BY: Daiman Teer for The Simpleton Star
There are times when a politician says something so spectacularly ridiculous that you almost feel obligated to thank him for the material. James Talarico, an exhumes Wally Cox, and the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in Texas, has provided one of those moments. Talarico is a politician, a Presbyterian seminarian and, apparently, an expert on the gender identity of the Almighty. In 2021, while speaking on the floor of the Texas House, he declared, “God is nonbinary.” He went on to argue that God is masculine, feminine and everything in between, using biblical references to support his position.
Now, I can already hear the theological intellectuals warming up their keyboards. They will explain that God is beyond human categories, that Christianity has used both masculine and feminine imagery for God, and that Talarico was making a sophisticated argument about the limitations of human language. Wonderful. But there is a rather large difference between saying that God transcends human categories and announcing that God is nonbinary, a term that belongs squarely within the modern argument over human gender identity.
Here is the thing, if you are going to invent stupid and woke words, phrases and expressions, don’t self-own when you decide to use them in a political campaign, you nitwit!
That distinction is important because Talarico didn’t merely whisper this opinion to himself while contemplating the heavens. He was a public official speaking in the Texas Legislature. He deliberately made the statement in a political argument, and he has since acknowledged that he was being intentionally provocative. In other words, this wasn’t some unfortunate grammatical accident. He knew exactly what he was saying, and now that he is running for the United States Senate, he shouldn’t be surprised that somebody noticed.
I have a modest question for Mr. Talarico: when did God become part of the gender debate? Christianity has been wrestling with the nature of God for roughly two thousand years, while human beings have spent centuries trying to understand Scripture, theology and the nature of existence itself. Yet here we are, with a Texas politician informing us that the Creator of the universe has finally been properly categorized according to the vocabulary of contemporary progressive politics.
Apparently Heaven has been waiting for Austin.
Think about the comedy of it. God created the universe, but somehow neglected to settle the gender question until James Talarico came along. Galaxies, stars, oceans, planets and human beings apparently weren’t enough. The Almighty also needed a Texas Democrat to complete the celestial paperwork.
And this is where modern progressive politics becomes almost impossible to parody because reality keeps writing better jokes. Everything must be dragged into the same ideological framework. Race must be interpreted through politics. Sex must be interpreted through politics. Gender must be interpreted through politics. Religion must be interpreted through politics. Now God Himself gets pulled into the machinery and handed a contemporary identity label.
What comes next? Will Heaven issue a preferred-pronouns policy?
Perhaps the angels will need sensitivity training.
Talarico’s defenders will say that the important thing is his larger theological point: God transcends human limitations and cannot be confined to the categories people create. Again, there is nothing particularly outrageous about saying that. In fact, it is one of the most obvious things anyone could say about God. Human beings are finite. God, by definition, is not.
But then why use the terminology of the latest political controversy?
That is the question.
If Talarico wanted to argue that God is beyond human gender, he could have said exactly that. Instead, he selected the phrase “God is nonbinary,” a formulation guaranteed to inject contemporary gender politics directly into a discussion about the nature of God. Then, when people reacted to it, we were told that the people reacting simply didn’t understand the deeper theological meaning.
That is becoming a familiar trick in progressive politics: say something provocative, wait for the reaction and then explain that the people who reacted are too stupid to understand what you really meant.
No thanks.
Talarico is now running for the United States Senate, so perhaps he should get accustomed to people examining his public statements. His campaign has itself highlighted the “God is non-binary” statement, and Talarico has continued defending the theological argument behind it. He is therefore not entitled to pretend this is some obscure sentence dug out of an old college paper that nobody was supposed to see.
It is part of his public record.
And there is something especially entertaining about a politician who invokes the Apostle Paul while simultaneously presenting himself as the enlightened interpreter of God’s nature. Talarico has suggested that critics of his interpretation can essentially take their objections up with Paul.
That’s pretty damn confident.
Paul has been dead for about two thousand years, so getting him to respond to the Senate campaign might present a scheduling problem. Perhaps Talarico has a direct line to the afterlife that the rest of us don’t know about.
But the larger issue isn’t whether Talarico is a good Christian or a bad Christian. I don’t know his heart, and neither does anybody else. The issue is whether we should be suspicious when politicians begin using the language of contemporary political ideology to redefine ancient religious concepts. I think we should.
You don’t have to hate transgender people to think “God is nonbinary” is a ridiculous thing for a politician to say. You don’t have to oppose anybody’s personal choices to believe that the Creator of the universe is probably beyond the jurisdiction of a Texas Senate candidate’s terminology. And you certainly don’t have to be a theological scholar to recognize the spectacular arrogance involved in announcing that you have figured out something about God that has occupied theologians for thousands of years.
I have no idea whether Texans will elect James Talarico. Perhaps they will. Perhaps they won’t. But if he wants my vote, I would prefer that he explain his positions on taxes, energy, immigration, national security and the other earthly matters that senators are actually elected to deal with.
As for God, I suspect He can handle Himself.
In fact, I’m pretty sure He was doing just fine before James Talarico arrived.
THE BIBLE VERSE
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” — Isaiah 5:20
WHY I CHOSE THIS VERSE
I chose this verse because the problem I see here goes beyond one politician and one bizarre sentence. It concerns the increasingly common political habit of taking established ideas, established words and established institutions and forcing them through whatever ideological vocabulary happens to be fashionable at the moment.
Once that happens, confusion becomes a political weapon. Words stop having stable meanings, old ideas are declared obsolete and anyone who refuses to adopt the new vocabulary is treated as backward, hateful or ignorant. Eventually, the redefinition becomes more important than the reality being described.
That is why I chose Isaiah. The verse warns about the danger of reversing fundamental distinctions between good and evil and light and darkness. I am not suggesting that every person who uses the word “nonbinary” is evil, nor am I suggesting that Talarico’s theological position can be reduced to one Bible verse. My point is simpler: we should be extremely careful when political ideology begins dictating how we are permitted to understand things that are supposed to stand above politics.
And if God truly transcends our human categories, then perhaps the proper response is humility rather than certainty.
Perhaps the person who knows the least about the universe should be the least eager to tell the universe what God is.
A PRAYER FOR HUMILITY
Lord, give us the humility to recognize the limits of our own understanding. We are human beings living on a tiny planet in an enormous universe, and yet we often behave as though we have been handed the instruction manual for creation.
Give our politicians wisdom and our religious leaders courage. Help them resist the temptation to turn every theological question into a political slogan and every political argument into a theological crusade.
Give our citizens enough common sense to recognize the difference between genuine compassion and ideological theater, and enough courage to question fashionable ideas without fear of being shouted down.
And Lord, if You truly are nonbinary, binary, both, neither, or something so far beyond our understanding that our vocabulary cannot possibly describe You, I suppose we will eventually find out.
Until then, perhaps James Talarico could give You a little room to speak for Yourself.
Amen.
