Seminary student, US Senate candidate James Talarico tells crowd Christians 'saved' by 'healing the sick'

By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter Saturday, August 08, 2026

Democratic Texas state Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico outlined his plan to revamp the nation's healthcare system by invoking both policy and the New Testament.

At a July 20 campaign town hall at the Disciple Central Community Church in DeSoto, Texas, Dr. Helen Gibson, a physician living in Cedar Hill, asked what could be done so that people in "the richest country" finally receive the care they deserve.

Talarico, 37, replied that the solution is to "finish the work of President Obama and pass a public option so that every single American has access to the healthcare they deserve because healthcare is a human right. It is not a privilege." His platform calls for allowing every American, regardless of age, to buy into Medicare through a not-for-profit public option, alongside drug-price negotiation and caps on out-of-pocket costs.

Talarico, who is also a Presbyterian seminary student, then turned to theology, telling the crowd he wanted to speak scripturally "since we are in church." "If you read our Scriptures, if you read the New Testament, what does Jesus spend most of his time doing? … It's not preaching. It's not teaching. It is healing. Healing the sick," he said. "And in Matthew 25, Scripture says that's how we will be judged and how we will be saved — by healing the sick, by feeding the hungry, by welcoming the stranger, by visiting the prisoner."

The passage from which Talarico quoted in Matthew 25 is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, a central teaching from the Olivet Discourse which some have argued is a command from Jesus to welcome immigrants from all walks of life into every nation.

Opponents, meanwhile, have pointed to passages such as Leviticus 24:22, which commanded the nation of Israel to use the "same standard of law for the foreign resident and the native."

Talarico pointed to his own record — working with lawmakers to support a bipartisan bill to cap insulin co-pays at $25 in Texas — while noting the state still has the nation’s highest uninsured rate. He framed the campaign as a broad coalition rejecting “extremism and corruption” and fighting to make healthcare a true right.

His campaign later posted footage of the town hall under the title "James Talarico Unveils Plan For Black Voters," part of a broader $25 million commitment the campaign has pledged toward Black-voter outreach ahead of his race against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The Family Research Council responded sharply, arguing that Talarico is performing “verbal origami” on the Bible to support government-funded healthcare. 

In a post shared Aug. 3, Joshua Arnold, a writer at FRC’s The Washington Stand, disputed Talarico’s assertion that the Gospels show Jesus spending “most of his time” healing. Calling Matthew 25 “a classic favorite of liberal theologians to support their social agenda,” Arnold wrote that Talarico “errs because he did not pay close attention to the text.”

“Nowhere does Jesus say he will reward followers for healing the sick, only for visiting them (and the phrase ‘my brothers” further limits the application only to those sick who are in Christ),” he wrote. “The text then supports a visitation ministry more than a healing one.”

Arnold also argued that any attempt to apply Matthew 25, and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in particular, does violence to the text.

“...The sheep are praised for visiting those in prison, implying that the intended audience is individuals, not governments — and particularly individuals without political power. Thus, the ethical significance of this text speaks only to the conduct of individuals, not to government policy,” he wrote. “Applying it to government policy is a stretch, and those who would do so bear a burden to prove why it should legitimately apply.”

A lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) who is working toward a Master of Divinity degree at the denomination's Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Talarico was first elected in 2018, at 29 years old, to represent the liberal Austin area in the Texas House of Representatives.

Talarico has prompted a flurry of controversy; footage of his past sermons and social media posts have resurfaced since his decisive win in the U.S. Senate primary in Texas in March.

Some of his more colorful claims include calling Jesus a “feminist,” referring to women as “neighbors with a uterus,” and even preaching an ancient Gnostic heresy that God is “nonbinary.”