Just before the official opening of the Family Research Council’s religious-right activist conference Pray Vote Stand Friday morning, FRC’s political arm FRC Action hosted a breakfast gathering where former member of Congress and new FRC Action President Jody Hice talked about the group’s voter turnout plans for 2024. FRC Action is hoping to raise $4 million for its super PAC to turn out conservative Christian voters and elect right-wing candidates in key swing states. Former Rep. Michele Bachmann, FRC’s board chair, finished the session with a pitch for contributions to fund the plan, warning that the 2024 election “might be the last chance” to save the country.
FRC President Tony Perkins named Hice president of FRC Action earlier this week. Hice joined FRC earlier this year after losing his Donald Trump-inspired challenge to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Hice pushed baseless claims about election fraud.
Hice and FRC seem like a good fit, given that both share long and ugly records of anti-LGBTQ bigotry, efforts to undermine church-state separation, and previous claims that the First Amendment’s religious liberty provisions should not apply to American Muslims.
In 2018, Right Wing Watch noted, “While the Religious Right’s influence in today’s Republican Party is pervasive, it’s hard to imagine a member of Congress that more fully reflects the far-right, conspiracy-embracing, Christian nationalist wing of the party than Hice.” Then-Rep. Hice told the pro-Trump prayer warriors at Intercessors for American that year that the midterm elections that year were part of a “spiritual battle” raging in the country.
Before his election to Congress, Hice was a pastor and an early participant in the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Pulpit Freedom Sunday, a campaign to undermine the Johnson Amendment by getting pastors to endorse candidates from the pulpit and dare the IRS to go after them. When he was in Congress, he introduced legislation to repeal the Johnson Amendment and its restrictions on electoral politicking by churches. “This is our country,” he told a group of pastors organized by Christian nationalist David Barton, it’s our turf and God has placed us here to be stewards at such a time as this and to stand in the gap.”
Among the gems in Right Wing Watch’s archives on new Hice:
- He has said that Satan is behind judges who have “chipped away” at “our Christian rights.”
- He has likened public schools to totalitarian indoctrination centers.
- He believes that “any weapon that our government and law enforcement possesses ought to be allowed for individuals to possess in this country.” He explained, “The Second Amendment is about defending ourselves against potentially tyrannical government. You cannot defend yourself with a BB gun if your opponent has cannons and bazookas and missiles.”
- He praised the Bundy ranchers and their supporters who engaged in an armed standoff with federal officials to defend their refusal to pay grazing fees they owed the federal government.
- In a video message delivered to the dominionist Future Conference in 2015, Hice denounced the “so-called separation of church and state” and said that secular government leads to greater divorce, teen pregnancy, gang violence, and more intrusive government.
- When he was running for Congress in 2014, Hice saidthat the crisis of children fleeing violence showing up at the southern border that summer was “the reason we have a Second Amendment,” adding, “We have the responsibility as individuals and as states to step up in those areas where our federal government will not.”
Right Wing Watch noted before Hice’s 2014 election:
Hice outlines his political beliefs and fears in his book, “It’s Now or Never: A Call to Reclaim America,” in which he claims that abortion rights make the U.S. worse than Nazi Germany; endorses the fringe “nullification” theory; argues that Islam “does not deserve First Amendment protection”; and spells out his worries about gay people trying to “sodomize” children and persecute Christians, fearing that children will be “preyed upon” by gay “recruitment” efforts until they embrace “destructive,” “militant homosexuality.”
We expect this year’s Pray Vote Stand conference will confirm that Hice will be very comfortable at FRC.
