Scripture-twisting James Talarico rewrites the Bible for leftist ends

James Talarico may not think that God is non-binary anymore, but the Texas Democrat is certain that He’s in favor of universal health care.

On Sunday, the US Senate candidate posted a riff on X about how the Bible is the foundation of his progressivism.

Supposedly, through happy coincidence, Our Savior agrees with Talarico about important planks of the Democratic platform circa 2026.

“When Jesus healed the sick,” Talarico said, “He didn’t ask for a deductible. So, when I fight for universal health care, I’m doing it on Biblical grounds.”

This is the kind of cheap misuse of scripture that Talarico, a former seminarian, finds irresistible.

Whereas Abraham Lincoln said that “the Almighty has His own purposes,” Talarico apparently thinks His purposes are readily discernible — and align perfectly with his own political priorities. 

Several years ago, when Talarico was extremely woke, he invoked the supposed nature of God to buttress radical gender theory.

Now that he’s running in a contested statewide race and needs to appeal to the middle, he no longer wants to discuss what pronouns God uses, but how Jesus favors the Texan’s more palatable political positions, including on health care. 

If we do Talarico the favor of taking his rhetorical point seriously, the reason Jesus didn’t charge a deductible is that he wasn’t a health-care provider.

(Besides, no one had yet created medical groups, hospitals or insurance companies in first-century Galilee).

For that matter, Jesus also didn’t have any training as a physician, or do proper diagnostics, or make follow-up appointments — all of which are as irrelevant to his ministry as the absence of deductibles. 

The healing miracles aren’t about what we need or expect when we show up at the emergency room for an appendectomy; they show the compassion of God.

They reveal the identity and authority of Jesus.

They point back to Old Testament scripture.

They invite faith.

They foreshadow the ultimate triumph over death. 

All this is cut out or ignored by Talarico as he seeks to make the miracles into parables about his version of Medicare for All.

Talarico does the same thing when declaring that “when Jesus fed the hungry, he didn’t price-gouge to turn a profit.”

Put aside the implication that contemporary food prices are the result of unfair pricing; Jesus wasn’t running a grocery chain or even a food pantry. 

The miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 is about the abundance of God, connects to the Old Testament, establishes a predicate for the Eucharist, and forecasts the coming of the Kingdom of God.

When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life — whoever comes to me will never go hungry,” he’s not telling us anything about the desirability or contours of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Talarico also leaves out that when the New Testament talks about caring for the poor, it isn’t contemplating the Great Society: There’s also often an emphasis on personal responsibility.

In 1 Timothy, the Apostle Paul discusses at length the need for family members to care for widows before the church steps up.

When it comes to health care, the reflex of Christians in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries was to establish their own institutions providing medical services.

It’s not an accident that circa 1960, there were roughly 650 Protestant hospitals and 900 Catholic ones in this country. 

The ultimate problem with Talarico’s Christian progressivism is that, if taken on its own terms, it waters down the scriptures to make them sound like a gloss on an NPR program.

According to Talarico, Jesus came down from heaven not just for us and for our salvation, but to lend an extra increment of credibility to the social-democratic policy preferences of Democratic candidates running in red states in the 21st century United States of America. 

“The riddles of God,” GK Chesterton wrote, “are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

Especially, he might have added, when those solutions represent lowest-common-denominator leftism offered up in the midst of a political campaign. 

X: @RichLowry