In the Texas Senate race, Republican candidate Ken Paxton is running an ad that features an artificial-intelligence version of James Talarico, Paxton’s Democratic opponent, repeating several statements the real Talarico made about religion and gender identity.
But some of the statements are missing the context behind the remarks, and the various comments weren’t strung together the way the AI-generated ad presents them. The ad also includes some phrases that weren’t part of Talarico’s statements.
Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, has attempted to clarify, or walk back, some of what he said about God being nonbinary or there being more than two biological sexes.
The Paxton campaign released the ad on Sept. 8, and it has aired on cable and streaming or digital platforms in Texas and other parts of the country, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.
About 20 seconds into the 30-second ad, a disclaimer in tiny print appears at the bottom of the screen saying, “Certain video content depicted in this advertising was generated by artificial intelligence.” But not everyone may realize that the ad shows an AI-created Talarico, making remarks about religion as the generated character writes in, and reads from, the fictional “King James (Talarico) Bible.” We asked the Paxton campaign about its ad, and the comments it attributes to Talarico, but we didn’t receive a response.
In a statement to us about the ad, JT Ennis, a Talarico campaign spokesperson, said, “Ken Paxton and his billionaire backers in DC know they can’t rely on facts to win this race — so their only answer is to literally put words in James’ mouth with AI deepfake videos to try and fool Texans. Dark money groups are lying about James Talarico because they’re scared of the people-powered movement we’re building to fix this broken, corrupt political system.”
Here, we’ll cover the statements that Talarico did make and provide the context not included in the ad. Some of Talarico’s remarks mentioned in the ad were also brought up by politicians speaking at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Sept. 9 and 10.
Remark About Hating Christianity
One of the statements the ad shows the AI-version of Talarico saying is: “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.” Paxton, the Texas attorney general, referred to the same statement during his remarks at the midterm convention, saying of Talarico, “He calls himself a Christian who hates Christianity.”
That’s something Talarico, a Texas state representative, did say during a March 4, 2021, episode of the “Activist Theology” podcast. But the ad leaves out what came before and after that comment.
During an interview that touched on religion and politics, Talarico was asked by one of the podcast’s hosts, “How do we opt out of these systems that we’re conscripted into in such a way that we can live a generative, imaginative life? That’s what I’m curious about.” (Skip to about the 45:00 mark of the audio.)
In response, Talarico started by saying, “Yeah, and that’s, you know, I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity, right?” But then he said, “And, like, I always get drawn back into it because nowhere else, in no other political philosophy, in no other economic theory, do I find anything as truly radical or revolutionary as the teachings of that barefoot rabbi, right? Which I think, as you mentioned, Dr. Robyn, you know, look a lot like, you know, the teachings of the Buddha and from other great mystical traditions. But I can’t find anything wherever I look that really is quite the same inversion of values that I think we need, right?”
Earlier in the podcast conversation, Talarico and the hosts had discussed how Talarico navigates working with colleagues in the Texas Legislature who have “ethical standards” that are not aligned with “the teaching of the Jesus that we serve,” as one of the hosts said.
Expanding on his comments about Christianity, the Talarico campaign said in a statement: “The Christian seminarian who’s dedicated his life to the teachings of Jesus Christ obviously doesn’t hate Christianity. James is a devout Christian who fights religious and political corruption when he sees it — because there’s nothing Christ-like about powerful people twisting the teachings of Jesus to justify hate, violence, and greed.”
Remark About a Nonbinary God
The ad starts with the fake Talarico saying, “In the beginning, God was nonbinary and he wasn’t a Christian.” As the generated character utters those words, the phrases “God is nonbinary” and “God is not a Christian” are shown on screen in quotation marks.
Talarico said “God is nonbinary” during Oct. 14, 2021, Texas House floor remarks in which he spoke against HB 25, a Texas bill that became a state law requiring children to compete on school sports teams according to the sex they were assigned at birth. He was making a point about a section of the Bible that uses male and female terminology when referring to God.
“Before I sit down, I want to speak directly to my fellow believers in the chamber,” Talarico began. “I listened to 15 hours of testimony on this bill. The worst part, for me, was the number of Christians who used scripture to justify hurting children. Even on this floor today, a member tried to justify a hateful amendment in the name of ‘God’s Law.’ So, let’s talk about that.”
He then added, “The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary. In Genesis 1:26, God speaks of God’s self in the plural, saying, ‘Let us make human beings in our image to be like us.’ That’s the infinite multitude of God. The masculine, the feminine and everything in between.”
In a Sept. 9 Fox News interview, Talarico explained the intent of his remark.
“I was being provocative with that statement. I get that,” he said. “What I was trying to say is that you can’t use human categories to define God. And that’s not controversial, theologically.”
As for the quote “God is not a Christian,” Talarico said that during an October 2023 sermon at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, in which he discussed how God is bigger than any one religion. The title of the sermon was “God Is Not A Christian: Confronting Christian Nationalism.” (Christian nationalism is an ideology that believes the U.S. is a Christian nation and Christianity should be incorporated into the government and American society.)
Here’s the fuller context for Talarico’s comment:
Talarico sermon, Oct. 22, 2023: Christian nationalism is not only a threat to the American experiment in democracy, it’s also a threat to the gospel of Jesus Christ. When someone asked Jesus to name his most important commandment, he cheats and gives two, two that he says are related. The first is to love God. The second, he said, is like it: Love thy neighbor as thyself. It’s like it because when I recognize the divine image in myself, I can’t help but recognize it in my neighbor, whether they’re Christian or not, whether they’re religious or not. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus specifically defines neighbor as someone different from us racially, economically, politically, religiously. God loves diversity. God loves variety – just look around this big beautiful planet of ours. Do we really think God would make all these beautiful people with all their beautiful traditions for no reason at all? There are so many pathways to the sacred. The Islamic mystic Rumi said every religion has love, but love has no religion. God is so much bigger than our human categories. God is not a Presbyterian. God is not a Christian. God is not a noun at all. God is a verb. God is not a being. God is being.
Remark About Six Sexes
The ad goes on to have the manufactured Talarico say, “And God said, ‘Let there be six genders.’ And there were.” That’s a reference to something Talarico said in a 2021 legislative hearing on HB 4042, another bill aimed at restricting children’s participation on school sports teams based on the sex assigned at birth.
During the hearing, Talarico questioned the bill’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Cole Hefner, about the legislation and asked and answered a question about the number of biological sexes. Talarico had already noted that gender and sex are not the same. (Jump to about 2:15:00 in the video.)
“How many biological sexes are there?” Talarico asked. Hefner eventually said two. Talarico then said Hefner’s bill “seems to think there are two,” but Talarico said that “modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes.”
“In fact, there are six,” Talarico said, before listing several different chromosome combinations. “Rather than just the XX and XY,” the typical respective chromosome pairs for biological females and males, Talarico said there’s single X, XXY, XYY and XXXY. “So, there are six really common biological sexes,” he said, adding that individuals “with sex characteristics that intersect into that” are known as intersex.
“I think the point is that, biologically speaking, scientifically speaking, sex is a spectrum,” he said.
As we’ve explained before, biological sex is not always easily determined. While most people have XX or XY chromosomes with corresponding male or female reproductive cells, anatomy and sexual development, there are cases when there are fewer or extra chromosomes and instances when these biological features do not fully align with a single sex.
About 1 in 4,500 people each year are born with medical conditions known as Differences of Sex Development, which is also called intersex, according to the Pediatric Endocrine Society.
But in his Sept. 9 Fox News interview, Talarico walked back his 2021 comments, saying “no,” when asked if he still believes there are six biological sexes.
“I’ve missed the mark on some of my past statements. I will be the first to admit it,” Talarico said in the interview. “What I meant is that there are two sexes, and then there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities. I obviously didn’t say it correctly. There are not six sexes, there are two.”
Other Remarks Attributed to Talarico
The ad also shows the fake Talarcio saying that God “gave us his only son, who was a radical feminist and never asked people to worship him.” Then, just before the ad ends, the Talarico lookalike says, “America is not a Christian nation.”
Talarico did refer to Jesus as a “radical feminist” while commenting on the subject of abortion and “Christianity’s feminist tradition” during an October 2022 sermon at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.
“Thankfully, feminist, womanist theologians are helping us remember Christianity’s feminist tradition – a tradition that has been obscured and hidden by generations of men,” Talarico said. “Did they teach you in Sunday school that men and women are created equally in the Book of Genesis? Did they teach you in Sunday school that the Bible sometimes describes God as a female, calling her Sophia? Did they teach you in Sunday school that Jesus Christ himself was a radical feminist?”
Talarico then said, “I don’t claim to know what Jesus thought about abortion. He never mentions it either, which maybe that should tell us something right there. But what I do know is that Jesus believed a woman is a full person, and that’s the definition of a feminist.”
In addition, Talarico said that “America is not a Christian nation” on the Jan. 13 episode of the “Vote Common Good” podcast. He made the case that America is a place for people to worship a god, or not, freely.
“My faith in Jesus leads me to reject Christian nationalism and leads me to recommit myself to the project, the unfinished project, of a multiracial, multicultural democracy where we can all freely love God if that’s what we choose to do, and where we can fully love our neighbors, all of our neighbors,” Talarico said. “America is not a Christian nation; it is a nation where you are free to be a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Hindu, or a Sikh, or a Buddhist, or an agnostic, or an atheist.”
Talarico said that “because Jesus was deeply suspicious of religious supremacy,” Christians have to “be on guard of any attempt to elevate our faith tradition over all the others” and “to be suspicious of any attempts to dominate our neighbors instead of loving them as ourselves.”
At the same time, Talarico said that he sees “the radical teachings of Jesus” in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, in that “all people are created equal” and “have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Talarico called that a “Christian form of government” and said “pluralistic democracy is a Christian value” that Christians “should feel a special obligation to defend.”
Finally, in a video clip that the Team Talarico Facebook account posted in December 2025, Talarico said, “Not once in the entire Bible does Jesus ask us to worship him.” Talarico was explaining that Jesus’ teachings were focused on helping and loving others.
“Jesus didn’t tell us to love our churches. He didn’t tell us to love our doctrines and our creeds. He didn’t even tell us to love our scriptures. He told us to love our neighbors,” he said. “All he asks is that we follow him. Love like he loved. Love the outcast. Welcome the stranger. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Free the oppressed.”
At the beginning of the short video, Talarico had said, “Christian nationalists walk around with a mouth full of scripture and a heart filled with hate.” He said he could tell what someone believes based on how they treat other people.
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