State House Minority Whip Lori Saine said she had been working on the memorial resolution offered for Bill Armstrong during a joint session of the Legislature on and off for a year. Same with the eulogy she delivered – and she was clearly charged with deep feeling as she read it out to a chamber packed with past and present elected officials.

She was speaking Friday, April 28, from the well of the House. Men and women lined the walls, including members of Armstrong’s family.

“[Armstrong] represented something lost in Eden, a familiarity with the One who loves us,” Saine said. “He was a father for the spiritually wounded and famished. He spoke boldly and plainly to reach those ensnared in the leaven of worldly concerns.”

Lost lambs

Armstrong, a former U.S. representative and senator and a Colorado Republican Party icon, was what evangelicals call a “Christian in the Biblical sense” or a “person in whom Jesus lives.” He converted to the faith in 1973 as a freshman member of Congress and served as president of Colorado Christian University from 2006 to 2016. His politics and statesmanship came to be inextricably tied to his faith.

Saine, a Republican from Dacono, told The Colorado Statesman that she was baptized when she was seven or eight years old, that she “lapsed” from the faith during college and came back into the fold later, as an adult – “the way Bill Armstrong did” – about seven or eight years ago. She attends and is an active member at Rocky Mountain Christian Church, a protestant megachurch with campuses in Niwot and Frederick.

Saine said she met Armstrong in 2012, when conservative state Sen. Chris Holbert introduced them and urged her to tap the great man for election campaign advice.

But Saine said she feels as though she got much closer to Armstrong after his death, while working on the resolution, poring over his life and work and writing her eulogy.

Indeed, in her memorial remarks, she was openly channeling the part of Armstrong that most inspired her – the Christian warrior who lived his faith in a demonstrable way during his long tenure in the public sphere. Her speech at the well of the House was shot through with the language of evangelical Christianity.

“Armstrong reflected the One whom he loved,” she said. “He led lost lambs out of the battlefield bleeding to death. … He couldn’t have been Senator Armstrong without dwelling in the Holy Spirit.”

“Jesus is the greatest name, the only name that saves,” she told the crowd. “This is a memorial to Bill Armstrong but also a rallying point: Don’t you feel it, the weight of glory? We are more than conquerors in Christ … This country needs a third Great Awakening and if it starts now, here in this place, this will be the most important work we will ever have done together in this chamber.”

Saine had been building to a moment in her speech, and it had arrived.

“Let’s begin with Senator Armstrong’s battle cry – and repeat after me: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” she said, pumping her fist in the air. “One more time: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Praise Jesus,” she said.

Saine then explained that if any members felt a calling – a “tugging at their heart” – two pastors in the chamber were prepared to “pray over” them.

Suddenly feeling other

Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, a Democrat from Commerce City elected in 2016, a practicing Jew and self-described person of faith, has been attending the Legislature’s Tuesday Bible study group.

“I’m a person who values faith as a baseline for mores and value systems,” she said. “The Bible study is a Christian-based group. I’ve never studied the New Testament so I thought that, to be a solid legislator, it would help to be able to understand the values perspective.”

“I think what happened on Friday, we were honoring the individual – and then what all of a sudden felt uncomfortable was when the conversation turned to a feeling that Christianity was being attacked and a call for the entire body to chant ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!'”

“I did – I felt uncomfortable,” she said. “I felt very ‘other’ all of a sudden – and I didn’t know if I had a responsibility to say something.”

So she intentionally waited until the afternoon, after the memorial guests had left the chamber and the memorial proceedings had ended, and then addressed her colleagues from the well, accompanied by Rep. Paul Rosenthal, a Denver Democrat and another of the Legislature’s Jewish members.

“My family was targeted and forced out of homes, murdered,” she said talking about her European relatives, hounded by the Nazis. “They hid in basements to practice their faith.”

Michaelson Jenet said she has always felt comfortable practicing her faith in the United States and that she has long sought out other people of faith. “There are synergies,” she said.

“With tremendous respect for you, my colleagues, today I felt incredibly uncomfortable with the chanting and the message that one faith is the only faith and the only faith here represented,” she said. “The suggestion that this body is made up of largely of followers of one faith is dismissive of the diversity we represent. …

A Christian nation

“The eulogy was really for his family, and it was for a man who was the founder of Colorado Christian University, which he said was his most fulfilling work,” Saine explained later.

“I really felt like he was following me, moving me in the last year – I mean it was an impression, not a booming kind of voice in your head,” she is quick to add.

“The first amendment guarantees free speech, including here in the chamber. Does our free speech stop here? This is a Christian nation. That’s our heritage. The Capitol in Washington was a church where people of all beliefs could express themselves. Our nation is the most welcoming in the word to people of all faiths,” she said.

“Was I really supposed to dilute my remarks during a memorial for Bill Armstrong? I mean, I have to ask that question. Is that what I was supposed to do, really?”

Saine said, in fact, she didn’t feel like she fully wrote the eulogy – not by herself. “The paragraphs just came one after the other. I couldn’t have written that,” she said.

Silence and safe spaces

On Monday after the memorial, Saine felt the need to respond to Michaelson Jenet. She asked to address the chamber, but House Speaker Crisanta Duran, a Denver Democrat, wanted to know more about what Saine had to say. In a side meeting on the floor, Duran asked Saine to wait until the next day.

“On Friday, I memorialized a great man who meant the world to me,” Saine told the chamber Tuesday morning. “Anything I said, I could not have said any less. This well is not your safe space. This is the public square. This is the battleground of ideas. …

“We won’t be silent about the Holocaust, because silence was a tool of the state,” she continued. “Silence was used to eradicate a language, then a culture, then a history, then a faith, and then a people. Men and women were burned and people remained silent because talking about it made people uncomfortable. …

“This country was founded as a Christian nation,” she said. “… But America is also a beacon and the safest haven in the world to those who are not of the Christian faith.”

Getting a message across

Michaelson Jenet seemed at a loss after Saine’s Tuesday speech.

“I want to say that this has nothing to do with Armstrong,” she said, still clearly rattled. “But when I got up to speak, I felt I had to name what happened. I don’t know if I’m a hundred percent in the right, but I knew that what happened, well it just felt like there was a better place for that. …

“I got up not wanting to ruin the relationships I have worked so hard to build, but I felt I had to say that we represent diverse bodies here, diverse constituencies. I represent Aurora, where there are so many names for god it’s beyond my comprehension, and it felt important to say that what happened here Friday felt exclusionary.”

Michaelson Jenet said she didn’t even particularly note at the time that it was Saine who was leading the exhortations. She just suddenly felt that the chamber transformed, charged, uncomfortable. She was unsure how to proceed.

“Invoking the Holocaust today, saying that if I were uncomfortable with the name ‘Jesus,’ that she would just say it more – My question as a Jewish member is, I guess, ‘Do I have a responsibility to continue to have this conversation?’ I think, clearly, I haven’t got my message across in a way that was understood.

A protest record

At the end of the memorial on Friday, long before Michaelson Jenet made her speech, at least some of the chamber members appeared to lodge a protest – not against Armstrong or his memory, according to speculating House Democratic sources, but against what felt like proceedings that veered into what they saw as a heedless, even ungracious, religiosity.

From the Speaker’s podium, Duran called on lawmakers to signal if they would like to cosponsor the memorial resolution – and she asked House staff to open the vote-counting board to record the names. The memorial resolution drew 44 cosponsors. Eighteen Democrats kept their names off the proposal, including Michaelson Jenet, Rosenthal and Duran.

– john@coloradostatesman.com