation of the TikTok algorithm), but it is certainly an example of the ways in which rich ideologues are able to exert far more influence in our politics than the average citizen.
He ultimately makes the point that movements which derive much of their influence through division, manipulation and political coercion are ultimately no match for a broad-based, big tent coalition of people who are trying to break down walls, work together and lead with common values. I hope this is true.
Concluding Thoughts
Overall, I thought it was a fantastic interview and worth sitting through the full duration. Like Rogan, I was disappointed to hear that Talarico intends to one day be a pastor instead of a politician. That may make me wrong, and I am of course in no position to know what God is calling Talarico to do with his life. But I agree with Rogan that if people like Talarico keep withdrawing from politics (on both sides), we will continue to be led by people who are motivated not by service or a desire to make people’s lives better, but by self-serving narcissists who are just trying to capture attention, enrich themselves and abuse their power to impose corrupt and unpopular policies. Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like Talarico is going to withdraw anytime soon, and there are rumors he may be considering a run for U.S. Senate. He’d 100% have my vote and I think stand a decent chance, especially if the deeply corrupt Ken Paxton defeats John Cornyn in the Republican primary.
On Rogan himself, I can see why people enjoy his podcast. He has the curiosity and credulousness of a child, which is why he gets (deserved) criticism for platforming people and ideas that espouse dangerous or misleading views without providing much pushback. But it also makes him an effective vehicle for his guests to really share a lot about themselves (for better or worse) without him getting in the way with his own monologues (the couple of times in this interview that he does go on a bit, he doesn’t display a great deal of depth or understanding). So as a venue to hear from a wide variety of people at considerable depth, it’s quite effective. I appreciated Talarico’s willingness to go on his show despite the way many Democrats anathematize Rogan and wish more would follow his example. It’s a valuable audience, and Rogan himself seems to be a decent guy who just likes to listen and ask questions. He may be too open-minded, but there are worse things to be.