AUSTIN, TX — In the race to fill Texas’s open U.S. Senate seat, the question is no longer about policy, turnout, or even barbecue. It is about whose prayer line is open. Attorney General Ken Paxton has made the stakes explicit: God, he says, is the reason he is standing here at all.
“I truly believe that God just delivered me, not because I am a great person, because God is sovereign and he does what he wants to do,” Paxton said on Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s podcast, reflecting on tribulations that included an unsuccessful 2023 impeachment. “I don’t take credit for it, it’s really by the grace of God.”
This is, by any measure, the most confident a Texas politician has been about celestial logistics since at least the last primary. It is also a direct challenge to Paxton’s opponent, state Rep. James Talarico — a Presbyterian seminarian who has been running an unsubtly faith-forward campaign of his own, the kind where the candidate quotes Scripture from the stump and describes his platform as two simple commandments: love God, love neighbor.
The awkwardness, which political observers are now calling a scheduling conflict of the highest order, is that both men are claiming the same endorsement. Talarico, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and a man on leave from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, says the Almighty called him to serve. Paxton, a Southern Baptist layman, says the Almighty delivered him through impeachment. God, for His part, has not clarified whether He is backing the man of the cloth or the man of the acquittal, and His press office has gone quiet.
Paxton’s camp has been characteristically direct in resolving the tension. “His views are antithetical to Christian, historical Christian views,” Paxton said of Talarico, describing his opponent’s positions as liberal theology that does not reflect what Scripture says. Lt. Gov. Patrick, never one to understate a theological point, has gone further, suggesting Talarico is bound for a destination with considerably worse HVAC than the Texas Capitol.
So the race has distilled itself into the cleanest question in American politics: Whose God is it, anyway?
Here, Texas history offers a cautionary tale, though Paxton’s team is quick to insist it is actually an encouraging one. Consider Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in state history, a man who famously described having conversations with God about running for president. God, by Perry’s account, told him to run. Perry ran. And then, in a nationally televised debate, God appears to have gone briefly off-mic, because Perry could not remember the third federal agency he planned to eliminate and said, into a live microphone, “Oops.”
Perry dropped out not long after, explaining that being president simply “wasn’t in God’s plans for him.” This is, supporters note, not a reversal. It is a correction. God told Perry to run; God then told Perry to stop running; and God, in His infinite wisdom, later made Perry Secretary of Energy. The plan was there all along. It just wasn’t the plan Perry had initially announced.
It is this theological flexibility that makes the Paxton-Talarico contest so hard to score from the outside. If Paxton wins, God delivered him, exactly as promised. If Paxton loses, God — sovereign, inscrutable, and entirely within His rights to change course at the last second — simply delivered Talarico instead, and it was all part of the plan the whole time. Either way, God is undefeated.
God's Recent Texas Decisions: An Official Scorecard
- Rick Perry, 2012: Told to run for president. Ran. Said "Oops." Dropped out. (Ruling: "wasn't in God's plans" — victory reassigned retroactively.) - Rick Perry, 2017: Became Secretary of Energy. (Ruling: "this was the plan all along.") - Ken Paxton, 2023: Impeached by the House, acquitted by the Senate. (Ruling: delivered.) - Ken Paxton, 2026: Senate race, in progress. (Ruling: pending, will be declared God's will regardless of outcome.) - James Talarico, 2026: Claims a competing calling. (Ruling: under review; Lt. Gov. Patrick has filed a dissenting opinion.)The beauty of the arrangement, strategists on both sides privately concede, is that neither campaign can lose the theological argument. A victory is proof of God’s favor. A defeat is proof of God’s sovereignty. The only person whose reputation is never at risk is God, which is, as any pulpit veteran will tell you, precisely how He likes it.
At press time, both campaigns had reportedly filed formal petitions requesting a sign, and the Almighty, consistent with His long-standing policy of withholding comment until the votes are certified, had not returned either of them — a silence that each side is already claiming as an endorsement.