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Quotations from Speaker Mike

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“I am a Christian”

“I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a life-long conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order,” Louisiana state Representative Mike Johnson told the Louisiana Baptist Message in 2016, “and I think that order is important.”1

In 2016 when first elected to Congress Johnson, his wife Kelly, and their four children were members of the First Baptist Church in  Bossier City, Louisiana.

 In 2023 the newly elected Speaker told Sean Hannity that when people ask, “’What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it – that’s my worldview. That’s what I believe and so I make no apologies for it.”2

“I was called to legal ministry”

“Some people are called to pastoral ministry and others to music ministry, etc. I was called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.”3

Johnson entered politics after spending more than two decades defending conservative Christian causes as a lawyer for the legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom.

God “raises up those in authority”

When Mike Johnson gave his first speech as Speaker he quoted G.K. Chesterton, saying “America is the only nation in the world that is founded upon a creed … listed with almost theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”

The idea that America is founded on a creed is common to evangelical Christians, and it was a sign to historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez that Johnson is a right-wing, evangelical Christian nationalist. Johnson believes this country was founded as a Christian nation, giving that religion a superior position in our society and government.”4

Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws.5

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

This is especially true in Johnson’s Southern Baptist Convention. His biblical worldview is that all authority in family, church, and government comes from God.

Johnson said in his speech that he was elected Speaker because “God raises up those in authority.” Johnson said God has “allowed and ordained each and every one of us to be here at this specific moment.”6

“The idea of truth itself is being openly challenged”

The Christian right has taken an anti-democratic turn, particularly with the attempts by former President Donald Trump and Mike Johnson to overturn the 2020 election. It has been influenced by the author David Barton, the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders.7 For decades this amateur historian has been promoting the idea that the separation of church and state is a myth. He uses cherry-picked history and fabrication to argue that the Founders intended for religion to influence government, and not just be protected from state interference.

“…these are not historical facts that we’re dealing with. It really is propaganda, but it’s incredibly effective propaganda. If you listen to Christian radio, you will hear them echoed. It’s just this pervasive understanding of our nation’s history that is based on fabrication.8

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Mike Johnson believes and uses the myth. In a 2021 Wallbuilders podcast he said “we really have never been at a point like this, where the very foundations of our republic are being shaken and the idea of truth itself is being openly challenged on a large scale, and even in the halls of the Congress.”

And I said, so I just want to propose to you what I call my seven core principles of conservatism. I said, it’s individual liberty, limited government, the rule of law, peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, human dignity. I said, now under each of those big broad categories there are subcategories. For example, under human dignity is the sanctity of every single human life. 

And each of those principles, by the way, could be tied to Scripture. They come from that, and that’s why they’re timeless and true and right.9

Representative Mike Johnson
“We don’t live in a democracy “

We don’t live in a democracy, because democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. OK? It’s not just majority rule. It’s a constitutional republic. And the founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.10

Mike Johnson

His commitment is not to democracy. He’s not committed to majority rule; he seems to be saying he’s committed to minority rule, if that’s what it takes to ensure that we stay on the Christian foundation that the founders have set up.11

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Johnson believes the authority of the people in a popular democracy is limited by “the Constitution,” meaning his Biblical interpretation of the Constitution with a particular Christian understanding.12

There has been growing alarm among conservative white Christians, starting with the Obama presidency, about demographic change and the “end of white Christian America.” Not religious freedom for all Americans, but religious freedom to ensure that conservative Christians can live according to their values. This has led to a growing willingness to abandon democracy, including denying election results.13

“Protect the church from an encroaching state”

The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.14

Mike Johnson

Johnson has said he would overturn the 1954 Johnson Amendment to allow America’s pulpits to speak openly about political matters.15 The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code that prohibits all 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates.16

My values follow the model of our Founding Fathers, I believe, and I think this is important. We were established as one nation under God. We are perilously close to forgetting that principle now – and we desperately need to return to this fundamental understanding.17

Mike Johnson

In a September 2022 episode of his weekly podcast with his wife, “Truth Be Told With Mike and Kelly Johnson,” Johnson claimed there is no wall to separate church and state, but rather, the Constitution erects a wall to protect religious people from the state. The First Amendment was “intended to create a shield for people of faith.”18

See, the majority of the founders, having personally witnessed the abuses of the Church of England, were determined to prevent the official establishment of any single national denomination of religion. However, they very deliberately listed religious liberty, the free exercise of religion of course, as the first freedom protected by the Bill of Rights, and here’s the key: They did that because they wanted everyone to really live out their faith as that would ensure a robust presence, moral virtue in the public square, and the free marketplace of ideas.19

Speaker Mike Johnson

Johnson ignores the colonial lesson of Roger Williams, who was expelled from intolerant Plymouth colony as a heretic. The Founding Fathers took that lesson to heart when they prevented the establishment of an official, state religion in the first clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Thomas Paine wrote in 1791: “Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law.”20

A 2021 Pew Research poll found that only a minority of “White evangelical Protestants and highly religious Christians” say the U.S. should abandon separation of church and state (34% and 31%, respectively) or declare the country a Christian nation (35% and 29%).21

In a 2016 broadcast of the “Disciple’s Voice of Hope with Alex T. Ray,” Johnson argued the opposite:

Well, now wait a minute, the founders said religion and morality are the indispensable support to the whole Republic. Now you’re telling me I can’t even bring it in just one argument in the public policy arena? That’s crazy. It’s anathema. It’s, it’s opposite. It’s the opposite of how we were founded as a country and I’m telling you we’re losing those foundations at our peril.22

Mike Johnson
“We invented radical feminism. We invented legalized abortion”

Johnson had a successful anti-abortion history in the Louisiana legislature.23

If you remember in the late ‘60s we invented things like no-fault divorce laws. We invented the sexual revolution. We invented radical feminism. We invented legalized abortion in 1973, where the state government sanctioned the killing of the unborn.24

Mike Johnson

Johnson is against women increasing control over their own lives, whether the issue is equality of the sexes, abortion, birth control, or “no fault” divorce. Because Johnson believes in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and makes no apologies for it: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.”25

Johnson has tried to impose his religious beliefs on women nationally. After the GOP Supreme Court struck down Roe in 2022, he cheered the decision and praised  a Louisiana law that would imprison any person helping a woman have an abortion: “The right to life has now been RESTORED!” Perform an abortion and get imprisoned at hard labor for 1-10 yrs & fined $10K-$100K.”  And in 2021 he co-sponsored a bill that would nationally ban abortions after six weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest.26

“Prayer is appropriate at a time like this”

When asked about the mass shooting in Maine, newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson sent Thoughts and PrayersTM.

Johnson has opposed gun control measures for years, including a law passed last year that included increased criminal background checks under age 21, grants for state crisis intervention, and funding for mental health and school security. Johnson criticized the law as unconstitutional and blamed America’s violent crime on a lack of faith: “America’s problem is not guns. America’s problem is a heart problem.”27

We’re dealing now with the inevitable results of decades of secular humanist ideology and the rise of moral relativism and the marginalization of people of faith and the erosion of the rule of law. These things are so tragic, but they are really not that surprising when you consider what we have been doing for the last 60 or 70 years in this country.28

Representative Mike Johnson

While preaching a sermon to promote his “legal ministry” in 2016, Johnson blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution. His remarks at Christian Center Shreveport were titled Preserving Liberty.

In the sermon Johnson claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation, but God was replaced over time by human reasoning. 

“And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime.29

Mike Johnson

For Johnson, the answer to mass shootings is religion, not gun laws.30

“Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural” 

In a 2004 editorial in the Shreveport Times, Johnson wrote:

Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.

Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.

If everyone does what is right in his own eyes, chaos and sexual anarchy will result. And make no mistake, the extremists who seek to redefine marriage also want to deny you the right to object to immoral behavior. Our precious religious freedom hangs in the balance.31

Mike Johnson

Like the Pilgrims, Johnson’s religious freedom is always defined as the ability to impose his religious beliefs on others.

In a 2005 Times editorial, Johnson wrote “Your race, creed and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do.”32 In response to the Obergefell Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, Representative Johnson wrote in 2017 that “It is not ‘bigotry’ to remind people of God’s claims on our lives and biological reality.”33

As a congressman, Johnson has introduced Don’t Say Gay legislation and said that parents do not have the right to gender-affirming care for their children:34

A parent has no right to sexually transition a young child. Our American legal system recognizes the important public interest in protecting children from abuse and physical harm. No parent has a constitutional right to injure their children.35

Representative Mike Johnson

Gender-affirming care can involve hairstyle or clothes that affirm gender identity, or the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy. In adulthood it can be gender surgery, but surgery is rarely performed on patients under 18.36

Democrats say those statements are part of a campaign by GOP lawmakers to attack transgender children and their families, “picking on already vulnerable kids in order to stir up chaos that they hope to ride to success at the ballot box.”37

Right-wing Christians like Johnson believe that under God’s authority parents do not have the right to decide what’s best for their kids; those decisions must be based on biblical law. The government’s job is to support the authority of God’s laws.38

One of his core principles is human dignity. Well, does that extend to the dignity of gay citizens or trans citizens? No, absolutely not. His understanding of human dignity is rooted in his understanding of biblical law. One of his core principles is the rule of law. But clearly, he’s comfortable with election denialism. So all of these core principles — freedom, limited government, human dignity — are interpreted through a conservative Christian lens and his understanding of what the Bible says ought to happen and how people ought to behave.39

Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Footnotes
  1. Will Hall, “Mike Johnson: Faith, family & freedom motivate run for seat in U.S. Congress,” Louisiana Baptist Message, SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 ↩︎
  2. Dean Obeidallah, “New GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson blamed mass shootings on women having rights—I’m serious,” Substack, Oct 27, 2023 ↩︎
  3. Will Hall, “Mike Johnson: Faith, family & freedom motivate run for seat in U.S. Congress,” Louisiana Baptist Message, SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 ↩︎
  4. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎
  5. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎
  6. David Badash, “‘Scripture Is Very Clear’: New House Speaker Tells Congress God Has ‘Ordained’ Them,” The New Civil Rights Movement, October 25, 2023 ↩︎
  7. David Barton et al., “ProFamily Legislators Conference – With Congressman Mike Johnson,” Wallbuilders Live! 12/09/2021 ↩︎
  8. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎
  9. David Barton et al., “ProFamily Legislators Conference – With Congressman Mike Johnson,” Wallbuilders Live! 12/09/2021 ↩︎
  10. Mike Johnson, No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, Twitter, 10/25/23 ↩︎
  11. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎
  12. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎
  13. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎
  14. Will Hall, “Mike Johnson: Faith, family & freedom motivate run for seat in U.S. Congress,” Louisiana Baptist Message, SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 ↩︎
  15. Will Hall, “Mike Johnson: Faith, family & freedom motivate run for seat in U.S. Congress,” Louisiana Baptist Message, SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 ↩︎
  16. “Johnson Amendment,” Wikipedia, retrieved 10/28/23 ↩︎
  17. Will Hall, “Mike Johnson: Faith, family & freedom motivate run for seat in U.S. Congress,” Louisiana Baptist Message, SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 ↩︎
  18. David Badash, “New GOP Speaker: Separation of Church and State Is Only a ‘Shield for People of Faith’,” The New Civil Rights Movement, October 26, 2023 ↩︎
  19. David Badash, “New GOP Speaker: Separation of Church and State Is Only a ‘Shield for People of Faith’,” The New Civil Rights Movement, October 26, 2023 ↩︎
  20. The Life and Works of Thomas Paine. William M. Van der Weyde, ed. Thomas Paine National Historical Association, 1925  ↩︎
  21. David Badash, “New GOP Speaker: Separation of Church and State Is Only a ‘Shield for People of Faith’,” The New Civil Rights Movement, October 26, 2023 ↩︎
  22. David Badash, “New GOP Speaker: Separation of Church and State Is Only a ‘Shield for People of Faith’,” The New Civil Rights Movement, October 26, 2023 ↩︎
  23. Will Hall, “Mike Johnson: Faith, family & freedom motivate run for seat in U.S. Congress,” Louisiana Baptist Message, SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 ↩︎
  24. Dean Obeidallah, “New GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson blamed mass shootings on women having rights—I’m serious,” Substack, Oct 27, 2023 ↩︎
  25. Dean Obeidallah, “New GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson blamed mass shootings on women having rights—I’m serious,” Substack, Oct 27, 2023 ↩︎
  26. Dean Obeidallah, “New GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson blamed mass shootings on women having rights—I’m serious,” Substack, Oct 27, 2023 ↩︎
  27. Michael Macagnone, “After mass shooting, new speaker calls for prayer that ‘senseless violence can stop’,”  CQ Roll Call, October 26, 2023 ↩︎
  28. Michael Macagnone, “After mass shooting, new speaker calls for prayer that ‘senseless violence can stop’,”  CQ Roll Call, October 26, 2023 ↩︎
  29. J.D. Wolf, “New Speaker Mike Johnson Blamed School Shootings on the Teaching of Evolution,” MeidasTouch Network (MTN), Oct 26, 2023 ↩︎
  30. J.D. Wolf, “New Speaker Mike Johnson Blamed School Shootings on the Teaching of Evolution,” MeidasTouch Network (MTN), Oct 26, 2023 ↩︎
  31. Mike Johnson, “Marriage amendment deserves strong support,” The Shreveport Times, Sep 12, 2004 ↩︎
  32. Mike Johnson, “Sexual orientation move should be opposed,” The Shreveport Times, Sep 12, 2005 ↩︎
  33. Sarah Posner, “Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalist track record isn’t a mystery — it’s a tragedy,” MSNBC, Oct. 25, 2023 ↩︎
  34. Sarah Posner, “Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalist track record isn’t a mystery — it’s a tragedy,” MSNBC, Oct. 25, 2023  ↩︎
  35. Ariana Figueroa, “U.S. Rep Mike Johnson: Parents have ‘no right to sexually transition a young child’,” Louisiana Illuminator,  July 27, 2023 ↩︎
  36. Ariana Figueroa, “U.S. Rep Mike Johnson: Parents have ‘no right to sexually transition a young child’,” Louisiana Illuminator,  July 27, 2023 ↩︎
  37. Ariana Figueroa, “U.S. Rep Mike Johnson: Parents have ‘no right to sexually transition a young child’,” Louisiana Illuminator,  July 27, 2023 ↩︎
  38. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎
  39. Katelyn Fossett, “‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’,”  POLITICO, 10/27/2023 ↩︎

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