Before James Talarico’s campaign for a US Senate seat in Texas goes any further, I want to acknowledge the Christian message that he brings as a Democratic hopeful. Talarico’s Christ is not a unique source of epistemic meaning to him, but one of many ideas borrowed indifferently from a menu of faith options.
James Talarico said in 2019 that “prophetic voices like Jesus” — though not exactly Jesus — “have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.” Apparently Talarico considers
Masculinity and whiteness are sins. White men have to feel pain for their sins. The word for this religious remixing, coined by Wendy Doniger and Claude Lévi-Strauss, is bricolage. Humans form pastiches of beliefs using materials found in the cultural conversations all around them. Americans have access to a global free market of spiritua…
