The Freedom From Religion Foundation is demanding that Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin retract and apologize for her recent “menacing” and religion-infused incendiary remarks.
McGeachin said in an interview distributed widely on April 9, “God calls us to pick up the sword and fight, and Christ will reign in the state of Idaho.” In a letter to the lieutenant governor, FFRF Co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker condemn her “frightening, threatening, ignorant, unpatriotic and un-American remarks.”
“Holding the second-highest executive office in your state, you are using your position of civil authority to threaten that ‘Christ will reign in the state of Idaho,’” the co-presidents write. “In an era of Christian nationalist and partisan strife, particularly following the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, it is impossible to read your words as other than a threat when you say ‘God calls us to pick up the sword and fight.’”
FFRF reminds McGeachin that she took an oath of office to preserve and defend the U.S. Constitution, which is a godless and entirely secular document, the first in the world, in fact, to separate religion from government. Its only references to religion are exclusionary, such as that there shall be no religious test for public office. The framers of our Constitution were revolutionary, FFRF asserts, in being first in history to invest sovereignty not in a divinity, but in “We the People.”
In their letter, Gaylor and Barker document that nonreligious Idahoans make up 27 percent of the state's population.
“Please retract your intemperate and menacing words immediately, and apologize to the many nonreligious and non-Christian citizens in your state,” concludes FFRF’s letter.
Read the letter to Lt. Gov. McGeachin here, and the joint report on Christian nationalism at the Jan. 6 insurrection, issued by FFRF and the Baptist Joint Committee, here.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 36,000 members across the country, including more than 180 members in Idaho. Its purpose is to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church