In the future that the Idaho Family Policy Center envisions, every public school classroom in the state would begin the day with teachers reading from the King James Bible.
Verse by verse, over 10 years of school, children would hear their teachers recite the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and the repeated exhortations that Jesus Christ is God. Students who didn’t want to listen would have to bring a note from their parents.
The policy center’s attempt to make that vision a reality — a bill introduced this year in the state Legislature — failed to get traction. But the policy center’s president, Blaine Conzatti, is playing the long game.
“It usually takes us two to three years to get a bill through,” Conzatti said. “We're going to introduce it again next year, and I am confident and optimistic in the chances of success.”
After all, his organization has swiftly become the largest conservative policy organization in the state, having a hand in successfully pushing some of Idaho’s most controversial bills in recent years, including laws restricting access to abortion, puberty blockers and controversial library books.
The U.S. Supreme Court has considered mandatory Bible reading laws to be unconstitutional for the last six decades. But after a series of recent rulings, an emboldened movement of Christian nationalists — conservatives who want to use government to elevate their religion over other faiths — hope the constitutional walls dividing church and state are poised to come tumbling down.
The Idaho Family Policy Center is part of a national network of like-minded groups. It’s closely aligned with Doug Wilson, an incendiary Idaho pastor whose theocratic gospel has earned fame and condemnation. And now, it has allies in the White House.
President Donald Trump's Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, attends church in Wilson’s denomination and headlined an Idaho Family Policy Center event in March of last year. That’s where the policy center announced it was opening up another front: a law firm that will not only defend Christians for free, but also sue to enforce the laws that Conzatti wrote. The legal center is launching this summer.
“This will be the first conservative Christian public interest law firm in the state of Idaho,” Conzatti said.
The policy center’s growing influence over Idaho lawmakers alarms Liz Yates, a program manager at the Western States Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremism. Yates said the organization’s goals are ultimately “anti-democratic.”
“They are trying to install a theocracy in which the authority of government comes not from the people, but from the Bible,” Yates said. “And people who don't subscribe to that form of Christianity are the ones who are excluded."
Conzatti has sometimes bristled at labels like “Christian nationalism” and “theocracy,” wanting to distinguish his beliefs from white nationalists and Iranian ayatollahs.
Conzatti stressed that he would never “force someone to worship contrary to their conscience,” but pressed by InvestigateWest, he acknowledged that his perfect Idaho would allow only Christians to serve in public office.
“The people of Idaho are a Christian people,” Conzatti said. “They want a Christian constitution.”
Not all Idaho Christians are on board.
"You don't see Jesus going around imposing by law that people of other faiths listen to his scriptures," said Ben Cremer, a progressive former Boise pastor. "That is theologically and morally repugnant to me. "
He sees Jesus as a "revolutionary political" leader, but attributes the faith’s historical growth to its "radical love for the poor and marginalized,” not chasing political power.
“Every time the church crawls into bed with the empire, persecution of non-believers and the most vulnerable always happens," Cremer said.
And Planned Parenthood lobbyist Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman, who has four children and has been with her wife for eight years, said that Conzatti’s policies have her fearing for trangender members of her own family. In the wake of conservative wins on abortion in the state, she said the right has trained its focus on gay and trans communities — and lately, some have been making exit plans to leave the state if things get much worse.
“We're trying to live our lives,” she said. “They're using LGBTQ Idahoan's lives in order to get their political wins … and the harm that I've seen in the past two years is like nothing I've seen.”
‘Deus Vult’
As Trump entered his second term, a slew of figures with a Christian nationalist worldview have taken power.
U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, third in line for the presidency, is a former lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, a national Christian law firm and policy center partner that has scored numerous conservative wins at the U.S. Supreme Court. He flies an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his office, a Revolutionary War-era symbol that has been frequently tied to Christian nationalism.
Hegseth, the secretary of defense, has “Deus Vult” — a Crusader battle cry meaning "God wills it" — tattooed on his bicep and has accused public schools of implementing an “egalitarian, dystopian LGBT nightmare.”
But even with more allies in Congress and the White House, Conzatti still believes the best path to transform government is at the state level.
“D.C. is broken,” Conzatti said. “I am focused exclusively on state policy reform. And there, I think, we're making headway.”
Cheering on those efforts is Moscow, Idaho, pastor Doug Wilson, whose book “Mere Christendom” outlines his vision for state-focused Christian nationalism. He is, the website promoting his books brags, the “most hated pastor in America.”
He revels in sprinkling provocation and profanity in between intricate theological analysis and debate. He led protests to defy the city of Moscow’s pandemic masking mandates. His writings have derided feminists as "harpies and crones" and "small-breasted biddies,” argued that giving women the right to vote ultimately harmed families, and declared that Christians who owned slaves in the South “were on firm scriptural ground.”
That hasn’t stopped him from becoming a superstar within the world of Christian nationalism. Wilson has a podcast with millions of listeners. He helped found the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches denomination, a sprawling private school network and a Christian publishing house. And he’s played a crucial role in shaping the policy center.
While Conzatti stressed that Wilson has no formal governing role with the policy center, Wilson’s fingerprints are everywhere. Nearly two-thirds of the policy center’s board have clear connections to Wilson. There’s Toby Sumpter who was Wilson's assistant pastor; Jason Elmore, a parish elder at Wilson's church, and Israel Waitman who sits on the board of the New Saint Andrews, the Christian college Wilson founded.
Wilson is also Conzatti’s personal friend, giving him strategic advice and fundraising help, and has been a guest speaker at the policy center’s Biblical Activism Bootcamp.
“Doug's given us a lot of support over the years,” Conzatti said.
Conzatti, raised in an "agnostic, progressive Seattle family,” converted to Christianity at 19, eventually finding his way to attending a Meridian church that is part of the denomination Wilson co-founded. He attended law school at Virginia’s Liberty University, one of the most conservative colleges in the nation.
That’s not to say Conzatti agrees with Wilson on everything, but their shared vision for “Christendom” has them fighting side by side. They don’t just want to save souls — they want to convert nations.
Christian nationalists, Wilson said, are “one more radical step up” from earlier waves of conservative Christians trying to influence politics. They reject the notion that government can be secular. It has to choose — either fully accept or fully reject God. Wilson doesn’t just want the government to ban abortion, he told InvestigateWest. He wants the government to do it because they “don't want to make God angry.”
He told Politico he wants to destigmatize the notion of theocracy, arguing that at its founding America had a weaker federal government that gave states a long leash to establish a state religion as they see fit.
Conzatti rejects the “theocracy” label, but echoes Wilson’s goal.
“Our Founding Fathers didn't like democracy,” Conzatti said on a 2022 podcast. “Some of them called it demonic and satanic, because it so often degenerates into mob rule.”
Instead, Wilson and Conzatti argue that biblical law was the bedrock of America, and that the country has suffered for abandoning it.
That origin story is disputed by many historians, as well as Christians like Cremer, who argues Christian nationalists “take a revisionist approach to both Christian history and American history” but don’t understand either.
In Wilson’s version of history, the aftermath of the Civil War was a tragedy because it led to an expansion of federal power at the expense of the states.
“Had I been alive at that time, I would have fought for the South,” Wilson told InvestigateWest.
After all, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War paved the way for courts to conclude that constitutional provisions like the First Amendment and a ban on “religious tests” to hold public office apply to the states. That led to two 1960s court decisions banning school-mandated prayer and Bible reading, which Conzatti blames for everything from a spike in violent crime to a surge in teen pregnancies.
Wilson and Conzatti’s long-term vision for the future would reverse all that and allow states to not just establish an official religion, but to once again bar non-Christians from running for office at all.
Imposing a religious test would have a sweeping impact on Idaho’s Legislature. Roughly a third of Idaho’s 105 legislators are Mormon. While Conzatti says “we share so many values with our Mormon friends,” he also considers the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to be “outside the boundaries of historic Christianity.”
“Religious tests would be a good thing to return to, but we're a long ways away from that,” said Conzatti.
But for now, there are other ways Conzatti sees of elevating his faith.
Speaking from the pulpit at Mountain Heights Calvary Chapel in April, Conzatti assured the crowd that the policy center’s Bible bill "was crafted in such a way that it would not allow the Quran or the Book of Mormon or other religious texts to be taught in schools.”
Bounty hunters
As the Idaho Family Policy Center has pushed through some of Idaho’s most controversial laws, Conzatti said it has experienced “explosive growth.”
Four years ago, Conzatti was the policy center’s only paid employee. The organization is now planning to grow its staff to 14 people by the end of this year, surpassing the size of other players like the libertarian-leaning Idaho Freedom Foundation.
When legislative strategist Amy Dundon joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho in 2023, she quickly noticed that the Freedom Foundation didn’t seem like the most powerful mover in the legislature.
“Instead, it really was this Family Policy Center,” Dundon said.
The policy center and Conzatti claim they are committed to religious liberty, but are open about their desire to put Christianity above every other religion.
“It's religious supremacy,” Dundon said. “That's very different.”
At the heart of the policy center's strategy is its in-house legislative shop that seeks to influence every stage of the lawmaking process. They conduct legal research. They draft the bills. They train legislators to carry those bills. And then they rally supporters to lobby for their passage.
“Oftentimes we're actually listed as a sponsor,” Conzatti said.
The policy center is also partnered with a movement of social conservative advocacy organizations pushing a similar strategy across the country, including the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and Alliance Defending Freedom. Dundon describes it as a sophisticated "shadow network" working in tandem to carry out a shared vision of chipping away at the separation of church and state.
Alliance Defending Freedom has repeatedly represented the Idaho Attorney General’s Office for free, including in the state’s efforts to defend a policy center-written law restricting transgender children from using their preferred bathrooms.
That same organization also teed up the biggest win for conservative Christians in recent history: Alliance Defending Freedom authored a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, allowing the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority to take a swing at the issue.
It worked. In June 2022, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, handing Congress and individual states control of abortion laws.
The Dobbs decision was a product of decades of work by the conservative legal movement. For activists like Conzatti, it was only the start: After Dobbs, he lamented on the policy center’s website that Idaho’s anti-abortion laws still leave “large exceptions for rape and incest, and its penalties are not commensurate with the crime being committed.”
Even before the Dobbs decision, the policy center had launched its own gambit to limit abortions in the state. Riffing off a similar bill in Texas, the policy center successfully lobbied for the 2022 passage of what it called the “heartbeat bill.” According to the law, if a woman in Idaho gets an abortion after the fetus has shown signs of cardiac activity — often around six weeks — family members of the aborted fetus as distant as aunts or uncles can now sue the abortion provider for at least $20,000 in damages.
Gov. Brad Little signed the bill reluctantly, citing in a statement the possibility that “states hostile to the First and Second Amendments” could use the same tactic “to target our religious freedoms and right to bear arms.”
The strategy has, in fact, been used to advance liberal causes for a half-century, including laws protecting civil rights, the environment and consumer privacy. But in more recent years, according to a University of California Irvine law review article, social conservatives have increasingly embedded private litigation paths into proposed legislation.
That’s the case with the Bible reading bill and other proposals the Idaho Family Policy Center has sponsored in recent years:
- House Bill 230 would have let parents of children who have been exposed to “indecent sexual exhibitions” sue for damages. The 2025 bill was aimed at drag performances and defined “sexual conduct” as including “sexual provocative dances with accessories that exaggerate male or female primary or secondary sexual characteristics,” but specifically exempted high school and college cheerleading performances. It passed the Idaho House this year but died in the Senate.
- Senate Bill 1100, which became law in 2023, lets students sue for $5,000 per incident of encountering the opposite sex in a locker room or bathroom, plus damages for “all psychological, emotional, and physical harm suffered."
- House Bill 710, which passed in 2023, gives parents the right to sue a school or library if their child obtains books with “patently offensive representations” of sexual acts “normal or perverted.”
The tactic has sometimes been derided as “bounty law.” Yates, with the Western States Center, worries these types of laws effectively turn Idahoans into cops, policing the identities and behaviors of their fellow citizens.
“These laws encourage Idahoans to view members of frequently targeted communities … as threats that they must be protected from,” Yates said, citing the organization’s anti-trans legislation.
Gov. Little vetoed an earlier version of the library bill, writing in a statement that "allowing any parent, regardless of intention, to collect $2,500 in automatic fines creates a library bounty system” that would only cost taxpayers money.
The final version of the law reduced the fine to $250, but Conzatti felt it was vital to keep the litigation mechanism.
"No elected prosecuting attorney wants to throw a librarian in jail, so they would rather not prosecute the issue at all,” he explained to Wilson last year on Man Rampant, Wilson’s online talk show. But now, “families have legal recourse if the prosecuting attorney is refusing to enforce the obscenity law,” Conzatti added.
Soon, those same families will be able to hire the policy center’s attorneys to enforce the laws it wrote.
A brochure about the legal center said the initiative was inspired by an incident in which an abortion clinic allegedly violated the "heartbeat law" by encouraging a woman to cross state lines to receive an abortion pill. It lists hypothetical plaintiffs that it would represent: a woman who regrets an illegal abortion, a teacher who was fired for refusing to use a student's preferred pronoun or a parent who objects to a hospital removing life-support too soon for their disabled child.
The brochure also encouraged big donors to give upwards of $250,000 “to invest in the legal defense of persecuted Idahoans.”
Since 2019, Conzatti said his organization’s annual budget has soared from $90,000 to an anticipated $3.3 million this year. Some of that funding comes directly from local churches, with at least one church donating as much as $25,000.
“Every time the media publishes a hit piece on us that actually helps,” Conzatti said, “We will start receiving gifts from people who say, ‘Hey, if the media is attacking you, you’re doing the right thing.”
God’s politics
Despite the influx of money, Wilson and Conzatti still have a long way to go to convince Republicans to adopt their vision for Idaho and the country.
A 2024 Pew Research Center survey showed less than 21 percent of Republicans nationwide believe the U.S. should declare Christianity the official religion.
Less than a third said that the Bible should have a great influence on laws in the United States.
Even among some of Idaho’s more conservative legislators, there’s uneasiness about how far the policy center wants to push them.
Rep. Judy Boyle was a featured guest at the policy center’s 2023 Biblical Activism boot camp. But she was torn over the center’s efforts to get rid of rape and incest exceptions for abortion. In a 2024 policy center candidate questionnaire, Boyle said exceptions should remain for girls younger than 16, writing that she knows "a young woman whose father raped her at 14.”
“She had a very early preemie who suffered for a month before dying,” Boyle wrote. “The girl nearly bled to death and ended up with a hysterectomy."
Conzatti told InvestigateWest that, while such a circumstance is "absolutely heartbreaking,” the Bible says you shouldn’t punish a child for the sins of their father.
Some moderate legislators, meanwhile, look at Conzatti with scorn. In a text message with InvestigateWest, Republican state Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen derided Conzatti as a “nut case.”
“How these people can claim to be Christian I’ll never understand,” the Mormon lawmaker said.
This tension has been part of Idaho’s history from the very beginning: it was partly settled by Mormons fleeing religious persecution, yet its first constitution, drafted in 1889, contained anti-polygamy provisions aimed at preventing Mormons from voting. The state Constitution declared that "no sectarian or religious tenets or doctrines shall ever be taught in the public schools," and yet for nearly 40 years, Bible reading was mandated by state law in Idaho classrooms.
Christian Nationalism has sparked passionate opposition throughout most of the major Christian denominations, including opposition from Southern Baptist leaders, the denomination that Conzatti and Wilson once attended. In a 2022 60 Minutes interview, then-Southern Baptist Convention President Bart Barber argued that putting the church in control of the government "stands contrary to 400 years of Baptist history."
By contrast, when Wilson and Conzatti dive into scripture, they find support for protecting private property, keeping taxes low, and not taxing the rich more than the poor. When it comes to, for example, the Old Testament’s command that farmers leave a portion of their harvests behind for "the poor and the stranger,” that’s where Conzatti sees a biblical edict separating church and state.
"It would be a violation of biblical principles for the state to usurp the responsibility to care for the poor, because that responsibility God had delegated to individuals and the family and the church,” Conzatti said.
That kind of parsing of scripture deeply offends Christians like Cremer.
“You want to put the Ten Commandments and the Bible in school, but you don't want hungry kids to be fed?” Cremer said. “We are nailing our public reputation as Christians into the ground.”
Cultural victories
Conzatti’s immediate vision for Idaho may not even be legal.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Washington state school district had violated the religious freedom of a high school football coach by punishing him for kneeling for prayer after games. In doing so, the court tossed the complicated legal test used to adjudicate questions on the separation of church and state, instead declaring future courts needed to focus on “history and faithfully reflect the understanding of the Founding Fathers.”
Conzatti believes that decision "struck the fatal blow" to the 1963 precedent that banned mandatory Bible reading in public schools. To prove that theory, however, he’d first have to convince the Idaho Legislature to pass the Bible bill.
The policy center’s Bible bill died this spring after landing with a wet thud at the House education committee. Multiple Republicans expressed discomfort with the bill’s goals.
"This country was settled by people who weren't moving to religion, they were moving away from state-mandated religion,” Idaho House Rep. Jack Nelsen said in a committee hearing. “To me, this particular bill picks a religion.”
Wayne Hoffman, the former president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, went even further, excoriating the bill in a Substack newsletter titled the “The Awfulness of Required Bible Readings.”
Warning the law could set a dangerous precedent, Hoffman sarcastically suggested equipping public buildings with “loudspeakers, as they do in Islamic countries, to blast Bible verses as far as the sound will carry every morning.”
For years Hoffman had tried to push Idaho in a more libertarian direction, arguing conservatism is about personal freedom and small government. The foundation for a decade had scored bills on whether they advanced the cause of “freedom.”
But the foundation he once ran was neutral on the bill, reasoning on its website that on the one hand, the proposal may violate the Idaho constitution, while on the other it "upholds our nation's traditional Western values."
Last year, Hoffman’s replacement announced the Freedom Foundation would factor in “traditional family values and the virtues of Western culture” to their bill-scoring rubric, claiming issues like "mutilation surgery on minors” and "pornography being pushed in schools" made it necessary.
As the national mood has changed, the Freedom Foundation has begun singing from the Idaho Family Policy Center’s hymnbook.
Wilson, the Idaho pastor, says the national climate in the last few years — from COVID lockdowns to gender identity ideology in schools — have simply had the effect of making the Christian nationalist agenda that much more appealing.
“All of a sudden the hardcore conservative types don't seem like the crazy ones,” Wilson said.
Daniel Walters is the democracy and extremism reporter at InvestigateWest, where he’s written about everything from brawls involving white nationalists in Portland to secretly recorded conversations between politicians and lobbyists in Boise. He joined the organization through Report for America.