Last updated on October 17, 2022
Since her election, Lauren Boebert has been in the news cycle for one controversial comment or another. If you don’t already know her, she’s a former restaurant owner (Shooter’s Grill in Rifle, Colorado, almost foreshadowing her stances on gun control) turned representative of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. From joking that a Muslim House Representative was a terrorist to rejecting gun control after the Uvalde shooting with the bizarre argument of “When 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes” (and blaming it on “godlessness taking over in America”) to lying about her husband’s finances to the government, she provides no short supply of conflict, and in my opinion, idiocy. In this most recent ridiculous take, it appears that she’s fully committing to being a Christian nationalist.
Well, what exactly is Christian nationalism? In a nutshell, it is the belief that the nation of America is defined by Christianity and that the government is obligated to keep it that way. On September 13, 2022, Boebert was quoted saying, “it’s time for us to position ourselves and rise up and take our place in Christ and influence this nation as we were called to do.” This call to action is absurd for a multitude of reasons.
While Boebert hadn’t previously identified as a Christian nationalist, it’s pretty evident in many of her quotes such as, “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk” and “I believe that there have been two nations that have been created to glorify God. Israel, whom we bless, and the United States of America… And this nation will glorify God.” During one of her speeches, she also called for Christians to “speak up” and remove “unrighteous politicians, these corrupt, crooked politicians” and replace them with “righteous men and women of God”. This sounds an awful lot like she’s calling for a religious coup of some sort. The most alarming part of all of this is that Lauren Boebert was elected. And at the moment, she’s likely to win a second term. Christian nationalism is a force that can’t just be ignored. Lauren Boebert actively advocates for a religious uprising, Christian nationalism, and amounts of racism and Islamophobia that are hard to comprehend.
Boebert is also a zealous gun rights activist. She frequently uses religion to back up her position on the matter. “They like to say: ‘Oh, Jesus didn’t need an AR-15. How many AR-15s do you think Jesus woulda had?… Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.” This justification of militray grade weapons on the street using religious idealogy is a dangerous game.
The harm of Christian nationalism is tangible and was a major contributing factor to the January 6th riots. To summarize the statistics of a TIME article, compared to the days following the attack and 7 months after, among the ‘Ambassadors’ in Christian nationalism, (those who think the US should declare itself a Christian nation, which could be up to 30 million people and growing), the “percentage of white Ambassadors who felt the rioters should be prosecuted dropped over 22 points from 76.3% to 54.2%. Even more striking, the percentage of white Ambassadors who said they stood on the side of the rioters doubled from 13.6% to over 27%.” It is only escalating from here. The end goal of what Lauren Boebert wants is unclear. But the fact that she’s attained some mild grasp of power should be incredibly concerning. As someone (like most Americans) who is a fervent believer in religious freedom and the separation of church and state, this is genuinely worrisome and frustrating. And the worst part is there’s no clean way out of this one. The disturbing wave of Christian nationalism is a growing problem that we’ll be forced to tackle in the coming years and decades. Who’s to say how it’ll end?
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