Last week, Public Policy Polling took the pulse of the Republican primary field. It found that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker seems to be the frontrunner, with 25 percent support. However, the real news is in one of the crosstab questions. A whopping 57 percent of respondents would support ending the separation of church and state and declaring Christianity to be the nation’s official religion. Yep, you read that right. A majority of Republican primary voters are in favor of gutting the First Amendment and the ban on religious tests in Article Six of the Constitution.
Let that sink in for a moment. The GOP loves to tout itself as the defenders of the Constitution and true democracy against the closet socialism supposedly represented by the Democrats. And yet, their base would like to saw off one of the pillars of any democracy worth its salt–freedom of religion. Lest you think this is a sign that the GOP has definitely been taken over by the tea party, think again. Only 27 percent of respondents identified as tea partiers. While 58 percent of tea partiers support making Christianity the official religion, so do 55 percent of non-tea partiers. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that there really is no such thing as a “mainstream” Republican voter anymore. I know, that sounds harsh. But if wanting to destroy freedom of religion doesn’t put you outside the mainstream, then frankly, I don’t know what does.
Want more proof of how far gone Republican primary voters seem to be? Of the potential candidates who were mentioned in the poll, the only halfway sane one on the list is Chris Christie. Partly due to this, he’s probably most likely to cause a religious right meltdown if he gets the nomination. And yet, 70 percent of this supporters support making Christianity the official religion.
Then again, I’m not entirely surprised at this finding. After all, a number of right-wing pundits have all but announced that they’d like nothing better than to put the First Amendment in the shredder. For instance, several right-wingers suggested that Sandy Hook wouldn’t have happened if kids were forced to pray. In some cases, those arguments were made just hours after the shootings. It looks like that was the start of a trend. Just last year, we saw? the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins argue that Americans wouldn’t be trying to join ISIS if we force-fed Christianity into our culture. And we saw Bryan Fischer claim that the First Amendment was only intended to protect Christians. And Rick Santorum claimed that separation of church and state was a Communist plot. And just last week, Larry Klayman claimed that a Muslim cannot honestly swear to uphold the Constitution. This kind of talk isn’t just oppressive to non-Christians. It’s oppressive to Christians like me, who have this crazy idea that maybe we ought to learn to coexist with other faiths rather than essentially tell them to sit down, shut up, and accept an inferior role as a condition of their continued exisistence.
While this finding isn’t all that surprising, it isn’t any less scary. PPP, as most political junkies know, is almost laser-line accurate. It correctly predicted who would win each state in the 2012 presidential race, and was the most accurate pollster in last year’s gubernatorial races. So if PPP says that a majority of Republican primary voters want to make Christianity the state religion, then a majority of Republican primary voters want to make Christianity the state religion. This is yet more proof that one of our major parties has become a far-right party. To put it mildly, that’s not good for the country in the long run.
