When Quoting Paul Isn’t the Same as Agreeing with Paul

A Texas Senate candidate cited Scripture on the House floor. Paul didn’t mean what he said he meant.

Paul Wrote About Us. Not About God.

By now you may have seen the clip. James Talarico, a Texas state representative and the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, stood on the Texas House floor in 2021 and declared, “God is non-binary.” When the clip resurfaced this year and reporters pressed him on it, he offered a defense: he said he was being “intentionally provocative,” and then he reached for the Apostle Paul.

Specifically, he cited Galatians 3:28.

“The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, said that in Christ there is neither male nor female,” Talarico explained. “So if someone has a problem with that statement, they shouldn’t take it up with me — they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.”

That’s a clever answer. It’s also a misreading of what Paul was actually doing.

What Galatians 3:28 Actually Says

Here is the verse in full:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28 NIV

Read it carefully. Paul is not describing God. He is describing us — specifically, those who are “in Christ Jesus.” The subject of the sentence is the people who belong to Christ. That’s what “you are all one” means.

Paul is making a stunning claim about salvation — that it reaches every kind of person without exception. Jew and Gentile. Slave and free. Man and woman. In the ancient world, those were the deepest dividing lines imaginable. Paul is saying that in Christ, none of those distinctions determine who gets in. Nobody gets a head start. Nobody gets left out. The ground is level at the foot of the cross.

That is a powerful truth. But it is a truth about who receives salvation, not a statement about God’s nature or gender.

The Sleight of Hand

What Talarico did — and this matters — is take a verse about the reach of God’s grace toward people and turn it into a claim about what God is. That’s a significant move, and it isn’t supported by the text.

He took a verse about the reach of God’s grace toward people and turned it into a claim about what God is.

Scholars who study this passage closely note that Paul’s primary concern here is what theologians call soteriological — meaning it’s about salvation. Who gets saved? Everyone in Christ. That’s the point. Interpreters across a wide range of traditions agree on that basic reading, even when they disagree about what the social implications are.

None of them read it as a description of God’s gender identity.

To be fair, there are real and long-running conversations among Christians about how human language applies to God. Those are worth having. But Galatians 3:28 isn’t the text you reach for when you’re having that conversation, because Paul isn’t having that conversation in this passage. He’s talking about baptism and belonging and the promise made to Abraham.

When Talarico later admitted he had “missed the mark” on some past statements and called them “cringey,” he was probably gesturing at exactly this kind of overreach — where a real conviction gets dressed up in borrowed Scripture that doesn’t quite fit.

Why This Is Worth Paying Attention To

I’m not writing this to score political points. Politicians on every side quote the Bible to support positions they already hold. That’s not new.

What’s worth noticing is how it happens. A verse gets pulled from its context. The core of what Paul was actually saying — that every person, regardless of background, is equally welcome in Christ — gets set aside. And a different argument, about something Paul never addressed in this passage, gets slipped in wearing Paul’s clothes.

The remedy isn’t to distrust Scripture. It’s to read more of it, and to read it in context. Galatians 3:28 is a remarkable verse. It really is. It tells us that in Christ, the walls come down. That nobody gets a spiritual advantage because of their ethnic background or social standing or gender.

We don’t need to make Paul say something he didn’t say to get something worth preaching.

That’s enough. That’s actually extraordinary. We don’t need to make Paul say something he didn’t say to get something worth preaching.