What the James Talarico Vegan Story Reveals About U.S. Politics

Centuries ago, Thomas Paine envisioned a country free of arbitrary rule—both from monarchy and religion. Today, both religious and secular dogma still curtail what can be said on the campaign trail.

Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, advocating republican form of government in the thirteen colonies, turned him into a national hero. Few people today realize that he in fact died poverty-stricken and alone—his opposition to religious dogma in his last major work, The Age of Reason, having proven significantly less popular in early American society than his writings against monarchy.

Today, the United States appears on paper the sort of representative democracy with formal separation of church and state that Paine championed. But in practice, the sort of dogma Paine warned about is ubiquitous, including in electoral campaigns. Perhaps nowhere is this most clearly visible than in the runup to the Texas race for the U.S. Senate, where Democratic primary winner James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, has made his faith central to his campaigning, counterposing his vision of godliness to the Christian nationalism he sees as ascendant in the Republican Party. But now Talarico himself is being accused of apostasy: not against god, but against barbeque. It is a telling moment where debating the finer details of religious dogma is being actively encouraged while even the slightest challenge to secular dogma (in this case meat-eating) is treated as unacceptable.

Ever since the charismatic young member of the Texas House of Representatives from Austin won the Democratic primary and began polling ahead of both Republican hopefuls—long-serving incumbent Senator John Cornyn and his challenger, Attorney General Ken Paxton—the GOP has been scraping the internet for oppo research. Last week they found it, improbably, in a speech Talarico gave during a state house race in 2022 to a small animal rights group called the Texas Humane Legislation Network. In it, Talarico told his audience that reducing meat........

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