The Pulpit Spoke in Dallas — Now Texas Must Answer
On the night of September 10, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church walked to a podium a few miles from the sanctuary he has shepherded for decades and did what he has done for nearly fifty years of ministry: he said the truth plainly. He looked out at the delegates and named the modern Democratic Party what he believes it has become — “advocates for evil.” Then he turned to the marquee race on the Texas ballot, the 
United States Senate contest between Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico, and rendered a judgment that lit up every phone in the hall: Talarico’s professed beliefs, Jeffress said, are “blasphemous,” “evil,” and unsupportable by any true Christian.
Within the hour, the outrage machinery was running at full throttle. A pastor had dared to bring doctrine into politics, the usual voices insisted, and the words “Christian nationalist” were deployed with the speed of a fire alarm. For years, the professional commentariat has had one reflex: when a preacher states the plain teaching of Scripture about God, sin, and salvation, he is not answered; he is categorized. But Texas voters deserve better than categories. They deserve the real question: not whether Jeffress was polite, but whether Jeffress was right.
Consider the man at the center of the storm. James Talarico is a young state legislator from Round Rock, a former public-school teacher who spent time in seminary classrooms and emerged with a genuine gift for the left’s pulpit cadence. Now he is the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. Along the way, he has described himself — in his own unforgettable words — as “a Christian who hates Christianity.” He has affirmed a spectrum of genders as settled fact. He has taught that all the world’s religions are equal paths to God, each one a valid road up the same mountain. These are not stray comments ripped from context. They are his stated, repeated, campaign-grade convictions.
He also says God is not a Christian. Click Here
He’s concluded that Jesus is a radical feminist. Click Here
He wants to use Christianity as a pretext for national suicide. Click Here
This man want to be the United States Senator from Texas.
Let us do Talarico the courtesy of taking him seriously. In one sense, his self-description is the most honest sentence in 
Texas politics this year. There is indeed a version of religion so watered down, so captive to the spirit of the age, so desperate for the world’s applause, that a Christian could hate it without cost. What he cannot do — what no one gets to do — is keep the name of Christ while demolishing the claims of Christ. A Christianity whose Lord is one option among many, whose cross is one symbol among many, whose Bible is one voice among many, is not a humbler Christianity. It is a different religion wearing Christianity’s jewelry. And when a man says he hates that hollowed-out thing, he is, for once, telling the truth. He hates the costume because no one is left inside it.
This is the ground on which Jeffress stood. The prophet Isaiah pronounced a woe on those “that call evil good, and good evil,” and the warning has never gone out of date. When a candidate announces that all religions are equal paths to God, he is not offering Texans a generous, roomy spirituality; he is directly contradicting the Lord he claims to follow, who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” The apostles said the same: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” “Unsupportable by any true Christian” is not a personal insult. It is a doctrinal description, and any honest seminary would give it a passing grade.
The word “blasphemous” will strike modern ears as severe, but it is not a cuss word; it is a category. It describes the act of taking what belongs to God — His uniqueness, His exclusivity, His glory — and redistributing it to everyone and everything. Universalism sounds kind until you follow it to the foot of the cross. If every path leads to God, then Gethsemane was a misunderstanding, Calvary was theater, and the Son of God sweated great drops of blood for a redundancy. The apostle Paul put the case with terrifying clarity: though an angel from heaven preach any other gospel, “let him be accursed.” Talarico’s platform does not merely differ from Christianity at a few points of emphasis. It inverts Christianity at its load-bearing wall — the claim that in Jesus Christ, God has done something that nothing else and no one else could do.
The objection is predictable: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” But read the rest of the chapter. The same Lord also warned of false prophets who come “in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves,” and said we would 
know them by their fruits. He commanded elsewhere, “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.” John instructed the church to “try the spirits whether they are of God.” Scripture forbids hypocritical, self-exalting judgment; it does not forbid discernment, and it certainly does not forbid a pastor distinguishing between the gospel and a platform built to replace it. Jesus reserved His most withering words not for honest skeptics but for religious professionals who marketed half-truths to the masses. Jeffress stands in a long and honorable line of men who have been hated for pointing that out.
This is where the label comes in, so let us take it head-on. “Christian nationalist” is meant as a slur. Serious people should treat it as a plain description of an old American conviction. Christian nationalism, as its advocates actually mean it, is not theocracy, not coercion, not a baptism administered by bureaucracy. It is the conviction that nations, like persons, flourish when they honor God — that, as the Psalmist said, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” and as Proverbs records, “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” It is the refusal to be embarrassed by the plain fact that American liberty was built on American faith. In his Farewell Address, George Washington called religion and morality “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made for “a moral and religious people” and was “wholly inadequate” for the government of any other. Alexis de Tocqueville, touring the young republic, marveled that Americans combined the ideas of Christianity and liberty so intimately in their minds that they could not conceive of the one without the other. None of those men were radicals. They were simply reading the record.
Christian Nationalism is “The Great Commission” brought home. Click Here.
For three generations, American schoolchildren rose and recited “one nation under God” without a hint of scandal, and nobody supposed the phrase declared a war between church and state. Somewhere in the last decade, the same sentence became evidence of extremism. Christian nationalism is largely what happens when ordinary believers stop apologizing for sentences the nation used to recite before breakfast. It is the fourth commandment’s architecture of concrete loves — honor your father, love your neighbor, know your own — applied to a commonwealth: a people, a place, an inheritance, a covenant. And it is the honest name for what America First actually means: citizens’ loyalty to their own nation, their own borders, their own workers, their own children, and their own God, before the opinion of Davos, Brussels, or the editorial board of the New York Times. A man who will not put his own country first cannot be trusted to put his own constituents first, and a politician who will not honor his own Savior will not honor his own signature.
America First has a theological engine, and it is worth opening the hood. The Declaration of Independence does not say governments endow men with rights; it says men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” If rights come from Washington, they can be rescinded in Washington, and what the state grants, the state may retrieve. If they come from God, then the state is not the author of liberty but its bodyguard — and every official, from senator down to school-board member, stands on probation before a higher bench. Now consider the candidate who believes all gods are equal. A man who cannot tell you which God endowed him cannot tell you which rights are unalienable, and a politician who believes all religions are equally true believes, in practice, that none of them is finally binding. That is not a tolerant disposition. It is an empty altar, and empty altars have a way of getting filled in a hurry — usually with whatever the state happens to want that year.
The Senate race is where these abstractions get a mailing address. Talarico’s “spectrum of genders” is not a private opinion; it is a governing philosophy that will follow your daughter into her locker room, your son into his curriculum, and your pastor into his ministry paperwork. His universalism is not a private devotion; it is a ready-made reason to vote down every religious liberty protection, since no faith is true enough to be worth shielding. Elections in Texas are no longer contests between two management teams. They are contests between two theologies — one that says Texas belongs to God and His people, and one that says Texas belongs to whichever coalition can claw it. Ken Paxton has made his commitments plain over many years. Talarico has made his plain too, in his own words, more plainly than his handlers would like.
Texas occupies a singular place in this argument, and Texans know it. The country has watched California and Illinois, and it knows what happens when one party rules without check for a generation: churches closed by mandate, parents treated as problems, faith treated as a pre-existing condition. If Texas goes, no firewall remains—no state large enough, free enough, and faithful enough to hold the line while the rest of the country remembers who it is. This is why a midterm convention in Dallas felt like something more than politics. Texans have always understood frontier math: sometimes the line has to be drawn and defended, at an Alamo or at a ballot box, because everyone downstream pays the cost of not drawing it. Jeffress drew the line on September 10, and it was an act of civic kindness, not belligerence, to say out loud what the choice actually is.
Some will still object that the pulpit should stay out of politics, but Talarico’s own campaign refutes the premise before the objection finishes. He campaigns on theological claims — that God can be reached by any path, that the Bible’s categories can be amended by committee, that a religion he hates deserves its vocabulary anyway. He is not asking for a politics free of religion. He is asking for a politics in which his religion wins unopposed. No such thing as an empty public square exists. Secularism is not the absence of religion; it is a religion with a government and no altar call. The only question is which creed the square will honor — the one that produced the First Amendment, the abolitionists, and the civil rights pulpit, or 
the one that cannot produce a reason to say anything true at all.
And Jeffress’s words landed the way they did for a reason. The man has spent half a century saying what he means, enduring every weather the culture could produce, and at an age when most men are coasting, he spent his remaining capital on clarity. That is what shepherds are for. The hireling sees the wolf coming and flees; the shepherd stands between the flock and what would devour it. On September 10, a hall full of Texans — delegates, parents, churchgoers, workers — heard the difference in real time. Nobody left that building confused about what is at stake, which is more than can be said for most Sunday mornings.
So the choice now belongs to the people. Joshua stood before Israel and said, “Choose you this day whom ye will serve,” and then answered for his own house: “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Texas now faces that same sentence at statewide scale. A republic that will not say which God it serves will soon be unable to say what a man is, what a marriage is, what a border is, or what a right is. 2 Chronicles 7:14 still stands in the middle of the road: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven.” November is not merely an election. It is an altar call for the republic — one nation under God, or one nation under whatever the loudest coalition insists upon. The pulpit spoke in Dallas. Now Texas answers.
Dave
