Texas Senate Candidate Talarico Eschews Church-Based Endorsements — Until He Gets One
The Democratic seminary student has gone back on his word.
James Talarico, a state representative vying to become the first Texas Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, said last year he’d never accept a campaign endorsement made from a church pulpit. He did just that this week, however — and highlighted another pastoral backer Wednesday night.
The Reverend Timothy Sloan, senior pastor of The Luke Church in Humble, Texas, a Houston suburb, welcomed the Democrat to the pulpit of the 8,000-member church with a supportive message Sunday.
With the candidate at his side, Mr. Sloan said his mentor, the Reverend William Alexander Lawson of Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, “would always say this when he ever had an official that came to the church. He’d say, ‘No, we don’t endorse candidates. That’s not the church’s role. However, you should know who your pastor endorses and believes in.’ And I want you to know my full, total, and complete weight is behind James Talarico to help change the lives of Texans and the course of this nation. Amen.”
The congregation applauded and cheered the non-endorsement endorsement. Mr. Talarico, who said nothing following Mr. Sloan’s commendation, walked off the platform.
The turnaround comes months after Mr. Talarico — a member of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who is studying for a master of divinity degree at Austin Seminary — declared he would eschew such endorsements.
“I will not seek, nor will I accept, any endorsement from the pulpit anywhere, because that boundary is sacred in my mind,” he told Texas Monthly last year.
The Democrat’s campaign views that boundary as less sacred, posting the video clip on X saying, “One of the most respected pastors in Houston just endorsed @jamestalarico.”
And Mr. Talarico himself posted a campaign commercial Wednesday evening in which his grandfather, dubbed “PawPaw,” endorses the candidate. Family ties are understandable, but Mr. Talarico describes his grandfather — the Reverend Jimmy Clayland “Jim” Causey, 86 — as “a Baptist preacher who taught me to follow the two great commandments: love God & love neighbor. Those teachings led me to public service and they’re why I’m running for the U.S. Senate.”
Mr. Causey, Mr. Talarico’s maternal grandfather, was a Southern Baptist minister who pastored three South Texas congregations in the late 1960s. Contemporary newspaper records also identify him as interim pastor of Alameda Baptist Church in Corpus Christi in 1965. The names of his three subsequent pastorates have not been established in readily available public records.
The New York Times reported in June that Mr. Causey “said he found himself on the ‘moderate’ side during what critics call the ‘fundamentalist takeover’” of the Southern Baptist denomination in the 1970s and 1980s, “although he was no longer a pastor.”
Mr. Causey told the newspaper, “The conservatives believed that the Bible was dictated by God to the writers of the Bible and that every word of it was to be taken as the literal word of God. I just never could swallow that line.”
Mr. Talarico — who’s drawn fire for his 2021 statement “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary” — has also said he doesn’t take the Bible “literally.”
Political endorsements from church pulpits have had a checkered history over the past 72 years, after then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, also a Texas Democrat, sponsored a 1954 amendment to federal law banning nonprofit organizations exempt under Section 501(c) 3 of the tax code from endorsing or opposing political candidates.
Mr. Johnson — whose 1948 election to the Senate turned on a margin of 87 votes, earning him the sobriquet “Landslide Lyndon” — pushed for the legislation to blunt opposition from two nonprofits that were informational, not religious. But because churches are generally recognized under the same tax rule, they have also been prohibited from making those endorsements.
The ban has been somewhat fungible in this century. An October 31, 2004, sermon by the Reverend George Regas at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, which criticized the policies of then-President George W. Bush, sparked a multiyear IRS probe over a Johnson Amendment violation. Three years later, the IRS closed the investigation without charges.
President Trump vowed in his first term to eliminate the Johnson Amendment rules but has only issued a 2017 executive order directing the Treasury Department not to take adverse enforcement actions against religious organizations for speech not similarly penalized for nonreligious nonprofits.
Houston television station KHOU reported Sunday Mr. Talarico leads GOP nominee Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, by 4 points with fewer than 12 weeks before the general election.
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