In general, religious language fits badly in partisan spaces. Politics is about messy compromises and shifting coalitions, whereas religion requires precision of language and tenets that don’t change with the public mood. Some politicians manage to speak unreservedly about their faith without offending—I think of the relentlessly positive Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.). But then, Mr. Scott doesn’t have to fight contested elections and thus doesn’t have to get nasty.

Even so, progressives who pine for a “religious left,” for Democratic candidates sufficiently fluent in the language of faith to attract religious voters, miss the point. The mistake is to think Republican politicians are smarter and more calculating than they are. Most GOP pols who spout the terms of evangelical Christianity aren’t trying to manipulate their base; they’re speaking the way religious folk speak, however ill-advisedly in some public settings.

You don’t need a degree in political science to know that progressive candidates do poorly with religious voters because progressive candidates mostly aren’t religious. Leftist ideologies were originally, and in some measure still are, meant to take the place of religion—the state, not the church, would relieve the poor; experts rather than preachers would deliver moral instruction. That white Democrats struggle to make their views attractive to religious voters is the least surprising fact in American politics.

Enter James Talarico, who last week defeated Jasmine Crockett to win the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Texas. Mr. Talarico, a state representative, earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard and is working toward a divinity degree at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is a man of the progressive left. His theological commitments are decidedly liberal, perhaps universalist—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism he sees “as circling the same truth about the universe, about the cosmos.”

Progressive commentators hope Mr. Talarico can lend the left some of the spiritual authority it long ago ceded to the right. I remain skeptical, but from now till November Mr. Talarico can count on most of the news media to make his faith-based progressivism sound attractive.

The question of what sort of politics the Bible recommends is an old and tired one. Mr. Talarico echoes two or three generations of left-leaning churchmen when he claims that the Bible gives far more attention to relieving the poor than to issues of sexual ethics. He often names abortion and homosexuality. “To focus on those two things,” he said to a fawning Ezra Klein recently, “instead of feeding the hungry and healing the sick and welcoming the stranger—three things we’re told to do ad nauseam in Scripture—to me, is just mind-blowing.” Let’s grant the shaky premise and point out that Mr. Talarico is free to feed the hungry and heal the sick. What Scripture doesn’t command, ad nauseam or otherwise, is the coercion of other people to do those things or to pay for them.

But the most important point the seminarian and his progressive fans fail to grasp is that religious commitments don’t pack much of a punch if they’re always aligned with the smart-set orthodoxies. From a typical oration, in 2024: “You can’t call yourself a Christian and reject the stranger seeking asylum at our southern border. You can’t call yourself a Christian and destroy God’s creation with greenhouse gases.”

In the same vein, Mr. Talarico as a lay preacher posited scriptural support for abortion. “Before God comes over Mary, and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary’s consent.” (He doesn’t, incidentally.) “To me,” Mr. Talarico continued, “that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create.”

Nonreligious progressives aren’t always wrong to claim that Republican politicians use the language of faith to manipulate voters. It happens. What those progressives don’t appreciate is that contradicting an elite consensus carries a cost, even for a cynical Republican politician. To repudiate a doctrine accepted by the nation’s cultural arbiters gets you uninvited to their parties and called a fool. When Mr. Talarico shows he can bear that cost, I’ll take him seriously.