Republican Chair Says Only Christians Should Be Elected to Government

Kandiss Taylor, the Republican chair of Georgia’s 1st congressional district, said on her Jesus, Guns, & Babies show that “we shouldn’t be electing anyone in government…who isn’t Christian.”
Taylor hosts the conservative Christian program that promotes conspiracy theories and inaccurate information. She ran in the Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary in 2022, losing to Governor Brian Kemp after receiving only 3.4 percent of the vote.
In the episode streamed on Rumble on August 17, she told Erik Corcoran, founder of Businesses for Liberty, that “The Constitution is founded on common law; common law comes out of the Bible,” adding that the entire premise of the United States’ governing rules and structure is related to Jesus and God.
“You can’t separate the two,” she said of common law and the Bible. She continued: “The idea behind the whole document was that the church runs the state. The church and we the people. We are the church…and so we run the state. But the state, the government, has no control over the church.”
Taylor added, “And everybody is like, ‘Then you gotta let Satanists come in, and you gotta let witches come in, and you’ve gotta let Muslims and Hindus.’ No, no, we don’t. No, we don’t because America is founded on God Almighty, Creator God, Yahweh, Elohim.”
“That is what we’re founded on, and I don’t have to honor your religion. I don’t have to give you ‘freedom’ of religion. Freedom of religion is there for us to worship Jesus. It’s not for you to come force anything else upon me,” she said.
Taylor then went on to assert that “We shouldn’t be electing anyone in government—local, state or federal—that is not a Christian. That is how we take back this nation.”
Right Wing Watch posted the clip of the interview on X, formerly Twitter, which Taylor reposted, saying, “completely out of context, but I said what I said.”
Newsweek reached out to Taylor and the Georgia GOP via email for comment on Wednesday.
While the words “separation of church and state” don’t explicitly appear in the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause prohibit the government from “establishing” a religion and ensure individuals have the right to practice their religion of choice.
Taylor, who previously denounced the separation of church and state during her gubernatorial run, has been the chair of Georgia’s GOP 1st congressional district since April 2023. The district covers the state’s entire coastal area, including the city of Savannah.