- Adam Kinzinger slammed Lauren Boebert for her comments on the division between church and state.
- Boebert said the church should "direct the government" and decried the institutions' separation.
- In response, Kinzinger warned that there was no difference between her view and that of the Taliban.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger criticized fellow Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert on Wednesday evening for saying that the "church is supposed to direct the government" and that she was "tired" of the two institutions being separated.
"There is no difference between this and the Taliban. We must opposed the Christian Taliban. I say this as a Christian," Kinzinger, an Illinois lawmaker, tweeted while sharing an article about Boebert's statements.
Boebert had made her comments at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt. "The reason we had so many overreaching regulations in our nation is because the church complied," Boebert had said.
"The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church," she continued. "That is not how our founding fathers intended it. And I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk that's not in the Constitution, it was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does."
The letter Boebert referred to was penned in 1802 by then-President Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to the Connecticut Danbury Baptist Association that the US Constitution's First Amendment showed the American people had built "a wall of separation between Church and State."
The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
While it does not mention the separation of church and state specifically, Jefferson's letter interpreting the Constitution has for many years been the basis for the widely-accepted concept, although the phrase was reportedly coined by Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island.
As for Kinzinger's reference to the Taliban, the organization is an Islamic militant group that imposes a harsh rule on its subjects based on its leader's fundamentalist views of the Quran.
Representatives for Kinzinger and Boebert did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.