James Talarico claims Muslims ‘worship same God as Christians,’ ‘love Jesus’

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter

(Republished from The Christian Post)

A clip of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico claiming that “Christians and Muslims and Jews all worship the same God” has resurfaced as he continues to face scrutiny over his religious views amid his emergence in national politics.

The X account Lone Star Liberty PAC, which describes its mission as “exposing extreme liberal James Talarico as too weak & weird for Texas,” shared a video clip of Talarico from an appearance on the progressive podcast “The Weekend Show” in 2024. In the clip, Talarico insisted that “Christians and Muslims and Jews all worship the same God.”

“Muslims love Jesus. They love Moses and Abraham. We are all branches on the same tree as the Abrahamic faiths,” he added. “It’s heartbreaking to watch extremists, whether they are Christian nationalists or whether they are the Taliban or al Qaeda, perverting these beautiful traditions that have so much in common.”

The extended video of the clip from the full episode of the podcast shows Talarico identifying what he describes as the “perverting” of the major religions as “a tale as old as time” while maintaining that “It doesn’t mean that we don’t have an obligation to speak out against it and reclaim these traditions for their original values of peace and love and justice.” The short clip shared by Lone Star Liberty PAC was not the only example of Talarico suggesting that all world religions are the same during the podcast.

As he sought to deliver a message to the podcast audience, Talarico asserted that “We can’t always put our faith in each other.” Countering that “We’ve got to put our faith into something a little deeper than that,” Talarico said: “Whether you call that God, whether you call it the cosmos, whether you call it love or justice, that’s where we’ve got to root ourselves.”

Talarico encouraged audience members who “do not belong to some kind of community that is rooted … in that deeper well … of love and compassion” to “find that.” He assured them that “It doesn’t have to be a church, doesn’t have to be a synagogue or a mosque or a temple,” naming “a yoga group” or “a book club” as other examples of places where people can find the same sense of community.

Concerns about “Christian nationalism” also loomed large throughout the podcast, with Talarico accusing Republicans of making “abortion and homosexuality the two most important issues for religious voters when both of those issues don’t appear in the Bible … when both of those issues never come out of the mouth of Jesus.”

Talarico characterized the overturning of Roe v. Wade as well as the prospect of a “national ban on abortion” as part of a “Christian Taliban” that is “perverting my beloved religious tradition and using that to subvert our American democracy.”

Talarico has made similar comments across multiple public platforms in recent months. In a Jan. 13 appearance on “The Ezra Klein Show,” Talarico said all religions contain the “same truth” as Christianity and argued America is “not a Christian nation,” The Christian Post previously reported.

Separately, on a recent episode of the “Politics War Room” podcast, hosted by James Carville and Al Hunt, Talarico said atheists are “more Christ-like than” some of his fellow Christian lawmakers in the Texas Legislature.

The 2024 comments from Talarico, a state legislator and Presbyterian seminarian, are not the first example of the Senate candidate’s views about Christianity raising eyebrows. He has alleged in the past that “the Bible is silent on abortion,” which resulted in the Senate candidate receiving pushback from Christian leaders in the U.S.

The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, denounced Talarico’s premise as an “absolute lie.” According to Graham, “God commands us, ‘You shall not murder’ (Exodus 20:13). Abortion is taking a life — it is murder!”

The Word of God tells us we are created in the image of God and consistently underscores the value of human life. Jeremiah 1:5 says, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart,’” Graham wrote on social media as he sought to highlight the pro-life teachings laid out in the Bible.

Josh Howerton, senior pastor at the multisite Lakepointe Church based in Rockwall, Texas, has pushed back against Talarico’s theology, saying in a recent podcast, “Sometimes Christians naively go, well, there’s nice people, and there’s mean people. Well, hey guys, we’re not 4 years old anymore.”

In a 2022 sermon, Talarico cited the discredited Gospel of Thomas, telling fellow church members that it “quotes Jesus as saying, ‘When you make the male and female one and the same; when the male is not male, and the female is not female, then you will enter the Kingdom of God.’”

In a related vein, Talarico said in a 2023 sermon, “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity. There is a cancer on our religion. Until we confess the sin that is Christian nationalism and exorcize it from our churches, our religion can do a lot more damage than a six-pack of Lone Star,” according to The Washington Stand.

Talarico’s views on the fluidity of gender were also on display when he referred to women as “our neighbors with a uterus” during a 2022 sermon condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion nationwide.

In a 2021 speech on the floor of the Texas Senate, Talarico declared: “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between; God is non-binary.”

The RealClearPolitics average of polls measuring voter sentiment in the Senate race between Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton shows Talarico leading his opponent by 1.2 percentage points. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in more than three decades.