Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico said in a recent interview that he has been influenced by Islamic mystics as much as he has been influenced by Christian authors.
“I know personally that I’ve learned as much about my faith from Salman’s tradition, from the Islamic mystics, from poets like Rumi, as much as I have from Christian authors and Christian writers,” he said in an interview clip shared on social media.
The interview, reported by The Daily Wire, saw Talarico further arguing that such “interfaith dialogue” serves to strengthen one’s faith tradition and “brings out new flavors and new colors.” He also quoted a 13th-century Islamic mystic as saying, “In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.”
In a separate interview, Talarico described himself as a “Christian who hates Christianity.”
“I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity, right?” Talarico said during an appearance on the “Activist Theology” podcast. He went on to note that his “imagination is also just limited by my own background and identity, my whiteness, my masculinity, all those things limit my imagination about what’s possible. So, I have to continually press against that to try to expand the limits of what I’m dreaming of for our community.”
In that same interview, according to The Federalist, Talarico argued Jesus is a socialist. “The reason I think Christianity can be powerful in our context in this country is because so many of our political opponents share that kind of, that tradition,” he said. “It’s very strange every time I think about it, that the most popular figure in our country, particularly on the conservative right, is this socialist anarchist from Palestine.”
