A newly surfaced undercover video shows the pastor and longtime mentor of Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico telling a secularist audience that atheists are welcome in his congregation, according to footage obtained by Breitbart News.
The video, reported exclusively by Breitbart on Thursday, captures Rev. Jim Rigby as he prepares to speak at an event for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). In it, Rigby — who leads St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin — says he welcomes nonbelievers into the pews. “If you love humanity and love nature and that’s why you hate religion, then we’re on the same team,” he says in the clip.
Talarico has attended St. Andrews since he was a toddler, according to a New York Times profile cited in the Breitbart report, and Rigby has led the congregation since the 1980s. The relationship between the two men runs deep: Rigby baptized Talarico and officiated the wedding of Talarico’s parents. Talarico has described Rigby as “my pastor in every sense of the word” and named him, alongside his own grandfather, as one of “the biggest influences on me as a Christian, as a human being.”
A Pastor With a History of Battles Inside His Denomination
In the undercover footage, Rigby recounts that his theological stances have put him at odds with his denomination. “I’ve been on trial within the denomination for LGBT stuff, abortion and non-theist,” he says. “We had an atheist join the church but that’s not a big deal here.”
The FFRF describes itself as the nation’s largest freethought association, with nearly 42,000 members who identify as atheists, agnostics, and skeptics. Its website states that “Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion.” Rigby’s appearance before the group, captured in the video, places a pastor of a Presbyterian congregation at an event hosted by an organization built on a explicitly secular premise.
Rigby’s unorthodox approach to language about God has drawn attention before. According to the Times profile referenced in the Breitbart report, he avoids male pronouns for God, arguing that implying to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is amounts to a kind of “violence.” He also does not use the word “Lord,” because he says it conjures a wealthy, European, male deity. Rigby has said he doesn’t much care for the word “God” at all but uses it occasionally, preferring synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”
Another Pastor in the Footage: ‘I Don’t Have a Need for a God’
The video also features Rev. Babs Miller, whose official title at St. Andrews is Minister to the Parish. In the footage, Miller says, “I don’t have a need for a God,” and that while she believes there is “something out there that holds all this together,” she does not see that force as God. She adds that the congregation is “not a worshipping church.”
Miller has also been recorded recently saying that Talarico is engaged in a political game. “I can guarantee you that once he gets elected, he’ll change his tune back to where he was,” she says in that separate video.
The candidate has already been walking back some of his own statements on religious matters. In an interview, Talarico said he was being “provocative” when he said God was non-binary. “I was being provocative with that statement, I get that,” he said. “What I was trying to say is that you can’t use human categories to define God.”
A Closely Watched Senate Race
Talarico is running against Republican Ken Paxton in November’s U.S. Senate contest in Texas, a race that has drawn national attention. The state’s Republican establishment has rallied behind Paxton; RNC leadership has publicly said Republicans will coalesce around him and that “ruby red Texas” will reject Talarico.
The video’s release adds a new dimension to the questions surrounding Talarico’s religious identity — an area where the Democratic candidate has leaned heavily in building his public profile. How voters in a state where faith plays a prominent role in politics will weigh the words of his pastor and mentor remains an open question heading into the fall campaign.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/09/17/exclusive-undercover-video-shows-democrat-james-talaricos-pastor-supporting-atheists-lets-them-join-his-church/