Vance: Talarico wears Christianity as a 'skin suit' — and it reveals more than just contempt



Vice President JD Vance believes "woke is dead," and he thinks recent conduct from Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico demonstrates the point.

In an episode of conservative Vince Coglianese's podcast that aired on Tuesday, Vance sorted through white and black pills pertaining to the midterm election, which is now only five weeks away.

'Democrats are literally running away.'

Vance acknowledged the recent rightist doom-saying about the election, boosted in part by recent polls indicating that the Democrats have a serious edge in multiple races. However, the vice president emphasized that the country "is not going to be saved by what Thomas Paine would have called sunshine patriots."

"You have got to get in there and win these races and make it possible for Republicans to deny a bunch of crazy communists from having positions of power in the United States of America," said Vance. "It's just that simple."

Vance further suggested that the situation may not be as bleak for Republicans as some think, recalling polls from fall of 2024 that indicated that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was going to trounce President Donald Trump and that the Democrats were going to maintain control of the U.S. Senate.

In a Reuters/Ipsos poll published in late September 2024, Harris led Trump 47% to 40%, while an NBC News national poll showed Harris leading Trump 49% to 44%. Trump ultimately defeated Harris in a landslide, securing the popular vote and 86 more Electoral College votes than the Democrat.

RELATED: Exclusive: ‘We all got in by lying’: Hidden camera shows Talarico’s pastor rejecting Christ’s virgin birth, other foundational Christian beliefs

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

While optimistic that the pollsters may be wrong again, Vance noted there are nevertheless "headwinds" and that seldom does a party that controls the House, the Senate, and the White House maintain its trifecta through the midterm election.

"It almost never happens, but this is very different," said Vance. "Number one, we have a very unique president. Number two, we have a bunch of crazy people running on the other side — yes, people who are promising not to lower your prices or to make your life better. They're promising to trans your kids and steal all your property. Like, that is not what the American people want out of their government."

On the topic of the "lunatics" Republicans must work to deny power, two Democratic names came up: Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, and Talarico, who is running against Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Coglianese noted that "Talafreako" appears to be "spending all of his time running away from every insane position he's ever expressed around with a camera" and referenced recently published undercover footage revealing the radicalism and heresy at the Democrat's church in Austin, Texas.

"This is what I think a particular type of hyper-progressive does to Christianity," said Vance. "They don't actually believe in the Resurrection. They don't believe that Jesus died as an atonement for human sin. What they believe is that Christianity can possibly be a useful tool to acquire political power. So they strip your religion of all of its meaning, of all of its truth, and wear it as a skin suit — and they try to trick people into voting for them."

"That's what Talafreako is fundamentally engaged in," added Vance.

The vice president once again identified a silver lining: Whereas Talarico was previously proud of his theological, economic, and moral radicalism, now when "you turn on the TV ... you would think James Talarico is basically a Republican, maybe a moderate Republican — but you would have no idea if you're just a normal Texas voter watching his advertising who this guy is."

Although Talarico's election-time moderation could be read as naked opportunism and deceit, Vance suggested instead that it means "we've won the argument."

"When you've won the argument so thoroughly that the other side is pretending they agree with you on the issues just to get elected, the result is not the black pill," said the vice president.

"The reason I'm super optimistic about just the nature of the country long-term is we have won the argument. Woke is dead. The Democrats are literally running away from things that they said two years ago in an effort to gain political power. That's cynical. It's ridiculous. But the fact that we won the argument is a very good first step."

Talarico — who had a five-point lead over Paxton in a September Texas Public Opinion Research poll and was tied with Paxton in the new Republican-sponsored Stratus Intelligence poll — recently walked back his previous claims that there are six genders and that "God is nonbinary," as well as his support for male transvestites playing in girls' sports.

A lesbian chaplain at Talarico's church in Austin was recently shown in undercover footage claiming that while Talarico has publicly pivoted about God being "nonbinary," "he'll change his tune back to where he was" if elected.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Greta Gerwig’s Glam-Rock Aslan Is A Shoddy Imposter

Christians have honored images of Christ for 2,000 years without mistaking the wood for God, but none has thought a man could spit on a crucifix without spitting at Christ.

Alabama: The anti-caliphate



Massachusetts, birthplace of the American Revolution, is considering a new experiment in identity politics. Companion bills in the Massachusetts House and Senate — H.3351 and S.2134 — would establish a permanent commission dedicated to the interests of Muslims in the state. Among its duties would be to “identify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions.” Muslims make up a small percentage of the state’s population of roughly 7 million.

The legislation suits Massachusetts’ identity-politics obsession. It slides effortlessly alongside previous steps to protect the rights of Jews, gays, Asians, and blacks. Except now, lawmakers are proposing to put the state’s imprimatur on one of the world’s most rapacious and cruel belief systems.

The history of Muslim-majority societies offers ample material for examining the relationship among Islam, religious freedom, political authority, and the treatment of minorities.

The proposal should alarm Americans even more than the election of Zohran Mamdani or the proposed development of the Meadow, a mosque-centered, all-Muslim enclave in allegedly red Texas.

Block and tackle

On August 11, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, a sitting U.S. senator and Republican candidate for governor of Alabama, clapped back at the Massachusetts proposal. He posted on X that no such legislation would ever emerge on his watch in the Yellowhammer State.

Coach Tuberville should do more than post platitudes. If elected, he should seek legislation making Alabama the first state in the nation to formally declare Islamic teaching inimical to the history and tradition of Alabamans and force a constitutional debate over how far a state may go in protecting its religious heritage. And he should be willing to block and tackle for this policy all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Declaration of Independence does not define religious belief alongside its four mentions of a Creator. The Constitution likewise offers no comprehensive definition of religion. American courts have generally avoided establishing a single definition that would determine which faiths count as religions and which do not.

The “history and tradition” approach used by the Supreme Court in other constitutional contexts — most famously in Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion on gun rights in Heller (2008) — offers Tuberville a provocative model for the argument we propose. Heller did not concern religious liberty, and its test does not govern the First Amendment’s religion clauses. But history and tradition are hardly irrelevant to constitutional interpretation.

The Alabama way

And the history and tradition of America is deeply Christian. More directly, much of it is Protestant Christian. That is especially true in Alabama, which became a state in 1819 after settlement largely by migrants from other Southern states who brought with them overwhelmingly Protestant religious traditions. Earlier Spanish and French settlement left a Catholic inheritance, particularly around Mobile.

Recent Alabama history gives Tuberville two bright lights to follow. The first is former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore. Moore was removed from office in 2003 after refusing a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building. He was suspended from judicial office again in 2016 over an order concerning same-sex marriage after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The latter position, by the way, was broadly consistent with the view Barack Obama publicly professed before 2012. As the nation’s biblical foundation crumbles, courts are reconsidering some disputes over Ten Commandments displays, while polling suggests support for some gay-rights positions has plateaued or declined from its peak. Whatever one thinks of Moore himself, arguments once treated as beyond the pale have not disappeared.

The second beacon is Hoover, Alabama, where the Planning and Zoning Commission last December unanimously recommended denial of a rezoning request that would have allowed the Islamic Academy of Alabama and a Muslim prayer center to relocate to Meadowbrook Corporate Park. City planning staff cited concerns including compatibility with the comprehensive plan, traffic, and occupancy projections. The academy subsequently withdrew its application before the Hoover City Council could make the final decision.

The issue should resonate with Tuberville because his erstwhile hometown, Auburn, will soon face its own debate. Tuberville should make clear what role, if any, he believes the state should play when Alabama localities confront such controversies.

Coach Tuberville's playbook

In Montgomery, Tuberville could begin by forcing a debate over a history lesson the late Charlie Kirk gave in 2024: America’s founding political culture was overwhelmingly Christian and, more particularly, Protestant. Religious tests existed in a number of states during the founding era. Charles Carroll of Maryland was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence; Daniel Carroll of Maryland and Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania were the only Catholic signers of the Constitution.

Second, Tuberville and his legal team should explicitly ask a question existing constitutional law does not answer in the way we would like: How much authority does a state retain to defend its particular religious and cultural inheritance against an ideology it regards as hostile to that inheritance?

Current First Amendment doctrine places formidable limits on what Alabama could do. That is precisely why such legislation would constitute a constitutional challenge rather than an ordinary exercise of existing state authority. The bill could state Alabama’s historical relationship with Christianity and argue that the people of Alabama possess a legitimate interest in preserving that inheritance. Doing so would provoke a major confrontation over the First, 10th, and 14th Amendments and the Supremacy Clause — and force Americans to debate whether existing constitutional doctrine adequately equips states facing potentially existential cultural change.

Third, Alabama could explore the constitutional limits of legislation preventing state courts from substituting foreign or religious law for state and federal law. Any such statute would have to be carefully written: Religious principles can arise in contracts, wills, arbitration, and other private arrangements protected by existing law. The objective should be to establish unequivocally that Alabama courts are governed by Alabama and federal law, not to pretend that current First Amendment doctrine permits the state simply to outlaw references to Sharia.

Finally, Alabama should require serious academic instruction in the Bible’s influence on Western civilization and American history in its public schools, consistent with constitutional limits on devotional instruction. The state cannot do better than to examine the curriculum developed by Hillsdale College.

RELATED: 'I think they're demons': Why JD Vance refuses to downplay supernatural evil

Silver Screen Collection/Kent Nishimura-Pool/Getty Images

Verse of the sword

The larger argument concerns Islam itself. Islamic scripture and jurisprudence contain teachings concerning nonbelievers, warfare, conversion, tribute, and political authority that deserve far more scrutiny than contemporary American discourse generally gives them.

Quran 9:5 and 9:29 are among the passages at the center of centuries of argument over jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims. Islamic scholars themselves have long debated naskh, or abrogation — the doctrine that some Quranic revelations supersede others — including the relationship between earlier passages associated with Muhammad’s period in Mecca and later revelations from Medina.

Muslims disagree sharply about what those passages require today. That disagreement should be acknowledged rather than used as an excuse not to examine the texts at all.

What Alabama cannot plausibly do under existing First Amendment law is simply declare Islam “fighting words” and suppress it on that basis. The Supreme Court’s fighting-words doctrine is far narrower than that. But Tuberville could force the more difficult political and constitutional question underneath the phrase: What happens when Americans believe a religious ideology contains not merely private theological claims but a political program fundamentally at odds with the constitutional order?

That is the debate Alabama should provoke.

From X to executive

The history of Muslim-majority societies offers ample material for examining the relationship among Islam, religious freedom, political authority, and the treatment of minorities. Tuberville need not pretend that current constitutional doctrine already gives him the answer. His opportunity would be to ask the question aggressively enough that courts, lawmakers, and voters have to confront it.

Tuberville’s response to Massachusetts was what you do on X. But it was a quip for no gain compared with what a laser-focused, fearless, conservative Christian governor could attempt in office. In Matthew 21:42, Jesus quotes Psalm 118:22 and affirms that He is the cornerstone of the faith.

Make Alabama the cornerstone of America’s anti-caliphate wall.

How Governor Tuberville acts, if voters give him the job, will reveal whether the SEC’s famed Riverboat Gambler has the team and the guts to play smash-mouth legal football.

Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan shares Christian faith, claims music industry is afraid of God talk



Although there was admittedly a 20-year period when he refrained from entering a church, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins fame has since openly emphasized the importance of his Christian faith and having a relationship with God.

On the latest episode of his podcast, "The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan," the rocker discussed with Stryper frontman Michael Sweet the importance and risks of maintaining that faith and relationship while navigating the music industry — an industry where people appear, according to Corgan, to be "very comfortable talking about everything but God."

'God is the third rail in rock and roll.'

While he hailed from a Christian family, Sweet suggested that he experienced a period of aversion to religious messaging, particularly when first getting into the industry.

That changed, however, when a friend of the band visited their studio and declared, "I'm a Christian now. ... I know you guys have gone down that [other] path, and you're not now, but listen, if you give your band to God, He's going to do things that you never even dreamed of," Sweet recalled.

"It kind of blew my mind," said Sweet, adding that he heeded the counsel and the band ultimately became explicitly Christian.

"As musicians, we're certainly aware of other people's opinions," said Corgan, "especially at that particular time, making that kind of decision and say[ing], 'OK, now we're going to sort of represent that.' Not, 'We're going to hide it in our lyrics and sort of just play along.' Like, 'We're going to come out and say this is who we are, this is what we believe in.'"

RELATED: How a new Texas parish reminds us that the age of Christian martyrs is not over

Ricardo Rubio/Europa Press/Getty Images

Corgan, whose band has sold tens of millions of records, stressed that becoming overtly Christian is a "huge decision."

"It was scary," responded Sweet.

"You know what you're risking. You're not just risking some guy from another band making fun of you," said Corgan.

"This may blow our whole dream."

Sweet suggested that there was "brief" skepticism, for instance, behind the scenes at Enigma Records about signing a group whose songs included lines like, "Jesus is the way."

"Business is business, so I get it," said Sweet, whose band ultimately signed with Enigma in 1983.

Corgan said with confidence that his band "didn't get signed at different times" because of corporate sensitivities to social pressure and potential reputational damage.

"Signing a heavy metal band that's singing about Jesus in 1984 or whatever — that is very outside the line that was going," said Corgan.

The Smashing Pumpkins co-founder noted later in the episode that Christianity is "part of the fabric of the nation whether people like it or not." He also claimed that "this idea that our most popular forms of music are overly leaned towards vice I think says more about artists' sociopathy than it does reality."

Corgan repeated an observation he made in a previous interview, namely that "God is the third rail in rock and roll."

Given that the majority of Americans are still Christians, the musician is puzzled why, for so many artists, "God [is] antithetical to the part of marketing who you are."

"Fear," said Sweet.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Director finds faith in the wild with Brad Pitt’s ‘Heart of the Beast’



David Ayer took a Zen-like approach to his canine lead actor.

The veteran director behind “Fury,” “End of Watch,” and “The Beekeeper” worked extensively with Uber, a German Shepherd at the heart of his new film.

'I feel like traditional storytelling is going to have its place more than ever now, in values and ways of living that bring hope. I think audiences really respond to that.'

Uber plays a wounded combat dog named Odin fighting for survival alongside fellow veteran Brad Pitt in “Heart of the Beast,” which hits theaters today. And making sure Uber hit his marks took the patience of Job.

'Trained' actor

“The dog’s wonderful and capable and trained and really in his own way a character actor ... but not necessarily the most cooperative,” Ayer tells Blaze News. “You learn to accept the dog as a dog is ... it’s a real lesson in patience and also acceptance and surrender to the situation.”

Pitt’s character, seeking solace after years in combat, crashes his small plane in the Alaskan forests. That leaves him and his faithful companion struggling to survive in inhospitable terrain.

“I’ve always been inspired by Jack London and tales of wilderness and survival,” he says of his initial reaction to the script. “This had something deeper, the connection with the dog ... these parental relationships. This idea is that no matter what, I’m going to protect you and keep you safe."

The story struck something within Ayer.

“I lost my father at a young age. Something in the script brought up that grief, allowed me to look at it in a different way. ... It really broke my heart open in a way it hadn’t been before,” he says.

Spiritual endurance

“Heart of the Beast” isn’t a faith-based movie, but the director sees the story in deeply spiritual terms.

“These things we carry in our hearts, the damage that life and the world that it is can do to us ... it’s important to have hope, important to have faith, something outside of yourself. If you sit in your pain, it can overwhelm us,” he says, adding the film is a “simple portrait of spiritual endurance.”

To get there, Pitt met with military veterans to prepare to play his character, a soldier adjusting to civilian life on his own terms.

“He sat there with a notebook, hearing their stories ... what they felt and what they carried, the successes and the loss and the wisdom, the life wisdom they gained from these experiences,” Ayer says. His star, who he previously collaborated with on “Fury,” didn’t put on any A-list airs.

“There’s movie stars who are movie stars. Brad’s an actor first ... he was throwing himself down on the ground again and again [for select scenes] ... shivering on set, refusing to warm up so he could stay in it. He became a leader for us,” the director recalls.

Faith forward

Ayer’s work reflects a complicated bond with law enforcement (“Dark Blue,” “End of Watch”), but it’s also impressively diverse. Think vigilante romps (“The Beekeeper,” “A Working Man”), Superhero fare (“Suicide Squad”), and sci-fi adventures (“Bright”).

He sees his film choices as an evolution, showing people who are “broken in the world and how we fix that in ourselves.”

“In order to heal, we have to move heart first,” he says. “One of the most important things to have in our hearts is faith, that becomes the mechanism through which we can really endure everything.”

Ayer is one of Hollywood’s busiest directors, and he suspects he’ll soon have company in the filmmaking space.

“As technology evolves, it’s going to give more people access to tell more stories,” he says, a change that could bring mid-level movies back in vogue. The industry currently binges on big-budget IP films and micro-indies, but he envisions a return to the “amazing middle ground” of movies like “Pretty Woman” and “Jerry Maguire” that once captivated audiences.

That, in turn, could spark another positive trend.

“You look at the success of Hollywood, and for 100 years, we were really a great cultural ambassador to the world and showing an aspirational lifestyle, an aspirational way of being in the world,” he says. “If you look at the current slates ... not everything has been in that more traditional vein. I feel like traditional storytelling is going to have its place more than ever now, in values and ways of living that bring hope. I think audiences really respond to that.”

'Talaricoism': NYC Episcopal priestess torched for suggesting Jesus is 'trans,' Mary got it wrong



An Episcopal priestess identifying as "nonbinary trans" has prompted significant backlash for claiming Jesus Christ is "trans" and by suggesting that the Virgin Mary erred in identifying her son as male.

In a March 21 sermon that went viral this week, Madeline LeNore Klink — a trans-identifying woman who calls herself "Reverend Flourish Klink," is married to a man, and is listed as an "assistant priest" at Christ and Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church in Manhattan — yelled, "God is trans. It is not actually even a convoluted theological statement to make."

'A profoundly perverse distortion of the biblical witness concerning the person of Jesus Christ.'

"When God, who, as we have established, is nonbinary, was born in human form as our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary said, 'Oh, look! A baby boy!'" said Klink, who was ordained in 2024. "God isn’t a boy. We have established this. God is beyond boy and girl. God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on, it became clear that that gender wasn't quite right."

The gender ideologue dressed in vestments told attendees at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, "If you're going to deny God is trans, I think you're going to be denying the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Klink concluded that there was something "different" about Jesus — who in Scripture refers to Himself scores of times as the "Son of Man" and refers to or addresses God as "Father" hundreds of times — because He ministered to women and did not take a wife. She then insinuated that prior to His resurrection, Christ was not His "true self."

RELATED: Exclusive: ‘We all got in by lying’: Hidden camera shows Talarico’s pastor rejecting Christ’s virgin birth, other foundational Christian beliefs

"I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus' true self, which is beyond male or female," said Klink. "I think Jesus was not only transfigured. I think Jesus transitioned. And I think that when the disciples saw Jesus, they were astonished because they were seeing who Jesus truly was. And that's gospel."

Later in her sermon, Klink stated that she refuses to "cede the holy spaces of our world, the cathedrals and the churches," to people who disagree with her about God's nature.

An excerpt of Klink's sermon was slapped with a community note on X highlighting the Gospel passage in Luke that makes crystal clear that Mary didn't "assign" Christ's gender but was instead told by the Archangel Gabriel, "And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest."

The community note also links to an article pertaining to Docetism, the early Christian heresy that downplayed Jesus' full humanity and manhood.

Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck said in response to the sermon, "A little more distortion and lies with a side of evil anyone?"

"I don't think this is in the Bible," tweeted Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).

BlazeTV host Nick Freitas wrote, "I always wondered who exactly Jesus was talking about in Matthew 7:21-23. I don't wonder anymore."

Ceirion Dewar, a missionary bishop in the Confessing Anglican Church, said, "This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of Christianity. It is a profoundly perverse distortion of the biblical witness concerning the person of Jesus Christ."

"The language of the Gospel is not that Mary inspected her newborn child and imposed an identity upon Him. Rather, the child conceived by the Holy Spirit is repeatedly and unambiguously identified as the Son," continued Dewar. "And the assertion that Christ was resurrected as His 'true transgender self' is even more extraordinary, because it directly contradicts the resurrection narratives. The risen Christ is the same Jesus who was crucified."

Podcaster Mike LaChance noted, "It's a deliberate mockery of what Christians believe. That's the whole point. Call it Talaricoism."

James Talarico (D), a part-time Presbyterian seminarian who is running as a Democrat against state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) for a Texas U.S. Senate seat, claimed in 2021 that "God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary."

Klink did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment. However, she noted on Instagram Thursday, "What a blessing to get to see folks at their worst and know that God loves them anyway!"

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Exclusive: Hidden-camera footage captures Talarico’s pastor saying evangelical Christians are 'not smart' and comparing Trump to Hitler



Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D) has made no secret of the impact that Jim Rigby, the pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, has had on his thinking.

Talarico, the Texas Democrat now battling state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) for a seat in the U.S. Senate, told the New York Times, for instance, that Rigby was one of “the biggest influences on [him] as a Christian, as a human being.”

'This false shepherd managed to deny virtually every key doctrine of Christianity in less than two minutes.'

“He is my pastor in every sense of the word,” added Talarico, a part-time Presbyterian seminarian who has fought to keep the Bible out of school; attempted to use Scripture to justify abortion; taken money from an associate of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein; concern-mongered about traditional Christian views; and voted against sparing kids from sex-rejection mutilations.

Hidden-camera footage exclusively obtained by Blaze News appears to show that the pastor who shaped Talarico’s worldview doesn’t think too highly of evangelical Christians.

In a video dated Aug. 30, Rigby was asked by a person off-camera, “What’s wrong with evangelical Christians? Like, how do they read what they read, they claim what they claim?”

RELATED: Talarico's pivot from 'God is nonbinary' is all just an act, admits minister at his church

The woke pastor says in response, according to the video, “My guess is that they’re people who are just not that smart in, like, abstract thinking, which is where a lot of the liberal stuff and the principles of human rights and all that stuff comes up — it’s like they just, it doesn’t show up on their radar.”

“They panic when that stuff is laid out in front of them,” Rigby stated further, according to the video. “They know there’s something they’re not seeing. It’s like they have black and white vision and somebody’s showing them [a] color photograph or something like that.”

Rigby appears to believe that President Donald Trump and even Adolf Hitler have exploited evangelicals and their allegedly simple way of thinking for political gain, claiming in the video that "what Hitler did and what Trump is doing is play off of that."

The purported Christian pastor apparently complained further about evangelicals’ beliefs in the supernatural, specifically in hell, angels, and demons, suggesting that such beliefs are irrational.

“The church is a huge part of the problem — teaching people from the cradle that things are true because you believe them,” Rigby says, according to the video.

“A belief in hell shuts everything down, because when you think that you could be tortured for all eternity, and you believe in demons and angels and stuff like this, you can’t stay rational for long.”

Rigby adds, according to the video, “If you think that supernatural beings are affecting things, good logic wouldn’t make any sense.”

According to the most recent Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study, 27% of adults in Texas identify as evangelical Protestants.

Evangelicals are, however, hardly the only Christians who believe in the existence of hell, angels, and demons.

A 2021 Pew survey found that 62% of all American adults and 69% of all American Christians believe in hell. A 2023 Gallup survey found that 69% of Americans believe in angels and 58% believe in the devil.

“It's not surprising an open and avowed heretic like James Talarico goes to a church led by fellow heretics,” BlazeTV host Steve Deace said in a statement to Blaze News, after reviewing the footage. “What is surprising, though, is how this false shepherd managed to deny virtually every key doctrine of Christianity in less than two minutes.”

“You have to be really committed to doctrines of demons and detesting Christ and His Word to display that level of deception masquerading as conviction,” added Deace.

RELATED: UNDERCOVER VIDEO: 'Shady as f**k' scheme paid people to vote for Talarico in 'roundabout way,' Soros PAC leader caught admitting

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Rigby has issued plenty of other remarks that Talarico might want to distance himself from in the final months of his campaign. The pastor, who expressed hope that Talarico would follow in his footsteps at St. Andrew’s, has, for instance, made headlines for calling for a “true jihad” at a pro-Palestine rally; rejected belief in a literal resurrection; repeatedly cast doubt on whether Christ rose from the dead; emphasized that he doesn’t “believe Christianity is the only way, or even the best way for many people”; and expressed discomfort with the use of the word “God.”

Rigby and the Talarico campaign did not respond to requests for comment from Blaze News.

While supportive of Talarico, his message, and his candidacy, Rigby noted earlier this year, “I do not speak for him and he owes no one an explanation for things I have said.”

Despite noting that they do not speak with one voice, Rigby’s influence on Talarico is unmistakable — particularly in his eagerness to criticize Christians and mainstream Christianity.

Talarico noted, for example, in a March 2021 episode of the “Activist Theology” podcast that despite always getting "drawn back" in, “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.”

Paxton has stressed that Talarico "is a threat to our values, our way of life, and the future of Texas."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

'I think they're demons': Why JD Vance refuses to downplay supernatural evil



Love him or loathe him, but one thing is certain about Vice President JD Vance: He’s one of the most unique and bold political figures we’ve seen in the modern era.

And this proclamation has nothing to do with his tenor, tone, or party proclivities. Amid the normal cacophony of political chaos, Vance has offered a remarkably consistent narrative — an open discussion of evil, the demonic, and even aliens — that we have never quite seen from a sitting politician.

Vance paraphrased a claim first popularized by French poet Charles Baudelaire — "the devil's great trick is to convince people he never existed."

We have certainly not observed it in a vice president, arguably the second-most powerful position in the entire world. Typically, people in such prominent roles are intensely buttoned up and even pretentious, watching every word and making carefully crafted proclamations.

Personal encounters

But Vance has taken a starkly different route, specifically when it comes to conversations about combustible and seemingly bizarre topics like aliens, demons, and evil.

Rather than treating these matters as too ethereal to discuss in the mainstream, he has been talking about them with relative ease. Vance has discussed evil in broad terms, and he has even said he feels it personally in his role as vice president.

Most recently, he told influencer Bryce Crawford that he has sensed spiritual darkness from various world leaders. For the typical, run-of-the-mill politician, any question about evil would most certainly be met with a secular and safe response. But Vance went much deeper.

“People that are around you sometimes give you a very, very bad feeling," the vice president told Crawford. "Definitely, I've been in meetings with world leaders where various issues are being discussed, and somebody will say something or somebody will make an observation, and I will feel a certain darkness about it.”

Vance continued, “It sort of sets off every spiritual alarm bell in my body."

He also went on to say that there are even locations like Gettysburg, where past history with the Civil War and death has led him to feel “a very dark spiritual energy.”

Aliens ... or demons?

This was hardly the first time Vance dove headfirst into such conversations, with intentionality and ease.

Earlier this year, conservative commentator Benny Johnson asked the vice president about the UFO files, and the conversation took some fascinating turns, veering into Vance’s personal perspective about the origins and nature of aliens and unidentified flying objects.

"I don't think they're aliens,” Vance said of supposed extraterrestrials. “I think they're demons anyway.”

When pressed further, Vance dove deeper into his personal explanation for what is truly happening behind so many alien claims that keep making their way into the mainstream.

"I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people — I think that the desire to describe everything celestial … to describe it as aliens — I mean, every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain," Vance said.

"And I naturally go — when I hear about, sort of, extra-natural phenomenon — that's where I go to is the Christian understanding that, you know, there's a lot of good out there, but there's also some evil out there.”

Vance paraphrased a claim first popularized by French poet Charles Baudelaire — "the devil's great trick is to convince people he never existed."

RELATED: Evil unmasked: How Charlie Kirk's murder exposed a diabolical spiritual war

MELISSA MAJCHRZAK/AFP/Getty Images

Spiritual warfare

A few months later, Vance again tackled the topic with podcaster Joe Rogan, further arguing that he believes what many perceive as aliens are actually demonic entities.

"Just because I believe in the supernatural doesn't mean I believe in everything supernatural,” he said. “But if we're talking about an extraterrestrial being that is human-like but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want.”

And Vance wasn’t done there. He added, "But I think there's a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.”

The vice president’s conversations have been truly remarkable, considering few politicians would ever be caught opining about such matters. He’s probably the most outspoken vice president in history — and certainly the most outspoken in modern times — on matters of spiritual warfare and evil.

There are a few compelling reasons that this deeply matters. In a world where people are hyper-obsessed with the material, Vance is open to fully understanding spiritual matters that are very likely impacting our culture and world.

And if those matters are impacting our world, we are left wondering how we can possibly confront, fix, or heal anything if we reject the notion that a spiritual component is at play.

Vance not only considers these issues, but he is also actively opening up a conversation about them. He deserves a lot of credit for acknowledging the spiritual war so many others have chosen to ignore.

The Christian counterculture is already here



There’s a clip going around of Lindsay Clancy’s ex-husband, Patrick, saying she has never apologized or asked forgiveness for killing their three children.

Given the growing arrogance of her defense, that shouldn’t surprise anyone. It also cuts against the portrait her defenders have painted of a loving mother temporarily overtaken by postpartum depression or psychosis. If that were the whole story, you might expect some sign of remorse toward the grieving husband who lost all three of his children.

What we once called common sense grew out of a Christian moral culture that no longer commands the culture. What was once common no longer is.

Instead, nothing. Because she’s a monster.

But the culture’s numbed reaction to the Clancy mistrial raises another question about the 11 jurors who were prepared to absolve her of criminal responsibility for those ghastly killings.

How do you persuade people still coasting on the fumes of a once-great Christian culture that they are now the counterculture — and must learn to think and fight accordingly?

Between the positive Christian world of the American founding and today’s negative world came the so-called neutral world that produced the counterculture of the 1960s. For my entire lifetime, we have run an experiment based on the assumption that Americans shared enough fundamental values to sustain multiple competing cultures at once.

At 53, I think that experiment is over. It probably never had much of a chance.

Listen to the nice things Clancy’s jurors keep saying about her, then confront the horror of what she did. No neutral conversation is possible here. So it is with good and evil generally. There is no neutral boulevard called tolerance. Every time Christians travel down it, they eventually discover that tolerance runs in one direction.

We live in a negative world now. The spirit of the age intends to show us what a real inquisition looks like, because the Christian worldview that once formed this country has been steadily forfeited in exchange for other gods.

Third-wave feminists inhabit the positive world now, whether they hold formal political power at a given moment or not. The Overton window governing our language, emotions, psychology, and public discourse is largely theirs. Spiritually, the enemy holds the high ground.

We are the rebels now, not the founders.

That means Christians can no longer rely on easy assumptions about shared values, shared definitions, or even shared moral fundamentals.

RELATED: A Christian guide to trolling without sinning

Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

We are not simply a nation of laws. Laws are downstream from political will, and political will is downstream from moral conviction. By that measure, the American church is not exactly operating from a position of strength.

My friend Chris Goble likes to say we must “exegete the times.” He’s right.

By what civilizational standard regularly enforced in America today should Lindsay Clancy be expected to ask forgiveness? Common sense?

This is precisely the problem. What we once called common sense grew out of a Christian moral culture that no longer commands the culture. What was once common no longer is.

A second American revolution took place, and we did not so much lose it as surrender.

Wake up, Dorothy. You ain’t in Kansas any more.

In Massachusetts, where the Sons of Liberty once helped set the course of American freedom, 11 jurors just concluded that Lindsay Clancy was not criminally responsible for killing her own children.

So what follows?

For starters, Christians need to stop assuming that people who reject Christianity are nevertheless entitled to every cultural inheritance Christianity produced, on precisely the same terms Christianity produced it.

That does not relieve me of Christ’s command to love my neighbor as myself. It does mean Christian love cannot be reduced to cultural surrender or a lazy suicide pact with people who reject the moral order that made our freedoms intelligible in the first place.

It’s Christ or chaos. Christians need to become comfortable saying that plainly.

You do not get the full inheritance of Christian civilization while discarding the faith and moral assumptions that built it. Those are the terms of the negative world. If we want the future to look different, we first have to acknowledge the world as it is.

Most people will not tell you this, because rebuilding will be hard.

We will have to lay cornerstones and plumb lines again. We will have to reclaim ground that was once considered sacred and is now treated as disposable. It will cost us comfort, status, friendships, and perhaps careers.

RELATED: How groupthink replaces truth

John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

It will hurt.

But the alternative is worse: leaving our children and grandchildren a country so morally fractured that political disagreement eventually becomes something much uglier.

Do not kid yourself about the cost. The Puritans who founded New England were fleeing Anglicans, not Muslims or even Catholics. Civilizational conflict can divide people who share a language, a history, and much of the same religion.

Brother will turn against brother.

If Tucker Carlson’s deconstruction has taught us anything, it is that these fractures are already running through the right itself.

But Christians still have an obligation to stand. Not for a party. Not for a personality. Not for nostalgia. For the only kingdom that lasts.

Here we stand. We can do no other.

Nick Vujicic: A living refutation of abortion's culture of death



There are some people whose lives make you reconsider the way you’re living your own.

Nick Vujicic is one of them.

We live in a culture increasingly comfortable deciding which lives are worth living.

Born in Australia without arms or legs, Vujicic faced challenges few of us can imagine. Even with the love and support of his family, bullying, loneliness, and depression took a heavy toll. By the age of 10, he had sunk so deeply into despair that he contemplated taking his own life.

But Nick soon found something stronger than despair: hope in his Christian faith.

He came to understand that his life was not a mistake and that his disability didn’t rob him of meaning or purpose.

Vujicic went on to become an international best-selling author, husband, father, and one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the world. His 2013 appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s "Lifeclass" introduced his story to a global audience. To date, he’s spoken in person to 11 million people across 87 countries.

Now his journey comes to theaters Friday in the documentary "No Limbs, No Limits: The NickV Story." The film traces Nick’s struggle with anger, depression, and hopelessness — and his discovery that life is worth living because every person has value and purpose.

That message could hardly come at a better time.

Search for meaning

Across the Western world, we are living through a crisis of loneliness and a search for meaning. Young people are more connected technologically than any generation in history, yet many feel profoundly isolated.

Who am I? Why am I here? What difference can one person make?

Nick has spent much of his adult life answering those questions.

His answer is simple: You matter. Your life has value. You were made for a purpose.

Our limitations, disappointments, and wounds do not determine our worth. The challenge is to recognize our value and decide what we will do with the life we have been given.

That’s one reason Nick’s story resonates so deeply with me.

Redefining perseverance

I first heard of him in 2009 when he co-starred in "The Butterfly Circus," a short film starring and produced by my friend Eduardo Verastegui. I was intrigued by this young man with no arms or legs who could swim better and faster than I could.

And I say that as a marathoner.

Running marathons has taught me something about perseverance, but watching Nick navigate life without limbs quickly puts my own physical challenges into perspective.

I began following him on social media. Over the years, I watched Nick marry, become a dad, and continue showing millions of people that what we lack does not define who we are.

His life declares that no human being is a mistake. No life is disposable. No person should be judged by what they cannot do or whether that life meets somebody else’s definition of “quality.”

Every person is unique and unrepeatable.

And every person can make a difference.

That message desperately needs to be heard today.

Culture of death

We live in a culture increasingly comfortable deciding which lives are worth living. Nowhere is that more apparent than with abortion, particularly when an unborn child has been diagnosed with a disability or genetic condition.

A troubling prenatal diagnosis can be devastating, as it was for Nick’s parents. In that moment, fear can quickly take over: This child’s life will be difficult. The family will suffer. Perhaps it would be better if this life never began at all.

Nick Vujicic is a living refutation of that philosophy.

Imagine trying to measure the value of Nick’s future before he had even been born.

No arms. No legs. What could he possibly accomplish?

The answer: more than most of us could have imagined.

That question has particular urgency for me because I live in Virginia, where voters this fall will consider a constitutional amendment expanding the so-called right to abortion. The truth is that our broader abortion culture too often treats disability, dependency, and difficult circumstances as reasons to question whether a life should continue.

Against that backdrop comes Nick Vujicic.

Some ask whether a life will be too difficult, too dependent, or too burdensome.

Nick’s life asks a different question: What if we give that child a chance? A chance to surprise us. A chance to love and be loved. A chance to become a husband or wife, a father or mother — or someone whose words might one day save another person’s life.

RELATED: 'The Passion of the Christ' returns to cinemas — just when we need it most

Joel Nito/Getty Images

Finding purpose

That is why "No Limbs, No Limits" arrives at precisely the right moment.

The film doesn’t pretend Nick’s journey was easy. He knew rejection, anger, depression, and loneliness. He knew what it was to wonder whether his life was worth living.

Then he discovered that suffering did not have the final word.

Faith did.

Purpose did.

Love did.

Nick’s story makes me admire human life more deeply — disabled and able-bodied alike. It also makes me examine my own.

I run marathons. I have arms. I have legs. I have opportunities Nick could only have dreamed about as a boy.

Am I using them?

Am I loving enough? Serving enough? Am I grateful for another morning, another mile, another opportunity to make a difference?

In an age of loneliness, Nick Vujicic reminds us that no one is unnecessary.

In an age of despair, he reminds us that circumstances are not destiny.

And in an age searching for meaning, he offers an answer our culture badly needs to hear: Your life has value. Your life has purpose. Now go find it.