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Democratic Texas state Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico recently reiterated his belief that the Bible doesn’t prohibit abortion, and that the government shouldn’t restrict it.
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Speaking during the third part of an hours-long interview with podcaster and former L’Oréal CEO Jamie Kern Lima that aired Sunday, Talarico was asked to explain his views on abortion “as a Presbyterian seminarian” and how he “arrived at them from a biblical perspective.”
Noting abortion is “an issue that a lot of Christians struggle with, and that there’s a lot of fierce and passionate debate within our faith communities,” Talarico said he believes that “people of good faith can arrive at different moral conclusions, and I feel like we do not have the kind of tolerance for that disagreement right now within the church, within our politics, and it’s corrosive.”
James Talarico on abortion: “I trust Texas women to make decisions about their own bodies, to shape their own destinies. I don’t believe that’s a place for government. That’s a belief I hold not despite my faith, but because of my faith. Jesus never talks about abortion. The… pic.twitter.com/KjIU94ukqU
— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) May 25, 2026
While he acknowledged Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV as his “spiritual heroes,” Talarico said he disagrees with them on the topic.
“I trust Texas women to make decisions about their own bodies, to shape their own destinies in consultation with their family members, their doctors, their faith leaders. I don’t believe that’s a place for government. I don’t believe it’s a place for politicians. I don’t believe it’s a place for the state. And that’s a belief I hold not despite my faith, but because of my faith,” he said.
“Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion. And when that happens with a social issue as important as abortion, we Christians have to take Scripture as a whole. And we’ve got to try to make some kind of ethical determination,” he continued, going on to accuse Texas’ abortion ban of shutting out victims of rape and incest from accessing abortion.
Talarico has repeatedly defended abortion and homosexuality by noting there is no record of Jesus addressing such topics in the Bible, a tactic that Robert Gagnon, who serves as Visiting Scholar at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Ridgeland, Mississippi, dismissed as “juvenile hermeneutics” in a lengthy X post in March.
“The Bible doesn’t mention every issue in society. The absence of mention of abortion is no more significant than its absence of mention of the cruelty of infant exposure,” Gagnon wrote.
“The evidence that we do have from both Testaments of Scripture and from the unified witness of early Christian texts in the period from the second century A.D. on leave little doubt about the church’s consistent stance against abortion as a grave wrong.”
Despite claiming the Bible is silent on abortion, Talarico has used Scripture, including the story of the Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke, to defend his pro-abortion views.
During an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan last July, Talarico claimed the Virgin Mary assenting to the angel Gabriel’s message regarding the Immaculate Conception suggests the Bible is pro-choice, and that a woman’s consent is part of the creation process.
Talarico also claimed to Rogan that Genesis teaches life begins with breath, echoing a theological argument floated in 2019 by former Secretary of Transportation and outspoken Episcopalian Pete Buttigieg to justify late-term abortion.
Talarico said during a sermon in 2022 that he believes abortion rights are also relevant to transgender-identifying individuals, claiming “every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the state” when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that year. He said, “nothing is more un-Christian than that.”
Talarico has also claimed the Bible rejects the idea of “embryonic personhood,” likening embryos to any other cell or bacteria in the human body. In a 2016 op-ed, Talarico’s PCUSA pastor, Jim Rigby, compared aborted babies to “extracted teeth.”
During the first part of his interview with Lima that aired May 14, Talarico claimed he got into politics because of his Christian faith and that he must often remind himself that human beings bear the image of God.
“I always try to remember that everyone I come across is the expression of a divine source. Every person that I meet is the bearer of a sacred image. And I forget that all the time. We all forget it all the time,” he said, adding that remembering others are image-bearers makes him “more effective [at] bringing people over who may not agree with me on a lot of other issues.”
“It is valuing each and every person and valuing their humanity. And that really stems from those teachings that my granddad passed on to me and that Jesus is still communicating to us 2,000 years later,” he added.
Talarico, who won Texas’ Democratic U.S. Senate primary in March, will face off this November against the winner of Tuesday’s runoff Republican primary between Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
What do you think of Talarico’s views? Share your thoughts and prayers below.
This article was originally published at The Christian Post. Photo Credit: Screenshot/Marco Foster via X.
