> The Montana Republican Party has ... a state representative named John Fuller, who published an opinion column in The Flathead Beacon earlier that year declaring that democracy had “failed as miserably as socialism."
> Keith Regier, an influential state senator, said all laws should be based on Judeo-Christian principles. “The Ten Commandments were a good foundation for any country to live by,” he told me .. I told him that I’d heard other Montanans voice feelings of persecution because of the imposition of Christian doctrine. Was there a middle ground to be found? “There probably isn’t a middle,” he said. “You can’t have both.”
> On the day after the Billings convention in July, couples filed into Grace Bible Church for the morning service. [Montana governor Greg] Gianforte greeted Hughes and a handful of the other parishioners before sitting down next to his wife and near two notable visitors: the Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts and Trump’s former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who were in Montana for a gathering of the Republican Governors Association.
> Hughes yielded the stage to a visiting pastor named Brad Bigney, who dedicated much of the sermon to reassuring parishioners that, though they might feel uncertain, they had to believe that God was in control of their destinies. “We seem like a remnant,” Bigney said. “We seem weak. We seem like we don’t have enough resources. We seem — Hello, read your Bible! It always looks that way! I hear people saying now, ‘My America, I don’t even feel comfortable in my America.’ I get it. But this isn’t our final home,” he continued. “He’s testing us, you guys, and I’m sad to say we’ve got some believers that are failing the test. It looks like they never truly trusted in God and that’s being exposed now."
> " They trusted in their country.”
Nope, definitely not espousing anti-democratic, totalitarian ideas. Definitely not wanting to infringe on other's rights to ... well, what is their goal exactly?
> If you want to live here,” Karla Johnson, a chapter president of the Montana Federation of Republican Women, said, “be a Christian.”
Oh, cool then.
( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/magazine/montana-republic... )