Rick Wilson pours cold water on Lauren Boebert's desire to turn America into a 'Christian nation'
Appearing on MSNBC early Sunday morning, former GOP campaign strategist Rick Wilson dropped the hammer on Republicans such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) who are campaigning on a promise to turn the US into a "Christian nation."
Reacting to a Politico report on the rise of Christian nationalism among the far-right, Wilson said the Republican Party and far-right evangelicals will rue the day they made this their rallying cry.
According to Politico, "Prominent Republican politicians have made the themes critical to their message to voters in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has argued that America is a Christian nation and that the separation of church and state is a 'myth.' Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia hard-liner, declared: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian Nationalists.” Amid a backlash, she doubled down and announced she would start selling 'Christian Nationalist' shirts. Now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to be flirting with Christian nationalist rhetoric, as well."
Speaking with host Katie Phang, Wilson had little good to say about the direction those candidates are leaning.
"First off, I need them to stop talking about the founders at this point," he began. "If you stretch back to the Mayflower, this is a country that was founded on fleeing from the religious persecution of an official state religion. And when the constitution was being framed, we had states and we had leaders who all understood that this country was going to have a pluralistic approach to religion, which was to say, the government would neither condone nor suppress any religion."
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"This is a fundamental part of American history," he lectured. "This emergence of the desire to be a explicitly Christian nation is something that really thrusts itself into the center in the last 50 years, approximately, but it's blossoming in the last couple years."
"My recommendation to these folks, if they want to live in a country that is governed by the church, that is governed by a religious body, I would recommend that they move to Iran -- that is exactly the kind of government they want," he added.
After citing Boebert, he warned, "I don't like all the Handmaid's Tale clichés, but there are people in that movement, there are people in that subculture who really believe that's how America should be. They have completely divorced themselves from individual liberty. They're completely divorced from religious liberty."
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