Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama recently sat down for an interview with CBN News, discussing during the interview how her faith has developed and how she sees God as having helped her make it to the Senate chamber despite being very young.
In fact, joking about her extreme youth compared to the other Senators, Sen. Britt said that she’s still frequently asked to show her ID, saying, “If I ever get the Capitol Police to figure out I work in the Senate, that would be step 1. Still, still to this day, I get stopped multiple times a week to ask to show my ID.”
Continuing, she spoke about her childhood in small-town Alabama and how it was a great place to grow up because the American dream is still alive and well, telling CBN News, “I think it’s a place where the American dream still lives, where you treat your neighbor as family, where the ideals that make our country so special still exist.”
Then, turning to her faith, Sen. Britt discussed seeing Jesus when a highly destructive tornado ripped through her Tuscaloosa home. “In that storm, the helplessness that you feel. Remembering your faith, remembering to rely on the Lord, we were praying. As the storm approached, we could feel it, your ears could feel it, you could hear it,” she said.
She continued, saying her daughter asked her about Jesus one day and she realized that she had seen Jesus during the tornado, saying, “I pulled over to the side of the road and I’m shaking, and I said, ‘Baby, did you see Jesus?’ She said, ‘Yes, Mama, he was with me and Roro during the ‘ro-nato,’ her version of tornado. And she said He’s been with me but He just left and I want Him to come back, ‘Mama tell him to come back.'”
Sen. Britt continued, “And it just clicked, here we thought we had done such a good job, we were singing, we were praying. But He was literally with us, and I think a lot of times we need the faith of a child, and she said very direct words ‘Mama, doesn’t God call you to do hard things?’ and I said, ‘Yes, sweetheart, yes he does.'”
Then, speaking about the deep impact that moment had on her, Sen. Britt said it was with her daughter’s comments on Jesus and what God wants that she realized she should do more to try to make America a better place. She said, “I know that our nation and the next generation are worth fighting for, and so being in that game is what God called me to do.”
Giving an example of what she wants to do to make America better now that she’s in a position of power, she said, “I believe as leaders we must do something. The rise in rate of depression among our teenagers doubled in between 2011 and 2019. That perfectly coincides with the rise of social media. So we have a simple piece of legislation that’s eight pages that says you can’t be on social media until you’re 13, which is what the social media companies say they do, and between 13 and 17 you need to have parental consent to be on. This isn’t a bill that allows you to follow your child around, it just puts parents back in the driver’s seat to have the conversation.”