While the U.S House was ignoring the Israel-Ukraine aid package passed by the Senate and starting a two-week Presidents’ Day recess, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his leadership team went to Miami for a retreat and, according to a Politico story based on multiple first-hand accounts, Johnson’s presentation there “took on a surprisingly religious tone.”
Quoting people who were in the room, Politico reports: “Rather than outlining a specific plan to hold and grow the majority, these people said, Johnson effectively delivered a sermon.”
Portraying Johnson as just a pious Christian causes the public to overlook the way he manipulates Christianity to exert power.
“I’m not at church,” one of the people in attendance told Politico. “The approach fell flat among some in the room.”
It wasn’t just a sermon, though; portraying Johnson as just a pious Christian causes the public to overlook the way he manipulates Christianity to exert power. Johnson has taught classes miseducating Americans about church-state separation and perpetuated the myth that the United States, which has no national religion by design, is a “Christian nation.”
Two people who were in the room told Politico that Johnson “attempted to rally the group by discussing moral decline in America — focusing on declining church membership and the nation’s shrinking religious identity.” According to them, Johnson “contended that when one doesn’t have God in their life, the government or ‘state’ will become their guide, referring back to Bible verses.”
I’m sure Johnson is concerned about church membership decline. Most Christians, myself included, are concerned. But the responsibility for evangelism lies with churches, not with the speaker of the House in particular or the government in general. If increasing the number of people going to church is his priority, then Johnson ought to be leading a church, not Congress.
He seems to think more government promotion of Christianity will help reverse the trend of declining church membership. But studies show that this type of Christian nationalism will only accelerate church membership decline.
What else might Johnson have covered in his presentation?
I could think of no one better to consult than the Rev. Brian Kaylor, editor-in-chief of the Baptist magazine “Word&Way.” Kaylor wasn’t at the retreat, but he was the first to report on sermons and other presentations Johnson delivered in the years before he became House speaker.
“The presentations follow a similar script, complete with PowerPoint slides featuring quotes from U.S. founders, graphs about religious beliefs in recent years, and illustrations to depict his view of God over government,” Kaylor told me in an email:
His presentations follow the basic approach of his mentor, pseudo-historian David Barton: cherry-pick a few religious comments while ignoring the larger volume of rhetoric about church-state separation, depict the founders as Christians despite the deist beliefs of many of them, and use quotes falsely attributed to key figures (like John Quincy Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville). As Johnson bemoans society today and criticizes younger generations, he talks about the need to go back — not to the 1950s but the 1920s or earlier. He blames ‘truth decay’ on the rise of philosophical and legal pragmatism of the 1930s and 1940s. Before that, Johnson insists the U.S. was a nation that followed moral, biblical truth. Johnson’s solution is for government officials like himself to follow the Bible, even if it means ignoring laws or court decisions with which they disagree. With all of this, he says the quiet part out loud: he doesn’t want a constitutional democracy, he wants Christian Nationalism.
Despite Politico’s report that Johnson’s remarks “took on a surprisingly religious tone,” as Kaylor’s observations about his past presentations attest, Johnson adopting such a tone isn’t surprising at all. The strange part is that it didn’t go over well with his colleagues. When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., described herself as a Christian nationalist, only two Republicans in Congress spoke out against that proclamation. And most Republicans in the United States favor declaring the U.S. a “Christian nation.” Given this political context, I’m glad there was some pushback to Johnson in the room.
MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler, in a recent AP report about Christian nationalism, calls the America-as-a-Christian-nation idea “a trope of exclusion,” which centers white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as “the ones that are willing and should be running the country both then and now.” The myth, Butler said, justifies seeing people who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as “heathens.”
Johnson’s presentation at the leadership retreat in Miami came right after he received a letter from 26 House Democrats criticizing his decision to bring in far-right preacher Jack Hibbs to serve as the House’s guest chaplain.
Those Democrats write that “Pastor Hibbs is a radical Christian Nationalist who helped fuel the January 6th insurrection and has a long record of spewing hateful vitriol toward non-Christians, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community. He should never have been granted the right to deliver the House’s opening prayer on January 30, 2024,”
Johnson’s presentation at the leadership retreat in Miami came right after he received a letter from House Democrats criticizing his decision to bring in far-right preacher Jack Hibbs to serve as the House’s guest chaplain.
The letter says Johnson “with the tacit approval” of the House chaplain “decided to flout the Chaplaincy guidelines and use the platform of the Guest Chaplain to lend the imprimatur of Congress to an ill-qualified hate preacher who shares the Speaker’s Christian Nationalist agenda and his antipathy toward church-state separation.”
Because Johnson expresses such an interest in American history, he should reflect on something President James Madison wrote in 1822: “We are teaching the World the great truth, that Governments do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson, that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.”
However, in private and in public, Johnson seems intent on undermining the principle of church-state separation in the U.S. Constitution and advancing an ahistorical “Christian nation” myth. It’s not going to improve his ability to run his Republican caucus. Nor will it bring more people to Christ.
If Johnson wants to share the Gospel and convert people to Christianity, he’s free to do that in the United States because of our strong religious freedom protections. And given how bad he’s been at governing as House speaker, such a ministry may be a better fit for him than politics.