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In an interview final week on Fox Information, the newly elected speaker of the Area, Mike Johnson, informed host Sean Hannity, “Anyone requested me these days within the media, ‘Individuals are curious, what does Mike Johnson take into consideration any factor underneath the solar?’ I mentioned, ‘Smartly, pass select up a Bible off your shelf and skim it. That’s my worldview.’”
For lots of politicians, that might be a throwaway line. However now not for Mike Johnson. When he informed a Baptist newspaper in 2016, “My religion informs the whole thing I do,” he supposed it. His religion is his lodestar.
However religion, together with the Christian religion, manifests itself in many various techniques, 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 via dozens of various writers. Christians these days disagree profoundly on numerous doctrinal problems. And does any critical scholar of Scripture now not 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 in regards to the religion and the worldview of Mike Johnson?
Johnson, 51, has deep ties to the Southern Baptist Conference, the country’s greatest Protestant denomination. He believes in a literal studying of the Bible, together with the E-book of Genesis. Johnson is an in depth good friend of Ken Ham, the CEO and founding father of Solutions in Genesis, and equipped felony services and products to that ministry in 2015.
Solutions in Genesis rejects evolution and believes that the universe is 6,000 years previous; to consider the rest could be to undermine the authority of the Bible. “We’re now not almost about advent/evolution, the age of the Earth or fossils,” Ham informed Johnson and his spouse, Kelly, on their podcast. “We’re in point of fact 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 advised that college 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 attractive in any political marketing campaign job in the event that they need to stay their tax-exempt standing. He additionally believes that church buildings are unceasingly underneath attack, and that Christian viewpoints “are censored and silenced.”
Within the 2000s, Johnson used to be an lawyer and spokesman for the Alliance Protection Fund, recognized these days as Alliance Protecting Freedom. It describes itself as “probably the most main Christian legislation companies dedicated to protective spiritual 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 known 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, used to be “no other than Hitler’s.”
“Some persons are known as to pastoral ministry and others to tune ministry,” he’s mentioned. “I used to be known as to felony ministry, and I’ve been out at the entrance traces of the ‘tradition struggle.’”
He has certainly been that.
But so as to raised perceive Johnson’s worldview, it’s vital to acknowledge the affect of David Barton at the new Area speaker.
In 2021, Johnson spoke at a meeting the place he praised Barton. Barton, whilst now not widely recognized out of doors of sure evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is vital inside of them. A graduate of Oral Roberts College with some extent in Christian training, Barton is the previous vice chair of the Texas Republican Birthday celebration and has suggested figures together with Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and previous Consultant Michele Bachmann. He considers Donald Trump probably the most 5 largest presidents in American historical past.
Johnson mentioned he used to be presented to Barton’s paintings 1 / 4 of a century in the past; it “has had one of these profound affect on me and my paintings and my existence and the whole thing I do.” Through all accounts this is true. When you pay attention to Johnson discuss 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, now not the opposite direction round,” you’ll pay attention echoes of Barton.
Even supposing now not a historian, Barton has for years been engaged in what he calls “ancient reclamation,” wherein he manner appearing that the Founders, together with Thomas Jefferson, have 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 fable.
“It’s in point of fact exhausting 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 Country, informed Politico. “For them, he has in point of fact outlined The united states 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 have been all baked into the Charter, and that God has elected The united states to be a different country, and that the country might be blessed if we reply in obedience and handle that, and now not if we pass off beam,” she endured. “It in point of fact fuels evangelical politics and the concept evangelicalism has a different function to play to get the rustic again not off course.”
“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry alternatives from the previous to advertise political agendas within the provide, to color an image of The united states’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, informed NBC Information. “Mike Johnson comes instantly 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 used to be a “standard Christian” even if Jefferson wondered most of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of faith, mentioned it might were higher titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a work of ancient scholarship, the e book is terrible,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The e book used to be so riddled with ancient inaccuracies that it used to be recalled via its Christian writer, Thomas Nelson, as a result of “elementary truths simply weren’t there.”
However Barton’s distorted perspectives are infrequently confined to historical past. He has mentioned he doesn’t assume scientific government will ever discover a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. This view is “in response to 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 of 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 personality, this dedication, this data, this revel in and this religious religion” as Area speaker, Barton mentioned on a podcast. He additionally mentioned that he’s spoken with Johnson’s staff, “speaking with them about body of workers.”
“They wish to be the folk 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 enamel.”
“I am a rule-of-law man,” Mike Johnson informed Sean Hannity final week. In different places, in line with The New York Instances, 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 have been based as a rustic.”
On the identical time, Johnson has been a pivotal determine in undermining the guideline of legislation—in particular looking to overturn the 2020 presidential-election effects. In a in moderation reported tale at the 139 Area Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral Faculty rely, 3 New York Instances newshounds wrote, “In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied at the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Consultant Mike Johnson, crucial architect of the Electoral Faculty objections.”
Johnson additionally gathered signatures for a felony transient in strengthen of a groundless Texas lawsuit to throw out the ends up in 4 battleground states received via Joe Biden.
Consistent with a document within the Instances, Johnson “despatched an e-mail to his Republican colleagues soliciting signatures for the felony transient in strengthen of it. The initiative have been in my opinion blessed via Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson wrote, and the president used to be ‘anxiously waiting for’ 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 gadget used for vote casting used to be “suspect as it got here from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” Consistent with Johnson, “The allegations about those vote casting machines, a few of them being rigged with this tool via Dominion. Glance, there’s a large number of advantage to that.”
“The repair used to be in,” in line with Johnson.
In fact, it used to be now not. A commentary via Trump’s Division of Native land Safety’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, which is liable for serving to states safe the vote casting procedure, declared that the 2020 election used to be “probably the most safe in American historical past.” No longer been a unmarried discovering has refuted that declare, however many have showed it.
A document via a bunch of lifelong Republicans took a cautious take a look at the fees via Trump and his supporters. It confirmed the election used to be misplaced via Trump, now not stolen from him. In coming to that conclusion, it tested each and every rely of each and every case introduced in six battleground states.
“Even now, twenty months after the election”—the document got here out in July 2022—“a duration by which Trump’s supporters were energetically scouring each and every corner and cranny for evidence that the election used to be stolen, they arrive up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and permitted as honest via many patriotic American citizens. However on function exam they’ve fallen brief, each and every time.”
We now know, too, that point and time once more Trump’s personal body of workers 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” used to be a key player in undermining the guideline of legislation and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has achieved such a lot to shatter absolute requirements of appropriate and unsuitable.
From what I will inform, Mike Johnson—not like, 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 sure, particularly via 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 fact. I will’t lend a hand pondering this isn’t somewhat what Jesus had in thoughts.
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