Jesus Is Back. Can He End America’s Political Holy War?

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James Talarico's victory signals a Christian revival among Democrats, challenging the GOP's religious dominance and risking a new holy war.

When James Talarico invoked Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in his Texas Senate victory speech, the Democrat was doing something American conservatives have long made their own: claiming biblical authority for a political cause.

His November 3 defeat of Republican Ken Paxton gave Democrats their first Texas Senate victory since 1988, implicating the politics of a world beyond Texas. What happens when the party historically associated with secular liberalism begins speaking the language of Christianity as confidently as its opponents?

Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, is among a growing number of Democrats bringing God back into progressive politics. For decades, Republicans have been the party most closely associated with Christianity, claiming the mantle of religious faith and moral authority while Democrats largely ceded that ground.

Now, politicians like Talarico are challenging that dominance by invoking the same Scripture to defend progressive values. Their appeal could test whether Republicans still command the loyalty of religious Americans, particularly those who see a growing gulf between the Christian values their leaders profess and the lives they lead.

The Republican Party's association with Christianity is neither ancient nor exclusive.

Janine Giordano Drake, a historian at Indiana University Bloomington, traces its origins through Protestant business movements of the 19th century, long before the Moral Majority helped mobilize conservative Christians behind Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, Democrats have their own substantial religious inheritance, from the social gospel movement to the Black churches that helped sustain the civil rights struggle.

"From the dawn of the New Deal through the height of the civil rights movement and great society, a Christian liberal/left coalition dominated American politics," Heath W. Carter, an associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, told Newsweek.

The Republican advantage…

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