A call for defending church and state separation against the Christian Taliban

For this blog post,

substitute Santorum with Lauren Boebert 

I have been referring to a key goal of the Republican Party’s Christian nationalist (CN) political-theocratic movement as establishing Christian Sharia. It stands for an America controlled by God’s law, which stands above the US Constitution. What God demands is dictated by self-interested CN elites.

Apparently, some others are seeing the threat in this radical Christian fundamentalist legal attack on the secularism and provisions in the US Constitution that defend it. Secularism, pluralism and church-state separation are now all directly and openly attacked by the CN movement, Republican elites and the neo-fascist propaganda Leviathan that works for them, e.g., Faux News. One other critic of CN theocracy calls it the threat Christian Taliban. The Hill writes:

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on Wednesday criticized comments that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) made on Sunday in which she called for ending the separation of church and state in the United States.

Boebert said in a speech at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colo., that she is “tired” of the principle and falsely claimed that the Founding Fathers did not intend to keep religion separate from government.

Kinzinger condemned Boebert’s comments and compared them to the views of the Taliban, the militant Islamic fundamentalist group that rules Afghanistan.

“There is no difference between this and the Taliban. We must oppose the Christian Taliban. I say this as a Christian,” he tweeted.

Boebert argued that the separation of church and state “junk” is not in the Constitution and was only in a letter that “means nothing like they say it does.”

She appeared to be referencing a letter that then-President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Church Association in Connecticut. In the letter, Jefferson wrote that the American people had built “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

The constitutional interpretation of separation of church and state comes from the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

The Supreme Court applied this provision also to the states through the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which prohibits states from passing laws that restrict people’s “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The same legal arguments from the CN political-theocratic movement openly come up over and over and over now. One cannot deny the fact (not opinion) that the movement wants to gut core constitutional defenses of civil liberties. The radical Taliban Christian tyrants that run the CN movement hate the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Once those defenses fall to the CNs, the door is wide open to legally and brutally discriminate against hated out groups, especially racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBQT community, Democrats and political opposition generally, atheists, all non-Christians and all women, but especially minority and non-heterosexual women. In CN dogma, women are inferior and subordinate to men.

Core CN dogma is that God chose and still chooses elite and/or wealthy, White, heterosexual men to lead all people everywhere on Earth because they are morally superior to the rest of us. Proof of that is their elite status and/or wealth. They would not be elite or wealthy if God had not chosen them. 

A core CN creation myth is exactly what Taliban Boebert argues, i.e., the separation of church and state is “junk” that is not in the Constitution and was only in a letter that “means nothing like they say it does.” She lies. The Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment separates state from church. There is no religious test for holding office in government, but the CN movement wants to make Christianity a litmus test for holding power in government. In sacred CN dogma, non-Christians cannot hold positions of significant power in government or society generally.

In the 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association that Taliban Boebert misrepresents (lies about), Thomas Jefferson stated that when the American people adopted the establishment clause they built a “wall of separation between the church and state.” That is the point of the Establishment Clause in the 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That is why the CN movement hates the 1st Amendment’s Establishment Clause, along with the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses in the 14th Amendment. Those are the key provisions of the US Constitution that block what I call Christian Sharia and Kinzinger calls Christian Taliban.

This points to the reasons why, by the 1980s or earlier (arguably the 1950s in the wake of the horrific Brown v. Board of Education decision that ordered public school desegregation and abolished the separate but equal religious-political myth) the CN fundamentalist movement came to understand that they needed a whole now legal strategy to deal with a secular Constitution. A secular built on church-state separation stood squarely in the way of establishing Christian Sharia or Taliban in the US. Out of those intense White Christian fundamentalist frustrations grew aggressive but crackpot legal theories like Originalism, Strict Constructionism and Textualism that allowed American Christian fundamentalist elites to reinterpret the Constitution in their own personal, corrupt, intolerant Christian theocratic way. 

Those crackpot theories are what Republican CN Supreme Court justices are relying on right now to attack and gut the vitality of the Establishment, Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. In his concurrence in overturning Roe v. Wade Clarence Thomas directly attacked the scope of the due process clause: 

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. .... We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents. .... After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”

Once those three clauses fall to the CN theocratic movement, America will in fact be a kleptocratic Christian Sharia or Christian Taliban state. Church-state separation will have been demolished and all the rage, hate, vengeance, bigotry and corruption will gush out to smite all those who God demands to be smitten good and hard, even if it kills some or many of them. There is no reasonable doubt that cruel Sharia-Taliban laws will directly or indirectly kill at least some innocent Americans. 

Qs: Is it unreasonably inaccurate, or even a lie, to argue that the Republican Party’s CN wing 

(i) is attacking the secularism the US Constitution defends, and/or 

(ii) intends to establish God’s religious laws (Christian Sharia or Christian Taliban) above human secular laws the US Constitution is built on?