Speaker Mike Johnson’s Christian Nationalism Gets Congressional Attention—Not the Good Kind by Robyn E. Blumner

 

We have a caucus in Congress. Yes, we do. The Congressional Freethought Caucus (CFC) is dedicated to promoting the secular character of government by protecting the strict separation of church and state, as well as evaluating public policy based on its adherence to reason and science…

If you were to look for the opposite to this approach to lawmaking, one name would stand above the rest: Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House and the second in line to the presidency.

The Louisiana congressman is a Christian Nationalist of the first order and an energetic promoter of young-earth creationism. As HuffPost reported in December 2023, Johnson once lauded the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, saying they are “one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”¹

He sought to have a course on the Bible, grounded in biblical literalism and the Genesis creation story, offered to public school students. The course was created by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a group that claims “the Bible was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 to 30 years.”²

My sense is no one at the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has read our godless Constitution or has the vaguest clue about the religious antipathy of Thomas “A Wall of Separation between Church and State” Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But I guess if you fall for one delusion, you can fall for more.

Parroting these views is Johnson, who has talked of the “so-called separation of church and state” and said that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”³

But remember we have a congressional caucus, and it has not taken all this lying down. First, the CFC invited Johnson to talk with the caucus about protecting religious freedom. That invitation was ignored. Then, in January, the CFC put out a white paper titled “Speaker Johnson: Christian Nationalism in the Speaker’s Office?” I urge you to read it in full.⁴

The twenty members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus say that what is known about the Speaker’s record on religious freedom and church-state separation is “troubling and alarming.” It states bluntly that Johnson “is deeply connected” to Christian Nationalism.

As the CFC report points out, Johnson has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, a dominionist philosophy that says Christians must take over the key levers of society, including government, business, media, etc., to bring society into alignment with what they consider God’s plan for Christian hegemony.

“He has spent decades working to deny, reject, and undermine the constitutional separation of church and state, including trafficking in fake histories about our nation’s founding and distorting the meaning of the Establishment Clause,” the CFC says.

Johnson has spent much of his professional life working to impose Christian dogma on society through operation of law. As senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a national Christian Right legal organization (with contributions and revenues in 2022 totaling $104 million!), he promoted the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes and worked to shut down abortion clinics in Louisiana.

As the CFC reports, as a member of Congress, Johnson has pushed for a nationwide ban on abortion and called for prison time and “hard labor” for any doctor who performs one.

The CFC has put forth a series of nearly two dozen questions for Johnson. Questions such as: “Does he believe, as many Christian Nationalists argue, that the Bible—not the Constitution—must function as the supreme law of the United States and that the Bible must prevail in the event of conflict between the Bible and civil law?”

A simple “no” would suffice.

The caucus members are asking Johnson to talk with them to alleviate some of their concerns. They want assurances that he is not trying to impose his own “radical religious views” on others or “transform our secular democracy into an authoritarian theocracy.”

There is little likelihood of a response or of anything reassuring to come. Johnson is the real deal: a man who sees himself as a modern day Moses being called by his god—a god who talks to him apparently—to lead the nation.⁵

Where he wants to take us, none of us should want to follow.

Notes

1 Paul Blumenthal, “How Mike Johnson Helped Open the Door to Creationism in Louisiana Public Schools.” HuffPost, December 9, 2023. Available online at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-johnson-creationism-schools_n_657380ffe4b09724b4342739.

2 Mark A. Chancey, “A Textbook Example of the Christian Right: The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion vol. 75, no. 3 (September 2007), pp. 554–581.

3 Rob Boston, “Down the Memory Hole: House Speaker Mike Johnson and His Allies Would Like to Cover Up His History of Extreme Statements. It’s Not That Easy.” Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, December 30, 2023. Available online at https://www.au.org/the-latest/church-and-state/articles/down-the-memory-hole-house-speaker-mike-johnson-and-his-allies-would-like-to-cover-up-his-history-of-extreme-statements-its-not-that-easy/#.

4 Congressional Freethought Caucus, “Speaker Johnson: Christian Nationalism in the Speaker’s Office?” (white paper), January 10, 2024. Available online at https://huffman.house.gov/imo/media/doc/CFC%20White%20Paper%20–%20Speaker%20Johnson.pdf.

5 Azhar Majeed, “Mike Johnson Isn’t Just the Avatar for Christian Nationalism—He’s Actually Much Worse Than That.” Free Thinking, January 10, 2024. Available online at https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/mike-johnson-isnt-just-the-avatar-for-christian-nationalism-hes-actually-much-worse-than-that/.

-Robyn E. Blumner is the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason &, Science. She was a nationally syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) for sixteen years.