Wingnuts Just Asking (Again) Who Would Jesus Kill? This Time It's James Talarico, Fellow Christian.
It's only a metaphor for salvation! Unless he can't be saved, then God should smite him.
On a recent episode of the Christian nationalist podcast “Reformation Red Pill,” cohosts Joshua Haymes and Brooks Potteiger — the pastor of Secretary of Holy War Pete Hegseths’s church in Tennessee — had a really good theological discussion about why you shouldn’t love your enemies, but instead pray for God to destroy them, never mind what that wimp Jesus might have said. The enemy in this particular case is James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Texas, who is himself a Christian who talks often about how government policy should help the least of us, feeding the poor and welcoming the strangers who seek help. As if Jesus ever mentioned those people!
Haymes explained that when The Enemy (Satan and Democrats) is at the gate, there’s no time to reason with your foe, so instead, it’s Smitin’ Time. And while we don’t know how exactly the topic came up, Haymes and Potteiger agreed that in times of emergency, you break the glass and use an “imprecatory prayer” that will wipe out the baddies, or at least “break their teeth in their mouths.” (Sometimes fundies will add that of course they’re only talking about spiritual warfare, not calling for actual assaults on people, wink, wink.)
Here’s the clip from Right Wing Watch; we do wish that it included a bit more of the first line where Haymes mentions “public enemies.” Not only for the sake of context, but also because that was probably hilariously batshit too.
Haymes led off by explaining that when you’re in mortal danger from fictional monsters from The Lord Of The Rings, love and compassion and turning the other cheek go right out the window.
“These are the orcs at the gate. You are not called to love the barbarian horde that is planning to break into your city and, you know, pillage, plunder, rape, and mutilate you and your people. You don't love that horde. That is your enemy and you pray.
“This is where you have imprecatory psalms. This is where you pray strongly. The psalmist is not shy. ‘God, destroy them. Make them as dung on the ground.’”
We aren’t entirely sure who in America Haymes thinks are the orcs who are bent on rape and pillage — given what follows, it really seems to be Democrats in general and Talarico in particular — but if he thinks political opponents are actually inhuman hordes from a fantasy novel, he’s really one Tolkien over the line.
The two then shared their fervent hope that God will lead Talarico to a spiritual death and rebirth, like the apostle Paul, so the Senate candidate will realize that up until now he’s been evil and needs to get right with Trump, also God:
HAYMES: I pray that God kills him. Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ. That's the first thing.
POTTEIGER: Right. We want him crucified, with Christ.
HAYMES: That's exactly right!
POTTEIGER: I want him to be, I think, Saul of Tarsus, Talarico of Tarsus. That’s what I want. […]
HAYMES: Yes! We want death and new life, right? And if it would not be within God's will to do so, stop him by any means necessary. (emphasis added)
Why yes, that little coda does kind of undercut the whole “We are talking about spiritual death and rebirth, not actual killing” take.
Anyway, don’t worry, because this is all just very standard Christian talk about salvation, not at all stochastic terrorism, because these guys just happen to love thinking in terms of killing and spiritual battle and spiritual warfare and lots of smiting, no biggie. If any nut with a gun does go after Talarico, these guys will be every bit as innocent as Bill O’Reilly was, because they remembered to say “with prayers” after “I hope God kills him.”
It’s like when Good Christians prayed for God to take care of Barack Obama, by ensuring that his “days are few,” hahah. (Others made the same funny joke about Biden, too, and no doubt Kamala Harris. They were super witty about it, you may recall, with bumper stickers saying “Pray for Obama — Psalm 109: 8.” That particular verse — “May his days be few; may another take his office” — is the mildest part of the psalm, which continues,
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Oh, stop complaining, it’s only a joke, as well as a prayer to the Almighty to kill someone, make his children’s lives miserable, and utterly remove him from memory. You need to lighten up.
Anyway, just to clarify why he thinks the orcs are at the gates, Haymes followed up with a tweet (archive link) confirming that he’s mad that Talarico supports abortion rights (which Haymes calls “child sacrifice”) and also doesn’t hate transgender people like a good Christian should. It’s really quite simple, Haymes explained: He’s praying Talarico (and the rest of us) will repent, and if we don’t, that we be utterly blotted out of existence.
But he’s not calling for violence by anyone other than the Prince of Peace, and he’s giving Talarico and other Democrats a chance to repent, so what’s the big deal?
Haymes seems to be big mad about a 2021 speech in which Talarico supposedly blasphemed by saying “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.” This isn’t really all that radical a thought among mainstream denominations, what with God being a spiritual being who transcends human categories, but many of your fundies are quite certain that God is a man, shut up.
This appears to have started when theologian Donald Trump complained on Brian Kilmeade’s radio show that Talarico’s support of trans people was an “insult to Jesus,” because insults are the only thing Trump knows. Kilmeade had asked Trump whether he’d be endorsing Ken Paxton or incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas Senate GOP primary. In a typically disjointed word salad that also attacked “Gavin Newscum” for being dyslexic, Trump said the “good news” was that Talarico is “wacked out, with his six different forms of gender and all the things that I saw, the insult to Jesus, I mean, such an insult. […] He is so woke. He’s beyond woke.”
Trump’s attack prompted a lovely reply from Talarico himself, who seems to have actually read and thought about what Jesus said instead of drooling over Old Testament fantasies of how God will smite some orcs:
Here’s the money quote:
“The president of the United States just said that I insulted Jesus.
“You want to know what insults Jesus? Kicking the sick off their healthcare while cutting taxes for billionaires.
“You know what insults Jesus? Deporting the stranger and separating babies from their mothers.
“You know what insults Jesus? Bombing innocent schoolchildren in Iran and sending our brave women off to die in another forever war.”
The man knows how to construct a sermon, that’s for sure. We look forward to his debate with whichever Pharisee wins the primary.
[Right Wing Watch / Guardian / LGBTQ Nation]
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Quick update to fix a typo from the YouTube auto-transcript: Haymes definitely said "imprecatory" prayer, not "impregatory" prayer. It's the bot transcription's error, not his, and I should have caught it.
Let's stay focused, kids: Joshua Haymes knows how to spell just fine. It's his theology and contempt for other people that are completely fucked.
One Tolkein over the line...I see what you did there, Dok. And I like it.