Members of Congress get five minutes to ask questions at a hearing. Five minutes. It is one of the few real tools they have to hold powerful institutions accountable.

On April 17, 2024, Georgia's Rick Allen got his five minutes at a House Education Committee hearing on antisemitism at Columbia University. He used them to preach a sermon and threaten the school with divine punishment.

What he actually said

Allen turned to Columbia President Minouche Shafik and started quizzing her on the Bible.

"Are you familiar with Genesis 12:3?" he asked, according to Politico's account of the hearing. Then he answered his own question: "It was a covenant that God made with Abraham … If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you."

Then came the line that made news:

"Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?"

Shafik answered, "Definitely not."

Allen wasn't done. He went on about "lawless universities" and suggested Columbia add a class on the Bible so students could learn "kinda what will happen under the wrath of God."

That was it. That was his oversight.

A fuller transcript published by Baptist News Global shows he burned the entire five minutes on it — including telling the room, "I tell my colleagues that Washington, D.C., is not the center of the universe; Jerusalem is the center of the universe."

Even his Bible verse was wrong

Here's the part that should embarrass him most. Allen got the verse wrong.

Genesis 12:3 doesn't say "Israel." It says God tells Abram: "I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse."

Chance Bonar, a religion scholar writing in Religion Dispatches, called it an egregious misquote. Allen, he wrote, was "retrojecting 'Israel'" — a name that doesn't even show up until twenty chapters later, when it's given to Jacob — back into a story about one man, Abram. Allen then stretched that into a rule that supposedly applies to a country founded thousands of years afterward.

Mark Wingfield, the executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global, went through the rest of it and found more problems. Allen credited the Constitution with a teaching — treat other people the way you want to be treated — that isn't in the Constitution at all. He suggested Moses handed down the law "which most of our laws were made" from. Wingfield's verdict was blunt: "That's just flat-out wrong."

So a congressman lectured a university president about her ignorance, and got the text wrong while doing it.

A colleague told him to knock it off

Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, another lawmaker at the hearing, pushed back on his questioning. She said the "injection of biblical theology into this committee hearing is inappropriate."

She was right, and not because the subject was unimportant. Antisemitism on campus is a serious thing to look into. Real questions were on the table that day about discipline policies, faculty conduct, and whether students were safe.

Allen had the gavel time to ask any of them. He chose to ask a woman born to Muslim parents in Egypt whether she wanted God to curse her university.

This is who he has always been

If this were a one-time slip, you could call it a bad day. It isn't.

Back on May 26, 2016 — the day after the House adopted an amendment protecting LGBTQ workers from discrimination, and hours before the vote on the spending bill carrying it — Allen led the opening prayer at a closed-door meeting of House Republicans. He read from Romans 1, including the passage saying people who do such things are "worthy of death."

People in the room understood exactly who he meant. Several congressmen walked out. One called it "fucking ridiculous." An aide said "a lot of members were clearly uncomfortable and upset."

Days after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, a reporter asked Allen if he regretted it. He stood by it.

Then there's January 2021. Two days after a mob attacked the Capitol, Allen texted Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows that "Our Nation is at war, it is a Spiritual War at the highest level." He wrote that God "has used President Trump in a powerful way to expose the deceit, lies and hypocrisy of the enemy," and that "the War is just beginning."

See the pattern? Scripture comes out as a weapon. Against colleagues who voted the wrong way. Against a university president. Against everyone on the other side of an election he lost.

Meanwhile, back home

Here's what makes it worse for the people of Georgia's 12th District. Allen has plenty of time for sermons in Washington. He has almost none for the folks who sent him there.

On February 27, 2025, more than 100 people staged a sit-in at his Augusta office asking for one thing: an in-person town hall. One volunteer said she had researched it and couldn't find a record of Allen ever holding one anywhere in the Augusta–Richmond County area.

What he offers instead are telephone town halls, where constituents type in questions and staff decide which ones he hears. "It really isn't a replacement for actually meeting your constituents in person," one volunteer told WFXG, "because also what a telephone town hall can allow for is a filtering of the questions that are allowed to be asked, and that restricts constituent voices."

Three weeks later, asked point blank whether real town halls were coming, Allen said: "We do that digitally. We do digital town halls." He blamed the anger on "misinformation."

So he'll stand in a hearing room and ask a stranger if she wants to be cursed by God. He won't stand in a room in Augusta and take an unscreened question from a neighbor.

What we deserve

Nobody sent Rick Allen to Congress to be a preacher. There are preachers in Georgia's 12th District already, and they didn't need a federal salary to do it.

He was sent to lower costs, protect people's health care, look out for the district, and — yes — do real oversight when institutions fail. When he finally got a turn at real oversight, on national television, he spent it misquoting a Bible verse and telling a university it might get cursed.

Georgia deserves a representative who does the job. Not one who threatens people with divine punishment and calls it work.

Source

• "5 takeaways from the Columbia University antisemitism hearing," Bianca Quilantan and Mackenzie Wilkes, Politico, April 17, 2024.