In an interview final week on Fox Information, the newly elected speaker of the Home, Mike Johnson, instructed host Sean Hannity, “Somebody requested me right this moment within the media, ‘Individuals are curious, what does Mike Johnson take into consideration any difficulty below the solar?’ I mentioned, ‘Properly, go decide up a Bible off your shelf and skim it. That’s my worldview.’”
For a lot of politicians, that will be a throwaway line. However not for Mike Johnson. When he instructed a Baptist newspaper in 2016, “My religion informs every part I do,” he meant it. His religion is his lodestar.
However religion, together with the Christian religion, manifests itself in many alternative methods, with a variety of presuppositions and views. There isn’t any single worldview amongst Christians—nor within the Bible itself, which is multivocal, written over 1000’s of years by dozens of various writers. Christians right this moment disagree profoundly on numerous doctrinal points. And does any critical pupil of Scripture not see variations between the worldview of the Pentateuch and the prophets, between the slaughter of the Canaanites and the Sermon on the Mount?
So what do we all know in regards to the religion and the worldview of Mike Johnson?
Johnson, 51, has deep ties to the Southern Baptist Conference, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. He believes in a literal studying of the Bible, together with the E-book of Genesis. Johnson is an in depth buddy of Ken Ham, the CEO and founding father of Solutions in Genesis, and offered authorized providers to that ministry in 2015.
Solutions in Genesis rejects evolution and believes that the universe is 6,000 years outdated; to imagine anything could be to undermine the authority of the Bible. “We’re not nearly creation/evolution, the age of the Earth or fossils,” Ham instructed Johnson and his spouse, Kelly, on their podcast. “We’re actually on in regards to the authority of the Phrase of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and serving to equip folks to have a real Christian worldview.” Johnson is enthusiastically on board; he has prompt that college shootings are the results of having taught generations of Individuals “that there’s no proper or improper, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and also you evolve from the primordial slime.”
Johnson desires church buildings to be extra politicized; he favors overturning the 1954 Johnson Modification, which prevents church buildings from partaking in any political marketing campaign exercise in the event that they need to hold their tax-exempt standing. He additionally believes that church buildings are unceasingly below assault, and that Christian viewpoints “are censored and silenced.”
Within the 2000s, Johnson was an legal professional and spokesman for the Alliance Protection Fund, identified right this moment as Alliance Defending Freedom. It describes itself as “one of many main Christian legislation companies dedicated to defending spiritual freedom, free speech, marriage and household, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” Johnson has written in favor of criminalizing homosexual intercourse. He has known as abortion a “holocaust.” And he argued that “prevailing judicial philosophy” within the 2005 right-to-die case involving Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida lady, was “no completely different than Hitler’s.”
“Some individuals are known as to pastoral ministry and others to music ministry,” he’s mentioned. “I used to be known as to authorized ministry, and I’ve been out on the entrance traces of the ‘tradition struggle.’”
He has absolutely been that.
But so as to raised perceive Johnson’s worldview, it’s essential to acknowledge the affect of David Barton on the brand new Home speaker.
In 2021, Johnson spoke at a gathering the place he praised Barton. Barton, whereas not well-known outdoors of sure evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is important inside them. A graduate of Oral Roberts College with a level in Christian schooling, Barton is the previous vice chair of the Texas Republican Get together and has suggested figures together with Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and former Consultant Michele Bachmann. He considers Donald Trump one of many 5 best presidents in American historical past.
Johnson mentioned he was launched to Barton’s work 1 / 4 of a century in the past; it “has had such a profound affect on me and my work and my life and every part I do.” By all accounts that’s true. Should you take heed to Johnson converse on the “so-called separation of Church and state” and declare that “the Founders needed to guard the church from an encroaching state, not the opposite approach round,” you’ll hear echoes of Barton.
Though not a historian, Barton has for years been engaged in what he calls “historic reclamation,” by which he means exhibiting that the Founders, together with Thomas Jefferson, have been Christian males decided to create a Christian nation. In 1988 he based Wallbuilders, a corporation that promotes the concept that the separation of Church and state is a fable.
“It’s actually arduous to overstate the affect that Barton has had in conservative evangelical areas,” the Calvin College historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the writer of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Religion and Fractured a Nation, instructed Politico. “For them, he has actually outlined America as a Christian nation.”
“What meaning is that he sort of takes conservative, white evangelical beliefs from our present second, and says that these have been all baked into the Structure, and that God has elected America to be a particular nation, and that the nation can be blessed if we reply in obedience and preserve that, and never if we go astray,” she continued. “It actually fuels evangelical politics and the concept that evangelicalism has a particular position to play to get the nation again on monitor.”
“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the previous to advertise political agendas within the current, to color an image of America’s historical past as evangelicals would really like it to be,” John Fea, the chair of the historical past division on the evangelical Messiah College, instructed NBC Information. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, the place Barton’s concepts are extremely influential. It’s the air they breathe.”
In 2012, Barton wrote The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve All the time Believed About Thomas Jefferson. Amongst different issues, he argued that Jefferson was a “standard Christian” although Jefferson questioned lots of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of faith, mentioned it could have been higher titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a bit of historic scholarship, the guide is terrible,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The guide was so riddled with historic inaccuracies that it was recalled by its Christian writer, Thomas Nelson, as a result of “primary truths simply weren’t there.”
However Barton’s distorted views are hardly confined to historical past. He has mentioned he doesn’t assume medical authorities will ever discover a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. This view is “primarily based on a specific Bible verse,” Romans 1:27. He believes that AIDS is God’s punishment for sin; an AIDS vaccine would hold “your physique from penalizing you”—which might be opposite to the instructing of the phrase of God. QED, although with a sure merciless twist.
Mike Johnson’s ascension to the speakership has made Barton and people inside that evangelical subculture giddy; they know Johnson is certainly one of them. That is the primary time “in our lifetime” that Congress has appointed “a man of this character, this dedication, this information, this expertise and this religious religion” as Home speaker, Barton mentioned on a podcast. He additionally mentioned that he’s spoken with Johnson’s staff, “speaking with them about employees.”
“They should be the folks together with his worldview,” Barton mentioned. He added that Johnson will “make you smile earlier than he hits you within the mouth so he gained’t bloody your lips when he breaks your tooth.”
“I am a rule-of-law man,” Mike Johnson instructed Sean Hannity final week. Elsewhere, in accordance with The New York Instances, he’s complained to pupil teams, “There’s no transcendent ideas anymore. There’s no everlasting decide. There’s no absolute requirements of proper and improper. All that is precisely the other of the best way we have been based as a rustic.”
On the identical time, Johnson has been a pivotal determine in undermining the rule of legislation—particularly making an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential-election outcomes. In a fastidiously reported story on the 139 Home Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral Faculty rely, three New York Instances reporters wrote, “In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Consultant Mike Johnson, a very powerful architect of the Electoral Faculty objections.”
Johnson additionally collected signatures for a authorized temporary in help of a groundless Texas lawsuit to throw out the leads to 4 battleground states gained by Joe Biden.
In response to a report within the Instances, Johnson “despatched an e mail to his Republican colleagues soliciting signatures for the authorized temporary in help of it. The initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson wrote, and the president was ‘anxiously awaiting’ to see who in Congress would step as much as the plate to defend him.”
Johnson additionally claimed in a radio interview {that a} software program system used for voting was “suspect as a result of it got here from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” In response to Johnson, “The allegations about these voting machines, a few of them being rigged with this software program by Dominion. Look, there’s a variety of benefit to that.”
“The repair was in,” in accordance with Johnson.
Truly, it was not. A assertion by Trump’s Division of Homeland Safety’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, which is accountable for serving to states safe the voting course of, declared that the 2020 election was “essentially the most safe in American historical past.” Not been a single discovering has refuted that declare, however many have confirmed it.
A report by a bunch of lifelong Republicans took a cautious take a look at the fees by Trump and his supporters. It confirmed the election was misplaced by Trump, not stolen from him. In coming to that conclusion, it examined each rely of each case introduced in six battleground states.
“Even now, twenty months after the election”—the report got here out in July 2022—“a interval through which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring each nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they arrive up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Individuals. However on goal examination they’ve fallen brief, each time.”
We now know, too, that point and time once more Trump’s personal employees refuted his varied allegations of voter fraud.
So in Speaker Johnson we now have a person whose Christian worldview has led him right into a corridor of mirrors—traditionally, scientifically, legally, and constitutionally. A “rule-of-law man” who laments an absence of “absolute requirements of proper and improper” was a key participant in undermining the rule of legislation and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has executed a lot to shatter absolute requirements of proper and improper.
From what I can inform, Mike Johnson—not like, say, Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, or J. D. Vance and Lindsey Graham—is just not cynical; he appears to be a real believer, and a zealot. A well mannered and mild-mannered zealot, to make certain, particularly by MAGA requirements, however a zealot nonetheless. And what makes this doubly painful for many people is that he makes use of his Christian religion to sacralize his fanaticism and assault on fact. I can’t assist considering this isn’t fairly what Jesus had in thoughts.
