Congressman Gohmert Demands End To Constitutional Rights

Christian nationalism is rife in the halls of Congress, and not just in the offices of Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert.

U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican Party politician from Texas, brought his Christian nationalism to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives this week in a self-contradictory speech that insisted that if America can’t be a country that is ruled by Christians alone, then it doesn’t deserve the legal protections established by the Constitution. Here’s what Representative Gohmert threatened non-Christians with:

“This Constitution is intended for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the governing of any other. So, we’re either going to have to get rid of all our constitutional rights, we can’t even allow freedom of assembly or speech, much less the Second Amendment, if we are not going to teach moral right and wrong, and what are we finding? We’re finding in our schools, of course they’re not teaching the Ten Commandments.”

Congressman Louie Gohmert’s speech, given on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, seeks to overturn the bedrock of constitutional law in the United States. Representative Gohmert says that only religious people should have constitutional rights, but the Constitution states that it applies to all people within the borders and jurisdiction of the United States.

As a Christian Nationalist, Louie Gohmert threatens that if Americans refuse to be Christians, and teach the Ten Commandments, all our constitutional rights will have to be taken away. His reasoning is that only religious people are good people, and only good people deserve to live in freedom.

The obvious trouble with Gohmert’s attempt at logic is that the very constitutional rights he threatens to take away guarantee protection from government establishment of religion, and protection of the people to make their own choices about religion. So, it just doesn’t make sense to say that people should only be allowed to have freedom of religion unless they first agree to obey the government’s command that they be religious.

It doesn’t make sense, but this is the broken thinking that’s at the heart of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalists say that America is great, and point to America’s freedoms as evidence of that. Then, without even thinking twice about it, Christian nationalists demand that freedom of Americans to make their own choices about religion be destroyed.

Someone attempting to appease the Christian nationalists might object: What about the Ten Commandments? Couldn’t all Americans agree to accept those, just to get along and make nice? The Ten Commandments just tell us not to kill or steal or… what else?

It’s difficult to remember the Ten Commandments, because not all versions of Christianity have the same exact version of the Ten Commandments. That inconsistency is awfully strange, given that they were supposedly handed down word for word in stone tablets from an all-powerful god.

The thing is that nearly half of the Ten Commandments are nothing more than commands that people obey religious authority. They demand that there be only worship of one god, and that no idols be worshipped, and that the name of the one permissible god not be blasphemed. They demand that religious rituals be followed.

The Ten Commandments are firmly opposed to freedom of religion. The Bible makes it clear that the notion of religious plurality is anathema to Christianity. This fact alone should make it clear to any intelligent American that freedom in America comes from democracy, not from religion.

Among the other demands from the Ten Commandments are that people must not be envious of a neighbor’s slaves. Nowhere do the Ten Commandments say that people shouldn’t own other people as slaves. Instead, the Ten Commandments say that if your neighbors have slaves, you shouldn’t be jealous about it. The truth is that the Christian Bible is a pro-slavery document, in the Old and New Testament alike. From Andrew Torba to the Ten Commandments, slavery is a disturbing theme in Christian Nationalism.