The Texas Rep. Fighting Christian Nationalism w/ James Talarico
Rep. James Talarico is a Christian fighting Christian nationalism in the Texas legislature. He's also an 8th generation Texans; a former middle school teacher; and a seminarian. He calls school voucher schemes "scams," and "welfare for the rich," while labeling Gov. Abbott "Robinhood in reverse." He went viral for opposing the Ten Commandments bill on religious grounds and is now squaring up against the Christian nationalist billionaire pastors trying to take over Texas - and the United States. He spoke to Brad about reproductive rights, education, religious freedom, and how Texans are fighting back.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm joined today by someone I'm so grateful to have taken the time to talk to me, someone who many of you probably have seen on viral videos, just doing amazing work in the Texas legislature, and that is Representative James Tallarico.
So, Representative Tallarico, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Let me tell folks about you.
I think a lot of folks have probably heard by now, but you are a representative in the Texas House and you represent District 50 there.
You were born in Round Rock, which is near Austin, attended Wells Branch Elementary, graduated from McNeil High.
and earned degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard.
After that you became a teacher on the west side of San Antonio and public education remains something that is near and dear to your heart.
It is a cause you champion all the time.
You serve on the Public Education Committee, the Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee, the Calendars Committee, and many other things.
Folks, if you've been following Texas politics, they've had four special sessions called by the governor, so Representative Tallarico is tired, so we're going to get him in and out of here.
I wanted to interview you for so many reasons, but you went viral last summer talking about the Ten Commandments bill.
You've been featured in Politico and other places just talking about The state of Texas and the people that you represent.
One of the things that comes through every time you talk is that you're a person of faith.
You're a Christian.
Is it fair to characterize you as a Christian who is trying to combat Christian nationalism in Texas?
Yeah, I think that's a great way to describe the work I'm doing here in Texas.
There is a cancer on my religion, and until we confess the sin that is Christian nationalism and exercise it from our churches, we can't live up to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
And so, unfortunately, a lot of the time that I spend here at the Texas Legislature is combating that Christian nationalism, that perversion of my faith in that subversion of our democracy.
We're going to come back to that, and that's something that I think people are going to want to hear a lot more about.
I want to talk, though, also about your experiences as a public education, as a public school teacher.
And I'm just wondering what your experiences teaching in public schools in Texas did to motivate you to run for office and all the work that you do now.
Yeah, and to connect it back to your first question, my faith is really what motivated me to become a teacher and motivated me to run for office.
So my faith really underpins everything that I do.
It's the most important thing.
In my life, I was the grandson of a Baptist preacher from South Texas.
I still attend the same church I was baptized in when I was two years old, and I'm now in seminary studying to become a minister myself.
And so I was taught from the earliest age that That our love for God has to become our love for our neighbors.
Our faith has to move us from the sanctuary to the streets.
And so it's why I was a political activist and organizer.
In college, and it's why I became a public school teacher on the west side of San Antonio.
For your listeners who are familiar with San Antonio, they know that the west side is a beautiful and historic Mexican-American neighborhood.
And it's also one of the poorest zip codes in the state of Texas, one of the poorest zip codes in the country.
And so every day my students struggled heroically to overcome poverty, overcome racism, overcome systems that were designed to hold them, their families, and their community back.
And so my time in the classroom was was spent trying to help my students overcome those inequitable and unjust systems, not just educational systems, but also healthcare systems, criminal justice systems, environmental systems, all of which conspired to hurt my students and students just like them around the state, around the country.
And I was a pretty good teacher in room 112 at Rhodes Middle School, but We lost Desmond Tutu not too long ago, and he had this great quote about, you can keep pulling people out of the river, but at some point you have to go upstream and find out why they're falling in the first place.
And I knew that despite the good I was doing in my classroom, my students were still falling back into that same river after they left my care.
And that got me really mad and really angry.
And it's what led me to work in the nonprofit space and then ultimately to run for the state legislature because this is where the vast majority of education policy is crafted.
This is where those systems I was just talking about are built.
And I felt like we needed a teacher, needed an educator who cared about the students that I cared about in this position.
So we've already established that your faith is what really motivates everything you do as an individual, as a public servant.
You've just talked wonderfully about your experiences as a middle school teacher and what your students taught you and how you decided that the system needed to be addressed at large.
This brings us to what's happening in the Texas legislature now.
Over the past few months, Governor Abbott has called a number of special sessions in order to try to pass a school voucher bill that would provide each Texan with a given amount of money to apply to a school that they would choose.
You championed against this bill and you continue to do so.
You've helped to defeat it so far, and it looks like it's on the way to not coming back, at least one hopes.
But in the process, you gave us some great taglines.
So I'm going to repeat your tagline, and then I want you to tell us what they mean.
All right?
So here we go.
School vouchers are welfare for the rich.
So, you know, these voucher scams are pushed by wealthy special interests in Texas and across the country who are trying to dismantle public education and therefore dismantle democracy.
And they've come up with a bunch of poll tested slogans to sell these scams.
And, and those slogans sound pretty good, you know, school choice, educational freedom, parental rights.
But once you dig into the data about these programs and what they've done in other states where they've been implemented, you start to realize how, how much those slogans are pure BS.
So working class kids, poor kids, like the ones that I taught on the west side of San Antonio, can't take advantage of these voucher programs for a couple of reasons.
One, private schools can deny admission to any kid for any reason they want.
Two, the voucher doesn't cover the full cost of tuition.
So how is an $8,000 voucher going to help you get into a $27,000 a year private school?
And then last, Private schools don't have to provide transportation or special education services.
And a lot of counties in Texas, in fact a majority of counties, don't even have a private school.
We have a lot of rural communities that don't even have a private school option in their community.
And so what ends up happening in these states is these vouchers become a coupon for wealthy families to save on their private school tuition bills.
89% of New Hampshire's voucher program went to subsidize kids who were already in private school to begin with.
In Arizona, it was 75%.
In Wisconsin, it's 76%.
In every state that's done this, you see that the vast majority of the funding for these programs ends up going to rich parents who are already sending their kids to private school.
That's why I call it welfare for the wealthy.
All right, so this leads into our next one, and I think it's related, but this means that Governor Greg Abbott is Robin Hood in reverse.
That's right, because what ends up happening is that states that start these voucher programs, the program takes money out of underfunded public schools to give it to those wealthy parents to subsidize their private schooling.
And so you're essentially taking money from my kids on the west side of San Antonio, or kids from the third ward of Houston, or kids from small towns across Texas, and giving it to the wealthiest people in our state.
And so that's why I call it reverse Robinhood, because it's stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
And you make a point that I think many need to be reminded of, or maybe haven't thought of, is that this is not a one-to-one trade.
Oh, vouchers, no big deal.
You can still go to your school.
But what you're pointing out is that funds are going to then be drawn away from those public schools.
In the past, I've done some work with Houston ISD.
And I'm thinking of that vast and large school district with students who don't have, many of whom don't have access to the kinds of private schools that would charge $27,000 a year.
And if you take funds away from a school district like that, you are hurting so many students who have the least amount of choice, even though they want to sell this as a matter of school choice, parental choice, and so on.
That's exactly right.
Our schools in Texas are already dramatically underfunded.
We rank 43rd in the nation in per-student education funding.
Texas teachers are actually making less than they did 10 years ago when you adjust for inflation.
And we have schools across the state, including back in San Antonio ISD, that are on the verge of closing because they don't have enough funding.
So that's the context.
And any program like a voucher that siphons off money from our schools to the tune of $3 billion in the first year is doing a great disservice to our students and our parents and to all of us.
Even if you don't have kids in public school, Those schools are helping to strengthen our community, strengthen our economy, strengthen our democracy.
And I just want to say that's the point of these programs.
That is the goal.
If you read the investigative journalism on some of these billionaires who are pushing these voucher scams, they want to dismantle public education as a societal project.
And so that's the true motivation behind these voucher scams.
It's not to help working class or poor kids, right?
We already established that.
The goal is to brick by brick tear down our public neighborhood schools and therefore tear down our democracy.
I want to get to those billionaires in a minute and talk more about them.
I just want to follow up with one more question and comment about the democratic aspects of public schools, because I think it's worth everyone taking a minute to ponder, and that is, you know, the U.S.
school system was designed to be free for everyone and a place where we would really enact and ritualize
The idea of a government built for all people, a place where regardless of your religion, your race, your creed, your ethnicity, of your family's story of recent immigration or bygone immigration, whatever it may be, you walk into a school where we are going to live as people who have the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, people who have the promise of equality under the law.
And I can't think of a place Where in the United States, this is ritualized, where we are trained to enact that democracy more than in a public school.
It doesn't mean that you can't send your kid to private schools.
I'm not saying to outlaw that.
All I'm saying is as a public school kid, that's a treasure of American democracy.
And if you try to take that away or do away with it, You're taking away, to me, the very foundations of our public square.
And I think just from hearing you talk and hearing the arguments you've made in the past, that that's at least part of your view, too.
Am I right about that?
That's absolutely right.
These voucher scams are an existential threat to the project of public education and therefore to the project of democracy.
You know, in George Washington's last address to Congress, he talked about how important Education was to safeguarding this democratic experiment.
I, for one, would not be on this podcast if it wasn't for public schools.
I was born to a single mom who didn't get to go to college, but because of Texas public schools and Texas public school teachers, I got to get degrees from UT Austin and Harvard University.
That would have been unthinkable to my mom without this critical institution of public education.
And I think a lot of folks would say the same thing.
We owe a lot to our neighborhood public schools, and that's not to denigrate private schools.
There are great private schools, great private school educators that are doing great work, but I'm not going to take precious taxpayer dollars out of our underfunded public schools and give them to unaccountable private schools that serve the wealthy few.
That is, to me, un-American, and it's also un-Christian, back to our earlier conversation.
You know, neighborhood public schools, they help all of us, you know, at least many of us, go places we didn't think we could go.
And they also introduce us to our neighbors, which is part of democracy.
I get to meet my neighbors.
And it's something we all do together, right?
The analogy I've used for the voucher scams is it's like taking money from the park's budget to subsidize someone's country club membership.
Right.
It's like taking money out of our, uh, our transportation department budget to pay your own driveway.
Right.
Or it's like taking money out of our police department budget to pay for your own private security card.
Schools and police departments and roads and parks.
These are things that we do together as a community because they benefit all of us, even if we don't use them directly.
They still benefit us indirectly.
And so again, any attack on these institutions are an attack on democracy, which is just a fancy word for all of us living together and making decisions together.
Let's talk about these wealthy donors.
We got to do it.
So, Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes are West Texas, you know, very, very, very wealthy individuals, and they've injected tens of millions of dollars into Texas politics over the last few years.
According to CNN, they have turned the state legislature into a laboratory for far-right policy that's starting to gain traction across the US.
So friends, if you're listening and you're not a tech center, you're not sort of aware of what's happening, you know, two very wealthy individuals like this Can inject money into the legislature by funding the campaigns of people that run for the Texas State House, the Senate and so on.
And if you don't vote the way they want after they funded you, they will just primary you.
And so what they can do is push everyone in the Republican Party to the right because they are really the kingmakers.
If you don't have their money, you can't get elected.
And once you're elected, if you turn on them, they will do everything they can to get you out of there and get their person in.
They're particularly focused on education.
And again, according to CNN, their ultimate goal is to replace public education with private Christian schooling.
You've touched on this already, Representative Tallarico, but how is the voucher push part of a Christian nationalist vision for Texas and the United States pushed by these very wealthy individuals?
So Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes are two billionaires from West Texas.
And for context, for those that are not from Texas, we don't have any campaign contribution limits in this state.
You can literally give a candidate for office the million dollar check and that is not against the law.
And so these two billionaires have poured more than a hundred million dollars into our politics.
Every Republican state senator in Texas has taken their money, more than half of Republican House members in Texas have taken their money.
For some Republicans, more than half of their total contributions come from these two billionaires.
And it's not just buying politicians.
They also fund a sprawling network of think tanks, advocacy organizations, legal organizations, media outlets.
They've created this ecosystem to push an extreme Christian nationalist agenda.
And so if you're not a Texan and you're trying to figure out why this matters to you, two billionaires are trying to destroy democracy in the second largest state in the Union.
I think this is the biggest story in American politics and not enough people are talking about it.
The important thing to realize about these two is that they are not just billionaires.
They're not just oil and gas oligarchs.
They are also Christian nationalist pastors.
And I know billionaire pastor sounds like an oxymoron, but on Sunday mornings, these two billionaires are preaching at far-right churches.
And if you listen to their sermons, they don't preach a theology of universal love.
They preach a theology of power and control and domination.
They think Climate change is God's will.
They compare homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, and they believe that only Christians have a right to serve in public office.
In fact, they told the former Republican Speaker of the Texas House, Joe Strauss, that he didn't have a right to serve as Speaker because he's Jewish.
And so the scariest part is that they are turning this toxic theology into law in the second largest state in the country.
And we should all be incredibly alarmed by this development and what it means for the rest of the country.
So, as somebody who's not a Texan, but who has done his best to learn and read and invest in these issues, from afar, it looks like two men can spend $100 million, which means that they are able to, I will just say diplomatically, highly influence Who is elected in terms of Republican reps and senators in the state legislature.
And then they can basically tell those elected officials, here are the ways you should vote if you want our continued support.
And if you don't get our continued support, it's very unlikely you'll be reelected.
And or we will primary you.
And therefore, our vision for society, which just happens to be, as you say, a hardcore Christian nationalist vision of society, that means if you're Jewish, you don't get to be speaker.
If you are queer, you are somehow akin to committing bestiality.
They are able, in essence, to tilt the scales in a way that feels very It's undemocratic and it's having an undue influence on our school system because these are the kinds of men, and correct me if I'm wrong, that would tell you the public schools are full of sin and evil because they're teaching things like DEI or there are gay characters in some of the books in that library or woke ideology is taking over.
Am I wrong about that?
I mean, as somebody who's not there, please correct me.
Please expand.
Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
And I just want to say it's not that they believe these things about public schools.
They have created the narrative that you just encapsulated.
So they've always had two steps in their plan to dismantle public education, which, as you mentioned, the investigative reporting by CNN and other outlets, suggest that that is their ultimate goal, is replacing public education with private Christian schooling.
And to do that, they have two steps.
One is to discredit public schools.
The second is to defund public schools.
And you have to do the first one, because as we talked about, People love their public schools, right?
People across Texas love their neighborhood schools and their neighborhood public school teachers, and they owe a lot to those public schools.
And so, if you're going to defund them, if you're going to close them, you've got to discredit them first.
And that's why you've seen these book bans accusing our librarians of grooming students.
It's why you've seen this CRT hysteria and the historical whitewashing accusing our teachers of indoctrination.
It's why you've seen the largest public school district in the state, Houston ISD, being taken over.
Even though they have improved their academic performance over the last few years, all of these things are connected.
And it's a coordinated campaign to discredit public education as a societal project and paving the way for voucher scams that will defund and close our neighborhood schools.
It really is quite frightening.
I want to just finish talking about these two billionaires and their influence by asking, how are they able to push the entire Texas legislature to the right?
We hear a lot about, we need to get over our polarization.
What about reaching across the aisle?
Well, how does the influence of $100 million from two men make it really hard to have candidates in the Republican Party who want to do anything of that kind when it comes to building Texas policy and law together?
Well, we were talking earlier about the threat these two billionaires pose.
I just want to remind folks that this is not theoretical.
This is not something in the future.
It's already happened.
The most extreme abortion ban in the country, with no exception for rape or incest or the life of the mother, passed in the state of Texas.
Abortion is now illegal for every person in the second largest state in the country.
The most extreme gun laws in the nation have passed here in Texas.
Attacks on LGBTQ people have passed here in Texas.
Now, we stood up to these billionaires two weeks ago when they tried to defund our schools with this voucher scam.
And in the Texas House, where they have less influence, we were able to unite a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans, and we defeated Greg Abbott's voucher scam.
We stood up to these two billionaires.
And that's an incredible win.
It's great progress.
It should give us all hope.
That there is still a coalition in this country that will stand up for our kids and stand up for democracy.
But that win came after a lot of devastation with those policies I already mentioned.
So they are making tremendous progress.
We stopped them on this issue, and hopefully that provides a blueprint for stopping them going forward.
But I want to acknowledge the tremendous harm that these two billionaires have already done to the people of this state and to the people of this country.
Well, and you can imagine that one of the reasons the rural Republican reps were willing to jump on board is because when it comes to this issue, there's a lot of people who don't have a private school anywhere near them.
So it's really hard to go home and explain your vote there to the people that are going to be hurt by it.
All right, I'm going to ask you two more questions.
You identify as a Christian.
It's overwhelmingly important to you.
We've talked about that already.
I want to play a little bit of a clip from your just really inspiring words on the Ten Commandments bill from last summer.
Friends, if you remember, we talked about this.
There was a bill that would have mandated the Ten Commandments be shown in every classroom in Texas.
And you really had a lot to say about that, and a lot of that came from your personal experience and belief as a Christian.
This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional, it's not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian.
And I say that because I believe this bill is idolatrous.
I believe it is exclusionary, and I believe it is arrogant.
And those three things, in my reading of the gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.
A religion that has to force people to put up a poster to prove its legitimacy is a dead religion.
And it's not one that I want to be a part of.
It's not one that I think I am a part of.
You know that in scripture it says faith without works is what?
Dead.
Is dead.
My concern is instead of bringing a bill that will feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, We're instead mandating that people put up a poster.
And so I'm very ascended by this legislation.
So in this clip, you identify clearly and repeatedly as a person of faith.
I want to ask you this.
Why is freedom from religion the key to having the freedom of religion for a person of faith like you?
To me, the closest thing we have to the Kingdom of Heaven is a multiracial, multicultural, multi-religious democracy where power is truly shared among all people.
You know, in my tradition, Jesus could have started a Christian nation, but love would never do that.
The kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed was not like any kingdom we've ever known.
It doesn't look like any of the kingdoms of the world.
Instead of sitting on a throne, Jesus sat at a table.
Instead of riding a war horse, he rode a donkey.
Instead of picking up a sword, he picked up a cross.
So, the Kingdom of God, for those that belong to the Christian tradition or those who are simply learning about our tradition, the Kingdom of God inverts the power dynamics of the kingdoms of the world.
True strength is vulnerability.
True wealth is sharing.
True status is equality.
And so, to me, a bill that seeks to elevate one tradition over all the rest is antithetical to the kingdom of God and to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And that's what I tried to articulate.
We can criticize Christian nationalism on constitutional grounds.
That's pretty easy to do, as you just pointed out with the First Amendment and the Establishment Clause.
But I think it's really important to critique Christian nationalism on religious grounds, on explicitly Christian grounds, because Christian nationalists are pushing these harmful policies in our name, in the name of Christ.
And there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism.
It is a threat, not only to American democracy, not only to the American Constitution, but it's a threat to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And so it's incumbent upon every Christian, every person of faith, especially those who are holding positions of power in our community, to speak out against this perversion of our faith tradition and the subversion of our democracy.
So if I'm a devil's advocate, or I'm a Christian nationalist advocate in this case, and I say, hey, what's the big deal, Representative Tallarico, come on, Ten Commandments, who cares?
I'm in second grade, or I'm in 11th grade, and yeah, I'm an atheist, or I'm Hindu, or perhaps I'm something else, and is it really going to hurt me to have the Ten Commandments in my classroom?
What would you say?
I think you should ask those students.
You should ask the atheist student, the Hindu student, the Buddhist student sitting in a classroom and having their faith tradition, their identity, their culture denigrated on the walls of that classroom.
The Ten Commandments says that thou shall not worship any other god but me.
What does that tell a student from another tradition, a student who doesn't belong to one of the Abrahamic faith traditions?
So, yes, this does tremendous damage to students who are already different, who already stick out, who are already struggling to fit in in Texas public schools.
And now you're singling them out once again to prove that they're not really part of our community.
And my heart aches for those students, and that's part of what motivated my words in that committee hearing, is trying to, as a Christian, stand up for my neighbors, even my neighbors who aren't Christian or aren't religious.
I often think of the parable of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus specifically defines neighbor as someone who is different from us.
Religiously, politically, culturally, racially, economically, and calls us to love that neighbor who is different.
And to me, a bill that seeks to put up and elevate one tradition over the other is the opposite of loving my neighbor.
And the last thing I'll say is that I think it's indicative of a dying type of Christianity, one that feels like it needs to put up a poster to prove its legitimacy.
And I don't want to belong to a religion that feels the need to impose its belief on others rather than modeling those beliefs through our own example.
And that's what I tried to communicate to my colleague in that hearing.
Last question.
A lot of folks who are not Texans, they see what happens in Texas with the abortion ban you mentioned.
They see the ways that migrants have been attacked.
For lack of a better word, by way of really violent and gruesome traps set for them in rivers and other things.
They hear the comments of, of Dan Patrick and, and Greg Abbott.
From afar, I think it's tempting for, for many of them to just write Texas off.
Oh, it's a, it's a place that is so conservative, that is so committed to this right wing, hardcore Christian nationalist, uh, vision for society that, what, what's going on there?
And so I'll just ask you, is Texas a red state?
No, Texas is a non-voting state.
When you look at the data, there are so many Texans who are either disenfranchised or locked out of the democratic process or choose not to vote.
And that is really the majority that can swing elections going forward.
I would urge all of your listeners not to give up on our state for a couple of reasons.
One is that Texas, before this recent takeover by far-right extremists, was a progressive state.
Lyndon Johnson is from Texas.
Barbara Jordan is from Texas.
Ann Richards is from Texas.
You know, if you believe in the Great Society programs, the 1960s, voting rights, Medicare, Medicaid, all of those came about because of the Texas leader.
Our state has a strong progressive tradition, and it has only been recently that our state has been taken hostage by these wealthy special interests that are pushing an extremist Christian nationalist agenda.
And we are making progress in taking our state back.
Donald Trump won this state by only five points in 2020.
Every election cycle, we are getting closer to reclaiming Texas and putting in place a majority of folks who believe in democracy.
And so we need everyone's help.
Don't write off this state.
I believe Reverend Barber says there's no red states.
There's gerrymandered states.
that Texas can once again be a leader for progressive pro-democracy policies in the United States.
I believe Reverend Barber says there's no red states.
There's gerrymandered states.
There are states, as you say, where people are disenfranchised.
And what we say on this show is that when you say a state is a red or blue, what you do is a great disservice to all of those neighborhoods, all of those little towns, all those cities, all those places where people are Striving really hard to make a multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy that works for everybody.
And so what you might see in a headline about Texas is not the reality of so many folks in West San Antonio, in Austin.
Yeah.
And the last thing I'll say is that if you're sitting in California or New York or Massachusetts and You know, you're trying to figure out whether Texas is worth investing in.
It is in your best interest for us to take back Texas.
The only way we can overcome the filibuster, overcome the electoral college, the only way we can pass voting rights legislation nationally, climate action to save our planet, is if we take back Texas.
This is the key to the whole ballgame.
And so I hope folks recognize that and will join us in our struggle to retake Texas.
Thank you so much for your time, Representative Tallarico.
Appreciate your work, have featured it on the show, have let people know that you are a Democrat and a Christian in Texas who is fighting Christian nationalism.
I know you're tired.
You've been through like 50 or 60 special sessions here in like two weeks.
What's the best way people can link up with you and just figure out what's happening with you and all of the ways that you're fighting Christian nationalism and what's happening in Texas?
Yeah, you can find me on all the major social media sites, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok.
You can sign up for our newsletter on our website, which is just MyNameJamesTallarico.com.
And I want to thank you for having me.
I'm a big fan of the show and y'all do such important work letting people know about these issues.
And it's been a true honor to join you here.
Thank you so much for your time and hope we can have you back.
And in the meantime, we thank you for all you're doing to fight the good fight.
