David Lane, a Christian nationalist political operative who believes the U.S. has a national mission to promote the Christian faith, is urging his followers to lobby Republican senators to elect Florida Sen. Rick Scott as GOP Majority Leader in Wednesday’s vote. Over the weekend, Scott immediately backed Trump’s demand that Republican senators dismantle a crucial constitutional check and balance by allowing Trump to fill his cabinet positions through recess appointments, bypassing Senate confirmation.
Lane, who has long urged conservative pastors to turn their churches into voter turnout operations on behalf of right-wing candidates, is committed to the “eradication” of secularism. Lane has called separation of church and state a “lie” designed to stop “Christian America—the moral majority—from imposing moral government on pagan schools, pagan higher learning, and pagan media.” As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump attended one of Lane’s organizing events in Florida.
Also urging senators to back Scott is the Conservative Action Project, the political arm of the Council for National Policy, which released a letter last week signed by many of the same right-wing activists who backed Trump’s efforts to stay in power after his 2020 defeat.
Lane and the Conservative Action Project’s leaders are intensely opposed to LGBTQ equality and legal access to abortion, and are eager to further dismantle separation of church and state.
Lane’s “excited” support for Scott came in a message that praised Trump for including on his education agenda a pledge to “support bringing back prayer to our schools.” He wrote that then-Gov. Rick Scott hosted a political prayer rally with Lane’s American Renewal Project called “The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis.”
Scott is also being backed by new Trump bestie Elon Musk.
