James Talarico sells himself to Texas as a seminarian with a Bible in one hand and a moderate platform in the other. The latest hidden-camera tape from his home church says the Bible is optional. Ken Paxton called it what many pews already know: blasphemy.
The Daily Wire published undercover footage of Rev. Babs Miller, minister to the parish at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin. Miller has served that congregation since the 1990s. Talarico grew up there. He still names its senior pastor, Jim Rigby, as one of the biggest influences on him as a Christian and as a human being.
Miller told an undercover journalist she has “no way of knowing if Jesus really existed.” The virgin birth, she said, “comes out of the pagan belief that the gods came down and impregnated people.” Her method of faith sounded rummage sale: “Take what you want and leave the rest.” Then she denied the cross as Christians have preached it for two thousand years. “He didn’t die to save our sins,” she said incredulously. Rome killed a political threat. That was the whole story.
That is not a side chapel. That is the house that formed the candidate.
iResearch Weekly has already mapped this ground. Hidden-camera work from St. Andrew’s captured Miller saying some members wished the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump “had been more successful.” A later tape showed a Democratic operative, Jennifer Miranda, describing Talarico’s sudden softness on transgender issues as an effort to become “more palatable to Republicans,” while adding that “from the character he’s shown us, he does believe the things that he’s said before.” Another recording caught a PAC organizer calling a $25 “voting class” “shady as f***.” Public lines get sanded. Private lines stay put.
The transgender walk-back fits the same pattern. Talarico once named “trans children” among the things he loved besides family and friends. He called a parent’s refusal to affirm a child’s gender identity “abusive.” He voted against Texas limits on medicalization of minors and said a ban “infuriates” him. On the trail he now says he opposes surgeries for minors. Operatives on tape do not treat that as conversion. They treat it as marketing.
The religious claims travel the same road. Talarico quotes Jesus against his opponents. He has said God is “nonbinary,” and that he thinks of himself as “a Christian who hates Christianity.” Rigby has long denied a literal resurrection and treated Mary’s story as myth. Miller now denies the atonement and even the sure existence of Jesus. When the mentors reject the creed, the candidate’s Scripture talk starts to look like a campaign tool, not a confession.
Texas is not short of churches that still preach a real cross and a real Christ. Voters can decide whether a Senate hopeful whose spiritual home treats both as optics is offering conviction—or a costume tailored for November.
Does a faith that “takes what it wants and leaves the rest” still count as conviction when the rest includes the Gospel itself? Tell us in the comments.
