In an interview remaining week on Fox Information, the newly elected speaker of the Space, Mike Johnson, advised host Sean Hannity, “Anyone requested me nowadays within the media, ‘Individuals are curious, what does Mike Johnson take into accounts any factor beneath the solar?’ I mentioned, ‘Neatly, pass pick out up a Bible off your shelf and skim it. That’s my worldview.’”
For plenty of politicians, that might be a throwaway line. However no longer for Mike Johnson. When he advised a Baptist newspaper in 2016, “My religion informs the whole thing I do,” he intended it. His religion is his lodestar.
However religion, together with the Christian religion, manifests itself in many alternative tactics, with quite a lot of presuppositions and views. There’s no unmarried worldview amongst Christians—nor within the Bible itself, which is multivocal, written over 1000’s of years by means of dozens of various writers. Christians nowadays disagree profoundly on numerous doctrinal problems. And does any critical scholar of Scripture no longer see variations between the worldview of the Pentateuch and the prophets, between the slaughter of the Canaanites and the Sermon at the Mount?
So what do we all know concerning the religion and the worldview of Mike Johnson?
Johnson, 51, has deep ties to the Southern Baptist Conference, the country’s biggest Protestant denomination. He believes in a literal studying of the Bible, together with the Guide of Genesis. Johnson is an in depth buddy of Ken Ham, the CEO and founding father of Solutions in Genesis, and equipped prison products and services to that ministry in 2015.
Solutions in Genesis rejects evolution and believes that the universe is 6,000 years outdated; to imagine the rest can be to undermine the authority of the Bible. “We’re no longer on the subject of advent/evolution, the age of the Earth or fossils,” Ham advised Johnson and his spouse, Kelly, on their podcast. “We’re actually on concerning 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 urged that faculty shootings are the results of having taught generations of American citizens “that there’s no appropriate or unsuitable, 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 enticing in any political marketing campaign task in the event that they need to stay their tax-exempt standing. He additionally believes that church buildings are unceasingly beneath attack, and that Christian viewpoints “are censored and silenced.”
Within the 2000s, Johnson was once an legal professional and spokesman for the Alliance Protection Fund, identified nowadays as Alliance Protecting Freedom. It describes itself as “one of the vital main Christian regulation corporations dedicated to protective non secular freedom, loose speech, marriage and circle of relatives, parental rights, and the sanctity of existence.” Johnson has written in want of criminalizing homosexual intercourse. He has referred to as abortion a “holocaust.” And he argued that “prevailing judicial philosophy” within the 2005 right-to-die case involving Terri Schiavo, a critically brain-damaged Florida girl, was once “no other than Hitler’s.”
“Some persons are referred to as to pastoral ministry and others to tune ministry,” he’s mentioned. “I used to be referred to as to prison ministry, and I’ve been out at the entrance strains of the ‘tradition struggle.’”
He has indisputably been that.
But so as to raised perceive Johnson’s worldview, it’s necessary to acknowledge the affect of David Barton at the new Space speaker.
In 2021, Johnson spoke at a meeting the place he praised Barton. Barton, whilst no longer widely recognized out of doors of sure evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is essential inside them. A graduate of Oral Roberts College with a point in Christian training, Barton is the previous vice chair of the Texas Republican Birthday celebration and has urged figures together with Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and previous Consultant Michele Bachmann. He considers Donald Trump one of the vital 5 biggest presidents in American historical past.
Johnson mentioned he was once presented to Barton’s paintings 1 / 4 of a century in the past; it “has had this type of profound affect on me and my paintings and my existence and the whole thing I do.” Via all accounts this is true. Should you concentrate to Johnson talk at the “so-called separation of Church and state” and declare that “the Founders sought after to give protection to the church from an encroaching state, no longer the wrong way round,” you’ll pay attention echoes of Barton.
Even if no longer a historian, Barton has for years been engaged in what he calls “historic reclamation,” in which he method appearing that the Founders, together with Thomas Jefferson, had been Christian males made up our minds to create a Christian country. In 1988 he based Wallbuilders, a company that promotes the concept the separation of Church and state is a fantasy.
“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 creator of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Religion and Fractured a Country, advised Politico. “For them, he has actually outlined The usa as a Christian country.”
“What that suggests is that he more or less takes conservative, white evangelical beliefs from our present second, and says that the ones had been all baked into the Charter, and that God has elected The usa to be a unique country, and that the country might be blessed if we reply in obedience and handle that, and no longer if we pass off target,” she persisted. “It actually fuels evangelical politics and the concept evangelicalism has a unique position to play to get the rustic again on course.”
“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry choices from the previous to advertise political agendas within the provide, to color an image of The usa’s historical past as evangelicals would find it irresistible to be,” John Fea, the chair of the historical past division on the evangelical Messiah College, advised NBC Information. “Mike Johnson comes immediately out of that Christian-right international, 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 At all times Believed About Thomas Jefferson. Amongst different issues, he argued that Jefferson was once a “standard Christian” even if Jefferson puzzled lots of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of faith, mentioned it will were higher titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a work of historic scholarship, the e-book is terrible,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The e-book was once so riddled with historic inaccuracies that it was once recalled by means of its Christian writer, Thomas Nelson, as a result of “elementary truths simply weren’t there.”
However Barton’s distorted perspectives are rarely confined to historical past. He has mentioned he doesn’t suppose scientific government will ever discover a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. This view is “in line with a selected Bible verse,” Romans 1:27. He believes that AIDS is God’s punishment for sin; an AIDS vaccine would stay “your frame from penalizing you”—which might be opposite to the instructing of the phrase of God. QED, regardless that with a definite merciless twist.
Mike Johnson’s ascension to the speakership has made Barton and the ones inside that evangelical subculture giddy; they know Johnson is one in every of them. That is the primary time “in our lifetime” that Congress has appointed “a man of this persona, this dedication, this data, this enjoy and this religious religion” as Space speaker, Barton mentioned on a podcast. He additionally mentioned that he’s spoken with Johnson’s staff, “speaking with them about workforce.”
“They want to 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 received’t bloody your lips when he breaks your tooth.”
“I am a rule-of-law man,” Mike Johnson advised Sean Hannity remaining week. Somewhere else, consistent with The New York Occasions, he’s complained to scholar teams, “There’s no transcendent rules anymore. There’s no everlasting pass judgement on. There’s no absolute requirements of appropriate and unsuitable. All that is precisely the other of the best way we had been based as a rustic.”
On the similar time, Johnson has been a pivotal determine in undermining the guideline of regulation—particularly looking to overturn the 2020 presidential-election effects. In a moderately reported tale at the 139 Space Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral Faculty rely, 3 New York Occasions journalists wrote, “In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied at the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Consultant Mike Johnson, an important architect of the Electoral Faculty objections.”
Johnson additionally accrued signatures for a prison temporary in reinforce of a groundless Texas lawsuit to throw out the leads to 4 battleground states received by means of Joe Biden.
In step with a file within the Occasions, Johnson “despatched an electronic mail to his Republican colleagues soliciting signatures for the prison temporary in reinforce of it. The initiative were individually blessed by means of Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson wrote, and the president was once ‘anxiously looking forward to’ to peer who in Congress would step as much as the plate to protect him.”
Johnson additionally claimed in a radio interview {that a} tool device used for balloting was once “suspect as it got here from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” In step with Johnson, “The allegations about those balloting machines, a few of them being rigged with this tool by means of Dominion. Glance, there’s numerous advantage to that.”
“The repair was once in,” consistent with Johnson.
If truth be told, it was once no longer. A remark by means of Trump’s Division of Fatherland Safety’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, which is answerable for serving to states safe the balloting procedure, declared that the 2020 election was once “essentially the most safe in American historical past.” Now not been a unmarried discovering has refuted that declare, however many have showed it.
A file by means of a gaggle of lifelong Republicans took a cautious take a look at the costs by means of Trump and his supporters. It confirmed the election was once misplaced by means of Trump, no longer stolen from him. In coming to that conclusion, it tested each rely of each case introduced in six battleground states.
“Even now, twenty months after the election”—the file got here out in July 2022—“a length by which Trump’s supporters were energetically scouring each corner and cranny for evidence that the election was once stolen, they arrive up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and approved as honest by means of many patriotic American citizens. However on purpose exam they’ve fallen quick, each time.”
We now know, too, that point and time once more Trump’s personal workforce refuted his quite a lot of allegations of voter fraud.
So in Speaker Johnson now we 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 a loss of “absolute requirements of appropriate and unsuitable” was once a key player in undermining the guideline of regulation and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has carried out such a lot to shatter absolute requirements of appropriate and unsuitable.
From what I will inform, Mike Johnson—in contrast to, say, Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, or J. D. Vance and Lindsey Graham—isn’t cynical; he appears to be a real believer, and a zealot. A well mannered and mild-mannered zealot, to make certain, particularly by means of MAGA requirements, however a zealot however. And what makes this doubly painful for many people is that he makes use of his Christian religion to sacralize his fanaticism and attack on reality. I will’t assist pondering this isn’t moderately what Jesus had in thoughts.