One of the most influential conservative policy groups at the Idaho Capitol wants to make the state explicitly Christian.
But their definition excludes a quarter of the population who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not to mention those in the state who belong to other religions or no religion at all.
Over the past five years, the Idaho Family Policy Center has become a legislative powerhouse, drafting, sponsoring and training lawmakers to debate a host of bills promoting Christian values in public spaces.
This year the organization pushed to mandate daily Bible reading in public schools, to require the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and to allow chaplains to serve as school counselors.
However, these policy proposals — which are relatively popular in the state, according to internal polling, and which have also been tried in Utah — are just the beginning of what the group envisions for the state.
Religious litmus tests in Idaho?
Idaho Family Policy Center president Blaine Conzatti told the Deseret News he would not oppose declaring Idaho a “Christian state” and implementing religious tests for public office, although he clarified these are not his short-term goals.
While the Supreme Court struck them down in 1961, provisions to prevent non-Christians from office are not new or radical, according to Conzatti. Many early American states incorporated religious tests requiring a belief in the Christian God, or a specific affiliation to Protestant sects.
Conzatti does not advocate for states to put their stamp of approval on one specific denomination but he does draw a line between “historic Christianity,” based on the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, and the faith of Latter-day Saints.
While they share many beliefs in common with Conzatti, some of the roughly one-third of Idaho lawmakers who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say this approach could alienate the state’s nearly half million members, and threatens religious pluralism.
“Mr. Conzatti, unfortunately, would not consider the majority faith in my legislative district to be Christian,” said Rep. Josh Wheeler, a Republican who represents the southeast corner of Idaho. “That right there shows you the danger of becoming too narrow in what you require in policy that brings faith into the public square.”
Since Wheeler entered the statehouse in 2023, legislators have introduced a record number of bills, with “a large majority” of those originating from groups like the Idaho Family Policy Center, Wheeler said.
The organization has had some major victories like the 2023 passage of bills letting parents sue libraries that carry sexually offensive books and letting students sue for encountering members of the opposite sex in public bathrooms.
The Idaho Family Policy Center is characterized by its relentless approach, providing lawmakers with several versions of a bill to introduce each session to make it more likely that efforts like daily Bible reading will eventually pass, according to Wheeler.
“What I was surprised by is the way that this influence kind of shapes the whole legislative process in Idaho,” Wheeler said.
But these legislative wins may ultimately come at the expense of broader goals to spread Christian values across society, Wheeler said, because they don’t take into account the needs of all state residents.
What the founders intended?
In a series of email responses, Conzatti said that his political mission rests on the belief that the Founding Fathers crafted constitutions with the assumption that governments would actively promote what Conzatti calls “biblical Christianity.”
“We are a Christian nation, as our founders at both the federal and state level affirmed,” Conzatti told the Deseret News. “Put simply, we want our public schools and local governments to acknowledge God, in ways consistent with the history and tradition of our state and nation.”
To support his conclusion, Conzatti, who studied government and law at Liberty University, cites numerous sources from the American Revolution and late 19th century where founders and Supreme Court justices affirmed the nation’s Christian foundations.
Drawing on Federalist leader Fisher Ames, Commentaries on the Constitution (1833) by Justice Joseph Story and Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892), Conzatti argues that the First Amendment was never meant to put a wall between traditional Christianity and policymaking.
His view is the opposite, that the maintenance of constitutional governance depends on the “governmental promotion of biblical Christianity,” and that forgetting this has threatened American liberty, led to increased crime and weakened the family.
“Both policymakers and voters alike should take this opportunity to return to those biblical principles that made America a great place to work, worship, and raise families,” Conzatti said.
Conzatti said he does not believe state-endorsed Christianity needs to come at the expense of religious liberty. The founding fathers, Conzatti said, were also firm believers in the natural right to freedom of conscience.
While Conzatti is consistent in stating that voters of every state should have the power to choose what “religious values and system of morality their state government will reflect,” he said “biblical Christianity” is the only worldview that can sustain the country.
“We can — and we should — openly promote biblical Christian values and acknowledge God in our governmental affairs," Conzatti said. “Idaho Family Policy Center affirms the freedom of all religious minorities to live out their faith, and we advocate for the religious freedom of everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.”
Idaho’s history of religious discrimination
Republican Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, who represents the area west of Idaho Falls, said proposals for the state to come out in transparent support of a certain interpretation of Christianity have “been on turbocharge over the last few years.”
Groups like Idaho Family Policy Center have an “outsized influence” in Idaho politics because of the partnerships they have developed with many sitting lawmakers and prospective primary challengers, Mickelsen said.
While some of their initiatives align with conservative small government principles, like allowing tax dollars to follow students outside of public school, others would expand government through increased litigation, spending and regulations, according to Mickelsen.
An approach to social issues that takes control away from local governments is not just heavy-handed, it could create a precedent that infringes on the kind of pluralism that protects religious diversity, Mickelsen said.
“I think that we’re getting back to a very slippery slope of being like the Church of England, or the Roman Catholic influence in Italy,” Mickelsen said. “When’s this going to stop? What’s good enough for them?”
Even though the 14th Amendment extended the Constitution’s prohibition on religious tests to the states in 1868, just after Idaho became a territory, in the state’s early history there was an effort to exclude Latter-day Saints from political life.
Despite Latter-day Saint missionaries being among the first Europeans to settle in Idaho, the territory’s laws in the 1880s, and its first state constitution, required an “Idaho Test Oath” that banned supporters of groups that practiced polygamy from voting, serving on juries or holding office.
The Supreme Court upheld the law in an unanimous ruling in 1890 — the same year the church ended the practice of plural marriage. And while enforcement ended later in the 1890s, the language that had earlier disenfranchised Latter-day Saint voters was not removed from the Idaho State Constitution until 1982.
Personal faith in the public sphere
Like Wheeler, Mickelsen, who is also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, pointed to the church’s seminary program as an example of how to bring religion into the public square without imposing on others.
In southeast Idaho, as in Utah, high school students are given release time to leave campus for one period to attend church seminary buildings that are often built next door to the school.
Former Republican Rep. Chenele Dixon, who was defeated in a primary in 2024 after opposing an Idaho Family Policy Center proposal, said she shared Wheeler and Mickelsen’s view that an individual’s faith should influence their policy decisions, and that this is healthy for society.
During her single term in office, Dixon supported some bills written by the Idaho Family Policy Center that overlapped with her conservative views as a lifelong Republican, she said.
But she said she thought other bills seemed like solutions in search of problems that the Idaho Family Policy Center had stirred up in an effort to box out views, or religions, they did not agree with.
“I do have a concern when we say that we need to be a Christian state, because there is always, I have found, a litmus test for Christianity with people that say that,” Dixon said.
“And actually, the folks who are saying that, don’t have room for LDS people either, and I think a lot of LDS people don’t understand that.”
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