Think Idaho can’t possibly drift much further into extremism? If so, you should find out more about what may soon become the most powerful political lobby in the state, the Idaho Family Policy Center.
Its website describes its intent “to engage the culture, train statesmen, and equip Christians and churches to advance the cultural commission” in words sounding benign enough.
But read the recent independent report about it from InvestigateWest and you’ll get a different picture. The group’s president, Blaine Conzatti, for example, “has sometimes bristled at labels like ‘Christian nationalism’ and ‘theocracy,’ wanting to distinguish his beliefs from white nationalists and Iranian ayatollahs. Conzatti stressed that he would never ‘force someone to worship contrary to their conscience’ [how generous of him!] but pressed by InvestigateWest, he acknowledged that his perfect Idaho would allow only Christians to serve in public office.”
You should fairly assume that by “Christians,” that means his kind of Christians – not mainline or Unitarian or LDS church members, and probably not but so many evangelical believers, but rather those like the devout of the Moscow church led by Doug Wilson. That’s the church whose firebrand tone has rattled area residents (local residents concerned enough to have held large meetings about it) and has a close linkage to the now-secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who was a headliner at an IFPC event last year. That’s an indication of the very real (political-secular) power behind this group.
The IFPC also is connected to several other similar groups arising in other states. It has announced partners including Focus on the Family, Family Research Council and Family Policy Alliance; look them up.
Wilson apparently is not formally linked to the new organization, but as InvestigateWest notes, “his fingerprints are everywhere.”
Wilson has told Politico that “he wants to destigmatize the notion of theocracy.” Please remember what theocracy, and what the actual examples of it are like, in places like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Iran, and long ago in medieval Europe. It entails government operated solely by and for the benefit of one specific religious group, one section of us, to dominate everyone else. Freedom of speech, religion, assembly. conscience or anything else be damned. .
The group is doing plenty of outreach, holding high profile events, launches and a podcast and much more.
So what do they want at this point?
One early starting point, InvestigateWest points out, has been a bill introduced in the last legislative session (House Bill 162 sponsored by Representative Jordan Redman of Coeur d’Alene) which says, “Selections from the King James version, the new King James version, or the revised standard version of the Bible shall be read each morning of each instructional day in each occupied classroom in all public school districts.” The bill got no further than the House Education Committee, but it will be back, and Conzatti points out, accurately, that bills like this often take two or three years to pass.
Call that step one in the religious and cultural indoctrination and domination of a state.
How far it may go could be suggested by the launch, sometime this year, of a new law foundation seemingly to press its agenda by legal action and force compliance (to its satisfaction) of laws it likes.
Implications? InvestigateWest had this comment from Liz Yates at the Western States Center: “anti-democratic … They are trying to install a theocracy in which the authority of government comes not from the people, but from the Bible. And people who don’t subscribe to that form of Christianity are the ones who are excluded.”
Remember the Idaho Freedom Foundation, with its vaunted “index” of rankings that has frightened so many Idaho legislators to vote its way for so many years? How quaint. It seems to have a little less juice these days than it once did, and may be in the process of being supplanted as the top dog among Idaho influencers.
Watch this new development come the next legislative session for clues about where public life in Idaho may be headed next.
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