Talarico Visited Mosque Weekend After 9/11, Defends It As ‘Solidarity’ Moment

The Democratic Party’s great white hope in Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico, visited a mosque in the days after the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks — a move that he now defends as being in the interest of “solidarity.”

Talarico’s mother was behind the trip — he was 12 years old at the time — and she took his sister Madeleine and two of his friends as well, to counter some of the distrust of American Muslims in the days after the attacks.

The Texas Democrat is an ordained pastor as well as a politician, and he often appears to blur the lines between the two. Brought up in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Talarico’s religion is rooted in activism, which in turn fuels his politics.

In 2021, Talarico sponsored a bill that would allow Imams to perform weddings in Texas. Talarico’s church has also continued to blur the lines, hosting an annual Iftar dinner for the Muslim holiday of Ramadan and inviting a local Imam to deliver a sermon in 2022. Rigby himself has touted partnerships with the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Pastor Jim Rigby of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church led a politically active congregation and preached social justice from the pulpit — and was even arrested in 2017 for criminal trespass after taking over the governor’s office to protest a bill that would allow police officers making traffic stops to check immigration status as well. Talarico said that Rigby inspired him to see politics as a way to practically implement the biblical call to love one’s neighbor.

As he became more active in politics, Talarico attended seminary.

“The whole reason I went to seminary is because I had a pretty big crisis of faith in our political system and in democracy,” he said, adding that he also wanted to make sure that when he discussed religious matters he was getting things right. “I wanted to have professional training, just because you can mess up people’s lives with both faith and politics, especially when they’re mixed.”

In 2021, Talarico’s particular blend of politicized religiosity led to a strange invocation in the Texas House — “Holy mystery, you have so many names,” he said, listing off names for God in a litany of religions before declaring simply that God is love. In his prayer before the body, he asked God to help the other members of the chamber to practice not just “personal love” but “political love” by embracing policies that would “welcome the stranger.”

The invocation ruffled enough feathers that the Texas House’s practice of rotating chaplains was abruptly discontinued.

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