James Talarico

As they should.

I mean, I honestly think that Christianity has a lot to share with the world at this moment of kind of crisis everywhere.

But this, again, is giving Christianity and religious people broadly a bad name.

Because this is what people think about religious people, that we're more interested in imposing our faith or our values or our beliefs on others instead of living it out ourselves.

I think fear.

Fear.

And I get that fear.

I want to acknowledge that I also feel this fear that –

You know, I look across my church on Sunday mornings and I see a lot of gray hair.

I worry about the future of my church, of my faith in this country.

Everyone has seen the charts of declining religious participation and the decline in the number of people who belong to faith.

I think a lot of it is well justified because organized religion has done a lot of damage to people, particularly if we're talking about this country.

This country is going to be Christianity, right?

Now, in India, it may be a conversation about Hindu nationalism, but here, the dominant religion is Christianity.

Yeah.

And, you know, we've seen that too many churches, too many faith leaders have abused that trust.

A lot of Gen Z, a lot of my fellow millennials, when they hear me talking about, you know, my faith and how it informs my public service, they're like, I've never heard of this kind of Christianity, right?

Like, I was told that if you wanted to be a Christian, you had to hate gay people, right?

If you wanted to be a Christian, you had to want to control women.

If you wanted to be a Christian, you had to reject science.