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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9719 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Always Bet on Susan Collins.

With that out of the way, democrats nominating normal guys seems to be a weakness right now- they've got Graham Platner being Graham Platner, the Islamic anti-israel single issue guy in Michigan, and James Talarico trying to convince people he's heterosexual and not a vegetarian.

James Talarico trying to convince people he's heterosexual and not a vegetarian.

What I find funnier about Talarico is them trying to sell him as "Look, he's a Christian! We got Christians in our party, too! Why, he's even a seminarian, how more devoutly orthodox could you get?" and leaving aside the fact that I didn't know Presbyterians called them seminarians, when you look at his positions he's reliably liberal down the line.

...Mr. Talarico’s politics, as he has defined them in his Senate campaign, start with the biblical command to love God and love your neighbor. Those principles, as he sees it, have implications for public policy on abortion, immigration, the separation of church and state, and “economic justice” that elevates the interests of the poor and the oppressed over those of the wealthy and powerful. His campaign slogan, “It’s time to start flipping tables,” is a reference to a passage in the Bible where Jesus displays righteous anger.”

So this isn't going to work for the people who do have a certain position on issues like abortion, and it isn't going to work for people who break out in hives at the very mention of the word "Christian". They'll think he's a Bible-bashing bigot, and the more the local party tries to reassure them that no, he's not that kind of Christian, the more they will lose any cross-party appeal to the believing types.

Plus, it looks like there might be a minor, Obama-style, "oops my pastor could be problematic" issue there:

By his own account, Mr. Rigby has been a major influence and inspiration. And now, Mr. Talarico’s opponents are also turning a critical eye to the pastor. They are finding a spiritual leader whose views on political issues like immigration and abortion, but also questions like the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus, are out of step with the teachings of many other churches.

Mr. Rigby’s theology and his rhetoric reflect what would be heard at many Mainline and progressive Christian churches across the country. But in Texas, where conservative evangelicalism looms large, they are rarely visible on platforms like the ones Mr. Talarico now occupies.

Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service. He does not use the word “Lord,” because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God, he said. For that matter, he added, he does not much care for the word “God.” He uses it on occasion, he said, but he tries to use synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.

...Mr. Rigby baptized a baby, and welcomed a family of four as new members, handing them a new copy of the Inclusive Bible, an unusual feminist translation St. Andrew’s has used since the 1990s. In Genesis, instead of writing that God created a man, Adam, the translation refers first to an “earth creature.” It often uses the term “kindom” of God in place of “kingdom,” which it deems classist.

I love this. Unironically, I love this. "In the beginning, Undefined Vague Spiritual Entity According To Your Own Understanding created an earth creature. Let us all enter into the kindom of Undefined Entity. Amen (and awomen and anonbinary)".

Wait, I thought Baptists didn't baptise babies! Either the NYT is getting religion wrong (shocker, I know) or they are misunderstanding a different 'no this is not baptism like the bad old Catholics, this is child dedication which is totally different' practice, or Rigby is baptising babies because hey, rules are for fools.

Oh man, this could be his very own Kamala moment! 'Trans abortions for everybody!' 🤣

But Mr. Wilder, who has written critically of Mr. Talarico, said the attraction may fade after they hear Mr. Talarico’s past progressive comments, such as asserting that “our trans community needs abortion care, too,” as he did in a 2022 sermon at St. Andrew’s.

“That dog’s not going to hunt in Texas,” Mr. Wilder said.

Talarico is not a baptist. Presbyterians are lectionary Protestants who baptize babies, use the term ‘saint’, do not do rock concert services, etc.

Now, differences in beliefs and practice are not necessarily off-putting to evangelicals- there are many elected officials who are Methodist, Catholic, Anglican, etc with broad appeal to the baptist masses. Baptist theology holds that baptism is a commandment and not a sacrament(this is why they do not baptize babies), and that gives them plenty of room to count those baptized as infants as real Christians. In practice their non-negotiables are still things Talarico doesn’t have- genuine belief in the historicity of the biblical account(famously genesis but theologically they would put more importance on the virgin birth and resurrection as literal, factual occurrences) and a certain level of conservatism on moral issues. This isn’t Ireland where Protestant theology has real, defined meanings- they don’t have a creed.

That was my mistake, I have no idea how I got the notion that the church in question was Baptist. I think I got confused because Talarico's grandfather was a Baptist minister, so the church-hopping threw me off.

I was surprised by the NYT seeming to do real journalism (and not just "vote for the Democrat or else the sky will fall in"), and I do think Talarico is less on the fringe than Pastor Bob there, or rather "Dr. Jim" as Talarico is quoted calling him. But Talarico went wading out past his depth on some matters. When you try spinning the Annunciation as meaning "abortion is kewl", yeah, I'm sinking my head into my hands here.

About 20 minutes into his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Texas Rep. James Talarico started making his case that the Bible sanctions abortion.

In the Book of Luke, the Austin Democrat noted, Mary has a vision from God that she’s going to give birth to a baby who will bring down the powerful from their thrones. But, critically, before she becomes pregnant, Talarico said, an angel “asks Mary if this is something she wants to do, and she says, ‘if it is God’s will, let it be done.’”

“To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create,” Talarico, an aspiring Presbyterian minister and U.S. senator, told Rogan, arguing “the idea that there is a set Christian orthodoxy on the issue of abortion is just not rooted in Scripture.”

He went on to accuse the religious right of prioritizing abortion bans and “control” of pregnant mothers, rather than reducing miscarriages and protecting children through expanded health care access.

“I think that’s what we see across this Christian nationalist movement,” Talarico said. “This is religion at its worst: trying to control people and what they do.”

While pivoting to abortion is clearly reaching, I agree with him that it's interesting and noteworthy that the Annunciation is not a rape, or even a seduction, as one sees in the vast majority of e.g. Greek tales.

Well, as a Catholic, imagine my expression 🤨when a Presbyterian starts talking about the Blessed Virgin. Hey, didn't you guys have an entire hissy-fit over Mariolatry during the Reformation? That we honoured her too highly? (Never mind the hardcore Calvinists and their "nobody cares about the human incubator once the baby popped out" line, because Mary didn't have a choice; free will is over-rated and she was only there to have the baby).

And now you're going to talk about Free Will and Consent and Mary's "yes" being important? Wanna talk about the Co-Redemptrix, Jimmy boy, instead of "Mary would totes have had an abortion nowadays" (again, a line I've seen some liberals taking).

Well, as a Catholic, imagine my expression 🤨when a Presbyterian starts talking about the Blessed Virgin. Hey, didn't you guys have an entire hissy-fit over Mariolatry during the Reformation?

Has anyone ever responded with 'No, that was centuries before my time, and by a totally different people?'

I like me a good sectarian shittalk as much as anyone, but I've hard enough blaming people for the sins of their own fathers, let alone the sins of someone else's fathers.

Come on, if they junked all that stuff because it was bad no-no wrong, they can't sneak it through the back door now that everyone likes playing dress-up in cherry-picked traditions.

Granted, with the kind of theology on show in that article, the church is just using 'Presbyterian' as a label and they might as well go the whole hog and be Unitarian Universalists because there's very little of the original confessional foundation left, but then there's no reason to call themselves anything in particular.

Basically, if we're "Sure, the Presbies can have bishops and the Baptists can have special ceremonies for babies and you can pretend to be Orthodox of six different flavours because you like the icons and we're scrapping all the deep dogmatic divisions because just say 'Jesus wants us to be nice to each other' and that's enough" that's because "now it doesn't matter, it's all make-believe, fighting over the sky fairy is dumb, the only real truth is Science! and Progress!".

I suggest that if Mr. Rigby's denomination had not tossed out Mary with the bathwater back in the day, then he would not feel the need to rewrite Scripture on the grounds that "Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service."

Imagine that: dumping the idea of veneration of female figures because that takes away from the worship due only to God leads, down the line, to replacing God with Fake Female Deity since you have no means of approaching "how do we integrate women in the church?"

Come on, if they junked all that stuff because it was bad no-no wrong, they can't sneak it through the back door now that everyone likes playing dress-up in cherry-picked traditions.

Certainly they can, for the same reason that you can proudly attend a Church that has done the same. Individual responsibility protects you from culpability in the sins and poor policy choices of your denomination as much as they can selectively ignore policy choices hundreds of years prior.

Particularly if we acknowledge that many theological disagreements of centuries were past were not purely of a theological nature, but often proxies for the more secular political disagreements and conflicts of the era. The Catholic Church was a religious domination. It was also a highly influential, and not-so-rarely highly intrusive, political institution at all levels of European society with complex relationships across the political hierarchies. These were not mere trivialities, but a central dynamic of the social order. Theological disputes not-so-rarely following along those lines is just a consequence of the culture war of its era. Many of the fractures not just of protestantism from catholicism, but within protestantism itself, derive from the widespread awareness of secular corruption and abuses cloaked in Church authority.

Again, sectarian shittalking is fine as it goes. But if you want to pin poor policies of the past to people who weren't there to influence them, they (and anyone else) can do the same for you. Splinters and logs and all that.

But just saying, as a far outside observe, if I were forced to guess who had the better insight into heaven between a denomination that threw the baby out with the bathwater, or a denomination responsible for the inquisition, crusades, and- in its more noble, modern institutional form, pedophile priests...

Well, if I did have to make the guess under the premise that adherents are accountable to the failings of their clergy centuries before, it would be an incredibly easy decision.

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