Indiana's Lt. Gov. says Muslims shouldn't be allowed to have "public calls to prayer"

Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith falsely claimed America's "Christian heritage" allows the government to suppress Islamic religious expression

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Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, said in a recent interview that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to publicly worship because “Judeo-Christian principles [are] our heritage.”

It’s the latest in a long line of hateful, bigoted, unconstitutional remarks he’s made since taking office.

Micah Beckwith, seen here not helping people in his state

The comments were made on the right-wing Conservative Review podcast in late June and got little attention until they were picked up by Right Wing Watch:

Beckwith slammed formal calls to prayer and equated Islamic prayers with “death and destruction”:

“We should ban the calls to prayer, public calls to prayer,” Beckwith declared. “If you’re a mosque and you want to have a loudspeaker and you want to start pumping these out five times a day locally, the state can say, ‘You’re not going to do that. We’re not allowing that. We’re not going to let you put these words of death and destruction throughout the city streets in any of our cities.’”

“Listen, we are a Christian nation,” Beckwith continued. “The Supreme Court in the Coach Kennedy case ruled that. They said, ‘Hey, the heritage of America is a Christian heritage and so that’s why Christianity takes precedent over all other faiths.’ Everyone can worship how they want, but you don’t get to implement Islam in our public spaces. You can’t put the Quran up on school walls, but you can put the Ten Commandments up on school walls. Why? Because of our Judeo-Christian principles. That’s our heritage.”

There’s so much wrong with all that…

The state literally cannot ban Muslims from worshiping in public or using loudspeakers to amplify their calls to prayer unless they’re violating a noise ordinance. Plenty of churches have bells that are rung loudly and those are subject to the same rules.

Also, the prayers are not calls for death and destruction any more than Christian prayers to Jesus. To assume they’re synonymous is just anti-Muslim bigotry mixed with Republican ignorance. It’s also wildly ignorant because when Christians urge others to worship Jesus, they’re implying that not doing so will lead to eternal torture—literal death and destruction.

Somehow, Beckwith’s legal lies are even worse.

The “Coach Kennedy” case involved the showboating public high school football coach who demanded the right to pray at midfield immediately after games (mostly to capitalize on attention). Despite all the evidence that this was coercive and no one was preventing him from praying on his own, the Supreme Court said he had a legal right to pray at midfield.

At no point in that ruling, though, did the Court say this established a Christian nation or that “Christianity takes precedent over all other faiths.” Not in those words and not even in spirit.

And while one right-wing appellate court has allowed Texas to put Ten Commandments posters on classroom walls, every other federal judge who’s dealt with those cases—and the Christian lie that those posters are not about promoting religion at all but rather reminding students about American history—has said those arguments are bullshit. Of course the Ten Commandments laws are about promoting one specific kind of Christianity.

So Beckwith doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s a pattern for him. Because he’s conservative Christian, he knows he can lie constantly and his Republican base will never call him out on it. It’s the same stupidity we saw when Beckwith trashed an Indiana high school marching band drum line for promoting Satanism… when they were just performing selections from an opera and dressing the part.

But his animus toward Muslims is truly vile. As Kyle Mantyla notes:

Earlier this year, Indiana’s far-right Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith caused outrage and generated controversy when he boasted that he was giving the residents of his state “permission to hate” the religion of Islam. Undaunted by the blowback, Beckwith steadfastly defended his statement and repeatedly doubled down on it, insisting that attacking Islam is “a political winner” for Republicans.

It just goes to show how Beckwith’s religion has taught him to be an asshole at every turn.

This is, after all, the guy who said the LGBTQ movement is operating out of a “demonic playbook,” that the infamous three-fifths compromise was “a good thing,” that his own election was a choice between “godly boldness” and “the Jezebel spirit,” that people who advocate for church/state separation are “the LGBTQ community trying to support Hamas,” that he would only allow exceptions to his state’s anti-abortion laws in the case of child rape victims as long as the rapist was murdered, and that Zohran Mamdani was wrongly trying to “force his values onto New York” by daring to be Muslim in a country that Beckwith falsely claims is founded on Christianity.

It’s possible to say you don’t agree with Islamic beliefs while stressing the need for religious freedom. But the MAGA crowd has decided to go all in on the idea that only one religion—their religion—matters. They get to bend the rules whenever it suits them, while the regular rules don’t apply to disfavored religions.

It’s the reason people like Beckwith should be condemned and rejected at the ballot box at every opportunity.

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