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By Alex Cunningham
Cronkite News

WASHINGTON – Tucson congressman Juan Ciscomani, who enjoys a reputation as a relatively moderate Republican, has long been active with a group that promotes the goal of Christians stewarding the nation’s morality through “biblical citizenship.”

“I can wholeheartedly say that nothing in my life has given me a clearer direction for my life than Patriot Academy,” the first-term Republican wrote in a 2010 blog post.

That was about four years after he first attended a session from the Texas-based organization, which says it seeks to “train citizens to understand and influence government policy with a biblical worldview.”

He attended again in 2007 and 2008, brought the program to Arizona in 2013, and sat on the board of directors for 14 years.

Kirsten Engel, his unopposed Democratic challenger, labels Patriot Academy a “Christian nationalist” organization hellbent on merging church and state. She argues that his extensive ties to the group – highlighted on a website she launched last month – show him to be “an extremist” like its hard-line anti-abortion leaders.

Ciscomani’s campaign consultant Daniel Scarpinato said Engel was resorting “to gutter politics” in bringing faith into the campaign.

Through Scarpinato, Ciscomani distanced himself from Patriot Academy’s theocratic approach.

“Juan believes everyone should have the right to make their voices heard in America,” he said. “That includes people of all faith backgrounds and those who don’t practice any organized religion at all.”

Patriot Academy was founded by Rick Green, a former member of the Texas Legislature. The inaugural class was held in 2003.

David Barton, one of Time Magazine’s “25 most influential evangelicals,” heads the Academy’s biblical citizenship classes with Green.

Barton is the long-time vice-chair of the Texas Republican Party and ally of Sen. Ted Cruz. He helped usher in changes to make textbooks in Texas schools more conservative and Christian-friendly.

He denounces church-state separation. His organization, WallBuilders, rejects the idea that America’s Founding Fathers intended for the country to be secular.

Frank Pavone, a former Catholic priest who founded the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, sits on Patriot Academy’s board of advisers. He was defrocked in 2022 and is known for, among other things, placing an aborted fetus on the altar two days before the 2016 presidential election to show support for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

Patriot Academy frequently collaborates with Turning Point USA – which hosted Trump’s Phoenix rally in June – and its founder Charlie Kirk. Kirk bused protestors to the Jan. 6 rally that turned into a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and, like Barton, campaigns for America to be overtly Christian.

Laura Jedeed, a freelance journalist, chronicled her visit to the Patriot Academy in 2023 in The New Republic. She described an organization on the fringes of Republican politics when Ciscomani joined as a 26-year-old but expanded greatly by the time he left the board in 2021.

“It’s basically state-sponsored religion,” she said by phone, describing a vision of an America where everyone is governed by overtly Christian principles regardless of their own faith. “You’re allowed to believe whatever you want… but your civic life, your government, will be based on the rock as understood by these people as Christian law.”

Ciscomani’s centrist image clashes somewhat with the style of other Patriot Academy alumni, including Reps. Burgess Owens of Utah and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

Owens, one of four Black Republicans in the House, called Vice President Kamala Harris “the greatest example of DEI” – a way of saying that Democrats elevated her to the presidential nomination despite her lack of qualifications.

Boebert has pushed conspiracy theories that hold that President Joe Biden is, in fact, dead.

In 2022 she told supporters she was “tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Ciscomani is a Protestant and has described his mother as a “pillar of faith” who taught him anything was possible with religion. The extent those beliefs play in his policymaking is unclear.

He has never called to dissolve church-state separation, though in 2008, he said gay marriage would “signal the end of society.”

Democrats have bashed him over his stance on abortion, which is not nearly as rigid as some other Republicans’ stances. He supports a ban after 15 weeks, which is later than nearly all abortions performed in the United States, and labeled the Arizona Supreme Court’s attempt to revive a near-total ban from 1864 a “disaster.”

Green, the Patriot Academy founder, has described himself as “100% pro-life, no exceptions” and favors outlawing abortion nationally.

A blog post on the group’s website penned by senior adviser Allen West, a former congressman who is now chair of the Dallas County GOP in Texas, accuses Planned Parenthood of harvesting babies’ body parts for multi-million dollar profit.

“There’s nothing moderate about that group in my opinion,” Jedeed said. “They might even see the word moderate as an insult.”

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