James Talarico

And they are starting to yearn for something bigger and something better and something that's more true and more honest.

I hear from people all day long, yes, on TikTok, but also in real life where they're just like, I want a relationship with God, and I'm just not sure how to find that.

I mean, I think that's maybe it was the pandemic, but there is something brewing out there where people, they're hungry for something bigger and deeper.

So, again, that's me on my hopeful days.

I've also had my days where I'm more cynical.

So I'm in my fourth term in the Texas House, and they're two-year terms, so that's eight years.

In my second term, I kind of had a crisis of confidence, I guess.

It was a brutal session.

It was a lot of really vicious fights on the House floor, a lot of really terrible bills.

The abortion ban, which we just talked about, was passed in my second term.

And I just kind of—I honestly lost faith in—

In the impact I was making and maybe even in democracy as a whole, whether this thing was even going to work, this idea that we were all going to try to solve our conflicts nonviolently and peacefully through a political process.

I don't know, all of that kind of I started to doubt in a profound way the work I was doing.

And throughout my life, whenever I've felt that doubt, I've always fallen back on faith.

Faith is the thing that is kind of the foundation for me.

And so in that second term, I had thought about quitting altogether.

I thought about resigning my seat and just going off to do other things that maybe would be more fruitful.

But through a lot of praying and a lot of soul-searching and a lot of meditation, I made a slightly different choice, which was to go to seminary and go back to school and go through the process of becoming a minister.

My granddad was a Baptist minister in South Texas, and so it was a part of my upbringing.

And I had really not thought about doing it myself, but I think I had just—