Last month, Republican Rep. Randy Forbes preached at his home church in Chesapeake, Virginia, where he warned that there is a massive and terrifying conspiracy at work to completely eliminate religion from public life.

Forbes was preaching as part of an effort known as Pray USA, which is an initiative of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation that seeks to encourage government officials to lead congregations in prayer and then urge churchgoers to add their names to its “Prayer for America Proclamation.”

During his sermon, Forbes told the congregation that the government has grown increasingly hostile to religion in America in an effort to systematically expunge it from the “marketplace of ideas” and that this development has not come about by accident or naturally; rather, it has all been orchestrated by a vast, well-funded conspiracy.

“Let me just tell you one of the myths that’s out there,” he said. “It’s easy for us to somehow just think that all of this just evolved because people on the internet, they’re reading more and they’re getting more intellectual and somehow or the other, it’s like they’ve discovered the world isn’t flat anymore and therefore we don’t believe in God and we don’t believe in faith.”

“If I had the time, which I don’t have,” he continued, “I could put up on this screen or on this screen or on both of them the proof that would show you this isn’t some natural evolution, this is artificially driven. I can show you organization after organization after organization to a network that would frighten you because it would be vast that you couldn’t get it on that screen, of organizations that are funded and paid with a systematic approach to killing and destroying faith in America today.”

“Most people don’t even realize it,” Forbes said, “and let me tell you, the dollars going into that organization is nine times the dollars going into the organizations trying to defend and protect faith in America.”