Around this time four years ago, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado condemned the separation of church and state as “junk.” As part of the same public comments, the far-right congresswoman added, “The church is supposed to direct the government.”

It was jarring rhetoric — and historical nonsense — but Boebert wasn’t the only Republican peddling notions like this about the First Amendment and religious liberty. The same month, as part of his ill-fated gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania, Republican Doug Mastriano insisted that the separation of church and state was a “myth,” while making the case for a Christian takeover of American politics.

Even at the time, however, there was no reason to necessarily see peripheral figures such as Boebert and Mastriano as speaking on behalf of the Republican Party’s mainstream. Leading GOP voices routinely cozied up to the religious right political movement, but it was far less common to hear them denounce church-state separation in overt and explicit ways.

Four years later, these theocratic attitudes have found a home in the White House. The Associated Press reported:

A new report by a Trump administration commission suggests replacing the idea of separating church and state with the idea of building bridges between them.

The assertion — challenging a longstanding concept in American law — comes amid a raft of recommendations in a draft report of the Religious Liberty Commission, released Friday afternoon.

Shortly after Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, he created this commission and filled it with conservative Christians aligned with the religious right movement. To the surprise of no one, it produced a 224-page draft report that endorsed a variety of goals, including more government promotion of religion, new laws to allow faith-based leaders to endorse politicians while maintaining their tax-exempt status, and allowing faith-based groups with government contracts to ignore civil rights laws while receiving taxpayer money.

In case this isn’t obvious, the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” According to Thomas Jefferson, those 16 words created a “wall of separation between church and state.”

Centuries later, Trump’s commission wants to replace the metaphor with a new one.

“The concept of a ‘wall of separation between church and state’ can wrongly imply that church and state are opposed to one another and must remain completely separate,” the panel’s members wrote in their report. “In reality, however, church and state strengthen and support one another. Perhaps a better analogy is that religious liberty acts as a bridge between church and state.”

In presenting their findings to the president, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick specifically declared, “From this day forward, [the separation of church and state] should have no power over people of all faiths ever again in America.”

Stepping back, it’s worth remembering that during the Cold War, it was common to hear American political figures condemn “Godless communists” in the Soviet Union. In fact, the conflict led the United States to go out of its way to create a contrast with our foes: If Russia was going to be atheistic, many American politicians said, it was incumbent on us to become less secular.

As a result, in 1954, Congress officially changed the Pledge of Allegiance to include the phrase “under God.” Three years later, federal lawmakers kept going, adding “In God We Trust” to all paper currency.

Seven decades later, Americans are at war with a literal theocracy run by radical religious clerics — but instead of moving in the opposite direction, many Republican officials are making the case that the United States should be more like Iran. We should be more willing to reject our bedrock principles of religious liberty. We should want more government interference in Americans’ religious decisions. We should welcome more Christian nationalism at the highest levels of power. We should be more open to theocratic objectives, even at the expense of democracy.

As a practical matter, it’s entirely possible that the commission’s recommendations were an elaborate chest-thumping exercise, which will have little if any impact on policymaking. But the fact that an official White House panel endorsed creating a “bridge” between church and state is an unsettling development, whether anything meaningful comes of its efforts or not.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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