Indiana’s uber-conservative Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith (R) recently stated openly what many on the right have implicitly communicated for years: the belief that America is a Christian nation that should be governed by Christian values.

“Separation of Church and State is and always has been a lie — a dangerous falsehood weaponized to dismantle our Republic,” Beckwith, a pastor and self-described Christian nationalist, wrote on social media. “From its very inception, this phrase was twisted to marginalize Christian values and strip away the moral foundation that has held America together.”

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“They want you to believe that faith and patriotism are separate — that you must choose between God and country. That is unacceptable. Don’t fall for it. We are a Judeo-Christian nation. Our Founders did not intend to erect a secular barrier between God and government — they understood that faith and freedom are inseparable. We must reclaim that truth and not let secular agendas undermine what it means to be American.”

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Beckwith’s claims about the founders are not correct. As LGBTQ Nation writer Dr. Warren Blumenfeld has outlined, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were both staunch supporters of keeping religion and government separate.

“Every new and successful example, therefore, or a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance,” Madison wrote in 1822, “and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”

And Jefferson wrote Virginia’s “An Act for the Establishment of Religious Freedom,” which became state law in 1786 and which, experts have argued, laid the foundations for the creation and passage of the First Amendment.

The GOP’s recent rise has coincided with a rise in the power of Christian nationalists, who have been emboldened and supported by the political right to use religion to accomplish a set of bigoted policies promoting white, Christian, and hetero-cis supremacy.

Beckwith, for example, as godly as he claims to be, recently shared a post from Indianapolis Sure Foundation Baptist Church leader Justin Zhong inviting him to a church service, appearing to approve of the invitation. The Sure Foundation Baptist Church made national headlines recently when lay pastor Stephen Falco used slurs and called for murdering gay people during a men’s preaching night.

Beckwith’s repost has since been deleted.

The Lt. Gov. also said in June that LGBTQ+ people in “ancient history and all the way up to today” have a “demonic spirit” associated with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.

That same month, he sent an “alert” to his followers on social media that Pride Month is a sign of “Pagan Conquest” that will bring “ritual child sacrifice – with glitter and hashtags.” He claimed that Pride Month is part of a “state-corporate-pagan alliance to reprogram society” that forced people to listen to “Harvey Milk sermons” and support “government-sanctioned grooming.” Grooming is a word for tactics used by child molesters to gain the trust of their victims.

When running for lieutenant governor in 2024, he referred to pro-choice voters as “demonic.”

He said that Democrats had the “Jezebel spirit” and “a boldness for immorality” during a podcast interview last year. The host of the podcast said that the Jezebel spirit was “ultimately about control, which is the spirit of witchcraft, as we know. That’s what Jezebel operated in.” Beckwith nodded along.

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