Politics

Lauren Boebert says churches should be allowed to “direct the government”

U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida.
Photo: Gage Skidmore

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has gone viral for saying that there shouldn’t be a separation of church and state and that the church should actually control the state.

“The reason we had so many overreaching regulations in our nation is because the church complied,” Boebert said while speaking at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colorado this past Sunday.

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“The church is supposed to direct the government,” she continued. “The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our founding fathers intended it.”

“And I’m tired of this ‘separation of church and state’ junk, that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does.” The crowd applauded and shouted “amen.”

Boebert was referring to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, where he wrote: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declares that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

While that may be the origin of the specific expression, the Constitution does not give churches any explicit power over the U.S. government and it explicitly forbids the government from establishing a state religion.

But advocates of religious freedom warned that Boebert’s wish for a theocratic America may be coming true.

“We are about to get a very brutal real-world lesson in what it’s like to live in a country that doesn’t have that separation,” Andrew Seidel of Americans United told The Denver Post, explaining that the first three words of the Constitution’s Preamble – “We the people” – show that the U.S. was not intended to be a theocracy.

“That looks like conservative, white Christians as this privileged class and everybody else as these second-class citizens.”

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