EVERYTHING'S BIGGER IN TEXAS - ESPECIALLY THE STAKES FOR CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA:
Updated: Sep 14
How a Texas Seminarian Is Shaking Up the South - and Disrupting the Politics of Christian Faith.
The Texas Senate race between Attorney General, Ken Paxton (R), and State Representative James Talarico (D) is giving new meaning to, “Everything’s bigger in Texas.”
Especially the money.
The Republican primary and subsequent runoff earlier this year in Texas broke records as the most expensive Senate primary in American history. Now with the general election around the corner, the spending is only ramping up.
Just last week, Donald Trump’s political operation, MAGA Inc. poured $10 million into the Texas Senate race. Now, Elon Musk's American PAC has joined in. As I type this, Trump and Musk’s super PAC's have now contributed a combined $12.4 million in ads supporting Paxton and attacking Talarico. Clearly, Talarico is making some people nervous. Nervous enough to dump millions of dollars into a campaign to maintain the status quo.
The higher the stakes, the higher the spending.
And make no mistake - (said in my very best politician voice) - the stakes are high. Before the latest tidal wave of outside spending from Trump and Musk, Talarico had already raised roughly $72 million to Paxton’s $16.8 million.
Such historic fundraising makes one thing clear: Texas is becoming far more competitive than anyone expected.
And I believe that invites us to ask all sorts of questions. Starting with, why should anyone outside of the Lone Star State care about Texas politics?
Is Texas Challenging "Politics as Usual"?
I live in Georgia. I have no connections to Texas. I did visit the Dallas-Fort Worth area once on a work trip and I loved it. But why should I care about some Senate race in Texas?
Well, for starters, Texas has long been one of the strongest Republican states in national politics. It is Red to its core. Texas has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election since 1980. The last Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate in Texas occurred in 1988, and every Senate general election in the state since then has been won by a Republican.
So, the improbability that a young Democratic candidate for Senate would give a Republican career politician a literal run for his money makes this race one to watch. And apparently, one national Republicans feel they cannot afford to ignore. Because if the political tide can shift in Texas, it can shift anywhere.
In other words, political identities we have treated as permanent may not be.
We Georgians saw that back in January 2021, when Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, defeating Republican incumbents in a state that, like Texas, had long been a Republican stronghold. But that outcome did not mean that Georgia suddenly became Blue - and there is no reason to believe Texas will be either.
But it does challenge assumptions about what is politically possible in Reliably Red States. And if we can fight off the instinct to be defensive of "our side," then maybe we can get curious about what is behind these shifts.
Paxton may very well win Texas and it will be back to business as usual. But what if we took this moment to simply ask ourselves what other assumptions might we need to reconsider?
Here's what challenging assumptions looks like for me as I am watching what's happening in Texas. As someone who writes about the intersection of faith and culture in America, I pay close attention when influential leaders or politicians start using religious language. And, if I’m honest, I often expect it to confirm my trepidations about Evangelical Christianity in American politics.
Which leads me to wonder if Texas is asking us to reconsider our assumptions about what it means to be a Christian in America today.
Is Texas Shifting the Role of Religion in American Political Discourse?
For me, the most interesting thing happening in Texas is not that a Democrat might defeat a Republican. Despite the two candidates being worlds apart politically, it's what they have in common that has me paying attention, as both Paxton and Talarico speak openly about the influence of their Christian faith on their political convictions.
It isn't surprising, in a state where 67% of adults identify as Christian. But what is fascinating to me is that each candidate appears to have a very different idea about what Christianity should look like in American public life and the role it should (or should not) play in politics.
Paxton and Talarico's views of Christianity highlight the increasing polarization between Christians on either side of the political aisle. To highlight their differences, we can look at one issue that illustrates the way each man incorporates his Christian faith into his politics: the separation of church and state. Because Paxton and Talarico's views on this topic reflect two competing visions of Christianity in America today.
In 2025, Texas passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every classroom in public elementary and secondary schools. Despite facing criticism and legal challenges, the law was upheld in 2026. In addition to raising concerns over the separation of church and state, this issue also gets at a deeper question, which is:
What role, if any, should Christian teachings have in government institutions?
As attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton has defended the law, arguing that the Ten Commandments are part of America’s moral and legal heritage and have helped shape the nation’s laws and values. But his actions go beyond political support: he has used the authority of his office to direct schools to comply and defended the law in court when it was challenged.
In Paxton’s vision, Christianity is not simply a private belief but a tradition that government has a legitimate role in recognizing and preserving in public life.
James Talarico, on the other hand, has opposed placing the Ten Commandments in school classrooms. For him, doing so not only violates religious liberty, but ironically, the law of God. As Christians, we are called to put our trust in God - not in governmental power. Therefore, using political power to advance or impose Christianity is a form of idolatry.
Talarico isn't arguing that Christianity has no place in public life; he's arguing that Christians should not use government power to impose their faith on everyone else. His position reflects a different understanding of the relationship between Christianity and government: Christianity does not need government power to enforce it. That validation comes from God alone.
One candidate believes Christians are called to defend God through political power; the other believes Christians are called to defend God's people from the abuse of power. These competing visions point to a much larger question:
Do we understand Christian faith as a source of political power, or as a public witness that speaks to how power should be used?
In other words, do we want our faith to enforce and maintain the status-quo of the world, or do we want to imagine something... different? You can fill in what the "different" might look like, because the truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to any question that begins with, “What do Christians believe about...?” If you were to line ten of us up and ask us what it means to be a Christian, you would get ten different answers.
But I know one thing for sure: we are called to be set apart.
THAT is why this race is about more than Texas politics. Not to decide which candidate is the better option for Texans, or even who is the "better" Christian, but to examine the very different ideas of what Christianity can mean in public life. And perhaps, if we are willing to ask those questions honestly, we might discover that some of our assumptions deserve a second look.
Is Texas Inviting Us to Reimagine Christianity in Public Life?
It is no secret that Christianity in American public life has typically been closely associated with conservative politics, "traditional" family and gender roles, and the idea that love of nation and love of Jesus naturally belong together. These are not bad things at all, in and of themselves. It is a free country, and we are all entitled to our opinions.
But somewhere along the way, that “close association” became something else entirely and morphed into what is known today as Christian nationalism, which fuses Christian identity and political power together. The goal of this political movement is to preserve a particular vision of Christian America, which is achieved through domination, military power, and the exclusion and marginalization of anyone who does not fit within its prescribed social order (i.e., “the nuclear family”).
A few years ago, very few people could even describe what Christian nationalism was or meant. Today, it has changed the way Christianity is broadly understood in American public life. And now anyone who pushes back against the politicization and weaponization of Christianity can be labeled as "radical" or anti-Christian simply for refusing to embrace it.
As a result, the cultural definition of what it means to be a Christian in America has often felt narrower than Christianity itself. Those who do not identify with that political or theological framework can find themselves wondering where they belong.
We have become so accustomed to thinking about Christianity through a left-versus-right political framework that it can be easy to forget there are Christians who reject that framework altogether. I am one of them.
Let me be very, very clear: I am a Christian and I love my country. I care about politics and I think I am a pretty engaged citizen. But my deep conviction is that my identity is in Christ alone.
Because I believe that Christianity in America has become so closely associated with a particular political identity, I recognize that I have to be careful not to let my critique of that identity create a new set of assumptions about what Christian faith in public life must look like. If I am going to challenge the co-opting of Christianity for political power on one side of the political spectrum, I have to be willing to apply that same scrutiny across the board.
For me, this is NOT about choosing one side or the other. This is about just being honest about our priorities. This is about asking what happens when our political ideology becomes synonymous with Christianity, so much so, that people begin to mistake the two for the same thing.
When Christianity becomes a tool for preserving power, it becomes something altogether different from the gospel it claims to represent.
The message of Jesus was never about gaining or protecting power; rather, it was about flipping earthly assumptions of power on its head. Yes, it is about loving God and loving our neighbors, but it is also about caring for the vulnerable, welcoming the stranger, and serving others in such a way that the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
Talarico represents a different possibility: a Christian who does not hide his faith but also does not believe Christianity requires political dominance.
But I want to take Talarico out of it for a moment because this is not actually about him, it is about the kind of faith he talks about and invites us to consider. A faith that shapes how we think about poverty, who we consider our neighbor, how we treat the stranger, and how we understand religious freedom and democracy. Things that we have been led to believe are "political," but are actually central to the teachings of Jesus. What if we allowed ourselves to ask:
What could faith look like when it does not need the government to validate it?
If you ask me, that is the biggest reason this race matters beyond Texas. In a state where Christianity and Conservative politics have long been deeply intertwined, the race in Texas has made another kind of Christian public identity visible.
For Christians who have felt pushed out of the church because they could not reconcile their faith with the politics that had come to define it, Texas is saying: maybe the tide is shifting. Not because another political side might take control, but because it now seems possible to rediscover a Christianity that was never meant to belong to a political party in the first place.
I know far too many Christians who walk around with this disclaimer at the ready: “Yes, I am a Christian, but I’m not THAT kind of Christian.” And I understand it. There was even a time when I considered abandoning the term altogether and simply saying, “I just follow Jesus.”
But I have decided I am not going to let Christian nationalism have the last word on what Christianity means. My faith is everything to me, and I know many of you feel the same way.
And that is why we are watching Texas.
I'm not making any assumptions about what is going to happen in Texas.
But Talarico's candidacy gives me hope that Christianity no longer has to be synonymous with domination and control, and that the Church can break from bending the knee to political power and reclaim its prophetic voice. It gives me hope that we can reimagine what Christianity can look like in the public square and actually work toward for the collective good.
I think my most realistic hope is that this race will encourage us to set aside our assumptions so we can have conversations and then be humble enough to listen to one another's answers.
And if nothing else, maybe what's happening in Texas is an invitation to discover that people are more than their political party affiliation. What a refreshing revelation that would be. And how divine, to encounter the person behind the policy.
They do say everything is bigger in Texas. Maybe even the possibilities.
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