Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico portray their U.S. Senate campaigns as a fight for the soul of America — one in which God plays an active yet vastly different role.
Talarico, believing God is on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized, focuses his message to voters on equity and protecting personal freedom.
Paxton sees God as on his side — a force safeguarding his ability to protect Texas and the nation from disaster at the hands of the “radical left.”
“I truly believe that God just delivered me, not because I am a great person, because God is sovereign and he does what he wants to do,” Paxton said on Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s podcast, referring to tribulations that included an unsuccessful 2023 impeachment on corruption charges.
“I don’t take credit for it, it’s really by the grace of God,” Paxton said.
In Texas — where two-thirds of the adult population identifies as Christian and 45% say religion is “very important” in their life — the candidates are asking voters to choose between two dramatically different views of Christianity. Paxton’s version insists conservative Christian values — such as protecting the unborn and preserving the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage — must prevail. Talarico’s Christianity celebrates pluralism, affirms LGBTQ+ individuals and believes God transcends all partisan divisions.
“Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people,” Talarico, a seminarian, said in a sermon posted on TikTok in December 2025. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor.”
“We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God,” he said.
Talarico has made the New Testament command to love thy neighbor a centerpiece of his campaign. That focus has also given Paxton ammunition to portray his opponent as out of touch with Texas values and Scripture.
“So, what are the differences between me and my opponent?” Paxton said in a July campaign rally in McAllen in a now viral X clip. “I’m sure you know some of them. One of them is family.”
“Actually, let me talk about faith first,” he said.
Paxton spent the next minute critiquing Talarico’s faith, stating the Democratic nominee had said that God is nonbinary and that supporting the oil and gas industry is un-Christian.
Talarico has dismissed the criticism, saying his statements were taken out of context, but the Republican continues to assail his opponent’s faith, implying and outright stating that Talarico cannot be considered a Christian.
Talarico’s views, Paxton said on Patrick’s podcast, are “antithetical to historical Christian views” and “adopted from liberal theology that do not reflect what Scripture says.”
The message is a frequent theme in Paxton’s stump speeches.
Talarico has gone on the offensive as well, criticizing Christian nationalism, an ideology that depicts the U.S. as a nation founded on Christian principles that must be protected by the government. Many Paxton-supported policies, according to Talarico, advance that agenda.
Talarico pointed to a state law requiring Texas public school classrooms to display donated copies of the Ten Commandments — a law that Paxton supports and has defended in court as state attorney general.
“It’s using political power to elevate one religious tradition over all the others,” Talarico told podcaster Joe Rogan in July 2025. “It’s using governmental power to dominate our neighbors instead of loving them as ourselves, which is exactly what we’re called to do as Christians.”
The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service requested interviews from both candidates. Paxton’s campaign did not respond to the interview request but had sent an earlier statement criticizing Talarico’s understanding of Christianity. Talarico's campaign pointed to the Democrat’s extensive comments about his faith in sermons, speeches and interviews.
“Founded on the rock of Biblical Truth”
Paxton is an evangelical Christian, though his denominational affiliation is unclear, who has questioned a strict separation of church and state, arguing the phrase does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Last year he encouraged Texas students to recite the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer in support of a law allowing school districts to dedicate class time for prayer.
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton wrote in a message on the office of attorney general’s website. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society.”
The U.S. was “founded on the rock of Biblical Truth,” he wrote, vowing to fight “far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Paxton has also said his faith — and the Constitution, which he said was “written by people of faith” in a 2015 interview with the Tribune — informs his opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and he has called gun ownership a God-given right protected by the Second Amendment.
Paxton’s combination of religion and politics is rooted in the alliance between the Republican Party and conservative Christianity that dates to “the late 1970s and early 1980s in the formation of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition,” said Janine Giordano Drake, a professor of history at Indiana University.
There were “many efforts at that time to define a so-called Christian moral politics around what they call family values, personal responsibility, what they defined as appropriate expression of sexuality and patriotism,” Drake said.
Talarico, disagreeing with many of the theological and political positions commonly associated with the religious right, rejects the idea that faithful Christians must oppose abortion and says he trusts women to make decisions about their own bodies.
“That’s a belief I have not despite my faith, but because of it. Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion,” he said in an interview with Jamie Kern Lima in late May.
Talarico’s campaign emphasizes the need to get the government out of private personal decisions, and the Democrat advocates for a version of Christianity that accepts all people as made in God’s image.
Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination. He is currently on leave from his degree program.
Both Senate candidates have been criticized for falling short of being an authentic or true Christian — Talarico for his progressive Christian message, and Paxton for two alleged extramarital affairs whose wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds” in July 2025.
Elesha J. Coffman, a professor of American intellectual and religious history at Baylor University, traces debates over the “correct” practice of Christianity to the Civil War, when Christians on both sides of the conflict disagreed over interpretations of the Bible.
“The pro-slavery factions were picking on specific verses like ‘slaves obey your masters’ and saying, ‘Well, we’re clearly advancing the more biblical society because look, the Bible says exactly what we're doing,’” Coffman said.
“The Northern abolitionists had some specific verses, but it was also bigger picture — what do we understand to be true about God? What do we understand to be true about human nature and human flourishing? So even if the Bible says these specific things, like let’s nuance that, let's contextualize that, let's acknowledge that our world is different,” she said.
A recent Fox News poll found 78% of white evangelicals would choose Paxton over Talarico. Support for Paxton drops to 57% for “regular worship attenders.” The same poll found 51% of registered voters in Texas preferred Talarico, as did 63% of moderates.
“Forcing our religion down their throats”
Protecting religious freedom and practice has been a Paxton priority since he became attorney general in 2015, generating loyal support from grassroots conservatives.
“I was thinking about one of my very first cases when I was attorney general,” he said during a July campaign speech in McAllen. “There was a teacher in Bell County, just an innocent teacher who put up a Linus cartoon over Christmas that said ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.’ And the school board voted to make her take that down.”
“We defended her,” Paxton said. “She has a right to her free expression, her religious liberty.”
Over the last 10 years, Paxton has championed religious freedom in court, often defending groups or individuals with conservative Christian views, particularly on marriage and gender.
Paxton has filed legal briefs defending Christian prayer as an acceptable way to open court proceedings, supporting an employer’s right to refuse to supply contraceptives, defending foster parents who “hold traditional beliefs about marriage,” defending a baker who refused on religious grounds to make a cake celebrating a “gender transition,” supporting a football coach who was fired for praying after games, and more.
Tisa Wenger, a professor of American religious history at Yale Divinity School, said religious liberty has long been understood as “an all-American ideal that many Americans are very proud of.”
“It’s a kind of principle that lots of people can claim, and do claim — and they claim it for their own purposes,” Wenger said in an interview.
“It is not restricted to one group or one side of the political spectrum,” she said, adding that the past two decades have seen a “more conservative approach to religious freedom.”
This shift prioritizes the expression of conservative Christianity over other religions, replacing “older American traditions” that believed the separation of church and state was the foundation of religious freedom, Wenger said.
At the nation’s founding, “the fear was religious tyranny of one particular church over others,” she said.
“In some ways, we are also returning to that moment now,” Wenger said. “Conservative Christians have a lot of public power, and there are many minorities — including Christians who are more on the left — who are protesting that on very similar grounds that people like Baptists did in the Revolutionary period against a kind of established church.”
As the Republican Party has increasingly embraced blurring the line between religion and government, Paxton has called the Ten Commandments an expression of America’s legal, moral and historical heritage, even as families have sued — and are suing — to remove them from classrooms, arguing the displays violate their right to practice religion and improperly expose students to religious doctrine.
On the floor of the Texas House, where Talarico has served since 2019, the Austin-area representative said displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools was un-American and un-Christian.
“I believe this bill is idolatrous, I believe it is exclusionary, and I believe it is arrogant,” he said in a May 2023 clip that went viral on X with over 5.7 million views. “And those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.”
Talarico expanded on the notion during a February appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, saying: “We are called to love all of our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors.”
“Forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I’ve fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment,” he said.
“If God wants me here, no one can stop me”
Paxton, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, has frequently portrayed himself as a victim of political witch hunts. And like Trump, Paxton believes he is destined to usher in a greater, God-ordained future.
“Despite the fact that the left and the establishment wanted me out, there’s a greater power,” Paxton said during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in June.
“I’m not here because of some great thing I did, I’m here because God delivered me,” Paxton said, likening himself to other “not particularly perfect” biblical figures like Peter, Paul and David. “If God wants me here, no one can stop me. If God doesn’t want me here, no one can help me.”
Daniel Shelton attended an early August campaign rally in Houston and said he admired Paxton’s common sense.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, he's got baggage, he cheated on his wife.’ Well, so did King David. Get over it,” said Shelton, 66. “I'm voting for the office. I'm praying for the man that's going to fill that office.”
Across the political spectrum, invocations of divine favor have a long history in the United States, said Heath Carter, professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of “Union Made,” a book about the 19th-century labor movement in Chicago.
“The workers that I write about in Union Made, they believed God was on their side,” Carter said. “They looked at the Bible and they said, look, Jesus said the labor is worthy of his hire.”
Black Christians during the civil rights movement also understood “that God was on their side, that God was the God who led the Israelites out of Egypt and out of slavery and into liberation,” he said.
Over the last four decades, members of the Christian right “felt that they have the momentum, the kind of wind in their sails, and that God is with them in their righteous fight to take back America,” Carter said.
Talarico said he does not believe Jesus would be on the side of Democrats or Republicans. ”Jesus is far more radical than any political party. … I think he would challenge both political parties to keep working toward a more radical vision for democracy,” he said in an interview with The Breakfast Club.
Paxton has described his political fights with Democrats in terms of spiritual warfare.
“The fight is vicious,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition crowd after encouraging them to pray for him and the future of the country. “They try to put us in jail. They try to disparage us. … They try to ruin our families.”
“This is a battle not with flesh and blood, as we know, this is a spiritual battle,” he said.
Colleen DeGuzman contributed to this report.
This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.
Disclosure: Baylor University and Fox News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
