# What Blue Texas Can Teach Uniting: Talarico and a Politics of Love

> Uniting’s David Barrow looks at what James Talarico’s Texas Senate win and his “politics of love” can teach the Uniting Church about faith, justice and winning change in flawed systems.

By David Barrow · 5 November 2026 · Features

Canonical: https://insights.uca.org.au/articles/what-blue-texas-can-teach-uniting-talarico-and-a-politics-of-love/

The US midterms delivered a thumping rebuke to the economic and social conditions put in place by the Trump administration.

No more than in Texas, where teacher, Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico won the first statewide Texas senate race in decades.

I've included lines from his speech below, which is a profound piece of public liturgy. It speaks to the challenge we face every day in Uniting and in our congregations.

Talarico provides a spiritual architecture that can help us as we struggle in a system that is often racist and punishes the poor. Talarico speaks to radical Christian themes of wealth distribution, anti-racist love and the importance of turning rage into outrage. It is even more powerful because he won.

One of the reasons that he won is that his high falutin' values and vision is matched by deep listening and practical actions to deliver on changes to material conditions. Such a perspective is all over the Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist tradition, and now, our Uniting Church.

In Uniting and in the Uniting Church in Australia we have accepted a huge challenge to change the world. Not only that, but to do so in a way that reflects the best of our Christian values.

Winning matters! That can't be done without compromise and negotiation. Without compromise our values stay stagnant.

Talarico's speech in the context of winning in Texas points to our human struggle. Living in the world as it is but striving for the world as it should be, or from the Lord's Prayer, trying to make on earth as it is in heaven. That is, balancing our values, vision, virtues, and ideals with the pragmatic realities of living in flawed systems, surrounded by flawed humans (including us).

(I also add the necessary caveats; he's a white Christian dude representing millions of unrecognised people of colour who helped get him elected, and an American politician, bound as a representative of a military state to disappoint eventually. But nevertheless the lessons are still there.)

### Why does Texas matter to us in Australia?

Texas alone is a state of 31 million people, with a GDP 63% larger than Australia. American senate results matter to us. A single US senator can have profound impacts on wars, tariffs, foreign aid decisions that impact billions of people across the world. Not only that, but the "blue wave" of Democratic voting flipped the state senate, house and governorship, Texas Supreme Court, all the way down to local school boards. These are changes not seen in generations.

### Understanding life for a Texan

In my previous role as Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation Pacific, I worked with US organisers on the West Coast and through them met the Texan community organisers.

They were tough Hispanic-American men and women organising non-partisan Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and multicultural communities, unions and schools across the state. Low-income communities in Texas don't only face what all other Americans face; a failed and exploitative private medical system, ICE raids at schools and grocery stores, school shootings, skyrocketing petrol prices (there is virtually no public transport in Texas, so this is a class issue) and grocery prices; but also a set of state laws and policies that punish them. Their state minimum wage is US $7.25 (AUD $10.40), 4 million people have no sick leave at work, 1 in 5 Texans have no medical insurance because of state decisions, cuts to public utilities and community services: at the same time as delivering historic tax breaks to billionaires.

My colleagues' work was about providing people the tools to see themselves as actors in their local communities. National economic conditions and strong candidates provided an environment for hundreds of thousands of new voters, especially Hispanic women and young people, to see themselves as able to influence the systems that impact their lives.

The Talarico win is built on decades of work like this across Texas.

### In Talarico's words

"We just showed that a politics of division is no match for a politics of love."

"My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas and when I was little, he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments, 'love God and love neighbor.' Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy."

"The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom."

"My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe. Love is not passive. Love is not neutral. Love is not weak. Love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied."

"Before the world changes in ways you see on TV or read about in newspapers, the world changes person to person, neighbor to neighbor."

"Two thousand years ago, when the people at the top hurt his neighbors, that barefoot rabbi didn't stay in his room and pray. He walked into the seat of power, and he flipped over the tables of injustice."

And if you have the time, you can listen to the delivery [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYehNiPTirE). There is something in the speaking.