Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) told a crowd that the Founders of the United States wanted the church to direct the government and said the idea of a separation of church and state is “junk.”

In a video posted to YouTube by Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colorado on Sunday, the freshman congresswoman railed against secular society.

Her remarks came amid Supreme Court rulings hailed by many religious conservatives. Last week, the court struck down a Maine law barring taxpayer money from going to religious schools as part of a state tuition program. The court also overturned Roe v. Wade, which for 49 years held that abortion is constitutionally protected.

In an address to the aforementioned church, Boebert called for the government to be run by “the church”:

The reason we had so many overreaching regulations in our nation is because the church complied. The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it. And I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does.

Of course, the church is not supposed to direct the government, as numerous Founders made clear. The “stinking letter” Boebert refers to presumably is correspondence from Thomas Jefferson to a group of Baptists in Connecticut in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Meanwhile, James Madison, who was the chief architect of the Constitution, was so averse to the mixture of religion in politics, that he believed the existence of congressional chaplains violates the Constitution – a view that would make him something of an outlier among today’s more religious politicians:

The Constitution of the U.S. forbids every thing like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them; and these are to be paid out of the national taxes.

Furthermore, the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli declared that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” There is no record of any official objections before the Senate ratified the document or before President John Adams signed it into law.