The Republican representative from Colorado, Lauren Boebert, says she is “weary” of the country’s long-standing practice of keeping church and state separate and feels “the church is supposed to lead the government.”
Before her primary vote on Tuesday, Boebert seemingly got confused when she stated the Founding Fathers did not intend to separate religion from the political system in a speech she gave on Sunday at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colorado. She argued that “the government is not supposed to direct the church.”
“I’m sick of this nonsense about religion and state separation; it’s against the Constitution. The audience applauded as Boebert said, “It was in a disgusting letter and it meant nothing like they say it does.
In Colorado’s 3rd District, state senator Don Coram is Boebert’s primary opponent on the Republican side; nevertheless, FiveThirtyEight, a website that tracks elections, predicts that Boebert will win on Tuesday despite having raised significantly more money than Coram during the campaign.
The establishment clause in the Bill of Rights, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” is the source of the idea of a separation between church and state.
The first person to interpret the phrase as “a wall or hedge of separation” between the “wilderness of the world” and “the garden of the church” was Roger Williams, who created Rhode Island.
The American public, according to then-President Thomas Jefferson, had “erected a wall of separation between Church and State” when he wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut in 1802.
The idea has been followed by states for a very long time since Jefferson’s letter. The Supreme Court utilized the notion to sustain such a wall and applied the clause to states with the 14th Amendment.
However, the current high court, which is dominated by conservatives, has been ruling more frequently lately in favor of religion in public places.
The Supreme Court decided in favor of a football coach in Washington state who prayed at the 50-yard line following public school games this month, and this month it overturned a Maine law that forbade religious institutions from receiving taxpayer-funded tuition help.
Conservative justices further declared in May that Boston’s denial of a religious group’s request to display its flag at city hall constituted a constitutional violation.
The court “continues to demolish the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers battled to construct,” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor remarked following the Maine decision.
The justice stated in her dissenting opinion that “the Court has upended constitutional doctrine in just a few years.”
Boebert, has been labeled far-right conservative with extreme views on abortion, weapons, and immigration. She generated controversy since winning the 2020 election, stated that the church has instead become a tool of the state.
“The church obeyed, which is why we had so many overreaching restrictions,” she remarked. “The government is meant to be governed by the church. The church shouldn’t be governed by the government. Not in the manner that our Founding Fathers intended.
