Someone asked Rev. Jim Rigby what's wrong with evangelical Christians. The camera was rolling. His answer: "My guess is that they're people who are just not that smart in, like, abstract thinking, which is where a lot of the liberal stuff and the principles of human rights and all that stuff comes up — it's like they just, it doesn't show up on their radar."
That's a pastor talking about the largest Protestant group in America. A man of the cloth explaining that tens of millions of believers are too dim to grasp human rights.
Rigby is the pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. He's also, by the candidate's own admission, the spiritual mentor of Texas state Rep. James Talarico, the Democrat currently running for U.S. Senate against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Talarico told the New York Times that Rigby was one of "the biggest influences on [him] as a Christian, as a human being."
So this isn't some random preacher in a strip-mall church. This is the man who shaped the worldview of a Senate candidate in one of the most watched races in the country.
The hidden-camera footage, dated August 30, doesn't stop at the intelligence insult. Rigby went further, drawing a comparison between President Trump and Adolf Hitler — suggesting both exploited the supposedly simple thinking of evangelical believers for political gain. He noted that Nazis who supported Hitler also claimed to believe in God, as though filling a pew on Sunday and voting Republican puts you in the same moral category as the Third Reich.
This is the same pastor who, in separate undercover footage, was asked whether he believed in the virgin birth. "I don't," Rigby said. He's also admitted on camera that he's "been on trial within the denomination for LGBT stuff, abortion, and non-theist" positions. In another clip, he acknowledged the quiet part out loud: "We all got in by lying."
Watch Rev. Rigby's comments on Christians for yourself
He's not the only one at St. Andrew's with interesting theology. Rev. Babs Miller, another minister at the church, told an undercover visitor that "if you polled our membership and ask them whether they were Christian, agnostic or atheist the vast majority would say agnostic or atheist." Rev. Carol Johnson, the church's minister for welcome and inclusion, added that "we don't have a lot of people who are religious here."
A church where the pastors don't believe in the virgin birth, the congregation is mostly atheist, and the senior minister thinks evangelicals are intellectually inferior. Talarico calls this place home. Has since he was two years old.
The footage creates a specific problem for Talarico's Senate campaign. Texas has more evangelical Christians than almost any state in the country. Talarico has positioned himself as a man of faith running against Ken Paxton. His spiritual mentor just told a hidden camera that the people Talarico needs to vote for him aren't capable of abstract thought.
Rigby's response, per the Daily Caller, was to blame "rightwing spies" for making the church "sound heretical." The camera didn't editorialize. It recorded a pastor answering a direct question with his honest opinion. The heresy isn't in the editing.
The footage is part of a series of undercover recordings from St. Andrew's Presbyterian that have surfaced over the past several weeks, each one peeling back another layer of what Talarico's home church actually believes — and what it thinks of the people sitting in evangelical pews across Texas.
Talarico is leading in eight major polls and prediction markets give him a 59 to 62 percent chance of winning. The voters who would put him in the Senate are the same ones his pastor just called not that smart.