Texas state Rep. Matt Schaefer appeared on a Christians Engaged livestream last week, where he put his radical Christian nationalist worldview on full display, declaring that every elected official at every level is obligated to "worship God" and ensure that biblical commands are turned into public policy.
Schaefer, who insists that every elected official must "really understand what the Bible says" before running for office, proclaimed that any government that failed to use its power to uphold "biblical mandates" is in direct rebellion against God.
"The first biblical command for all rulers and all persons in authority is to worship God," Schaefer said. "It's all over the Bible. Look at the cycle of Israel and all the kings and the rulers that came along; when they obeyed, they had blessing, and then when they disobeyed, they had curses. The overriding command to every person, and every king, every state representative, every county commissioner—doesn't matter what level—is to worship God and to love him. If you're not doing that, then you're out of his will."
"All government is established by God, and if you're not doing it his way, then you're in disobedience," he added. "There's only two courses: there's obedience or rebellion. Those are really the only two options for any elected official."
Later in the interview, Schaefer explained just what this means in practice when he asserted that right-wing Christians have a "biblical mandate" to use the power of the state to outlaw abortion in the name of "pure religion."
"A Christian has to be a steward of civil government," Schaefer said. "I think there are very practical issues like the issue of abortion. In the book of James, it talks about pure religion, and that's taking care of sick, going into the widow and the orphan in their distress. That is pure religion."
"If you look at that word 'orphan,'" he continued, "when a woman has gone into a Planned Parenthood clinic and she's sitting in the waiting room, and she's filling out the paperwork, and she signs that bottom line—that consent—for that doctor to kill her child, and she puts the pen down on the clipboard and hands it back to the nurse, in that moment, that child has become an orphan because no earthly mother or father stands there to protect that little girl or a little boy anymore. And so as Christians, we have a biblical mandate to visit the orphan in their distress. And we do that through public policy. We do that through our elected representatives. How can you neglect that? How can we neglect the orphan inside the mother's womb when we have a chance to vote on people who will decide whether that is legal or not?"
