Brad Reed
October 26, 2023
Ark Encounters under construction (Facebook)
Newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has a long history of advocating on behalf of right-wing causes, including total bans on abortion, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and filing lawsuits aimed at keeping former President Donald Trump in office despite losing the 2020 election.
Daily Dot has flagged another aspect of Johnson's resume that appears to go beyond standard Republican policy positions, however: His advocacy on behalf of an organization that pushes for the teaching of creationism.
Last decade, Johnson filed a lawsuit against the state of Kentucky aimed at helping creationist Ken Ham secure public subsidies to construct his Ark Encounter museum – a gigantic replica of the biblical Noah's Ark that even features models of dinosaurs, despite the fact that dinosaurs had become extinct 65 million years before the Bible was even written.
In an editorial published in favor of subsidizing the ark, Johnson argued that Kentucky would certainly benefit from the massive amount of tourist revenue that the creationist-themed museum would purportedly deliver to state coffers.
"Kentucky officials are smart to enthusiastically embrace the Ark Encounter, and the millions of tourists the park will welcome to the area from every viewpoint, race, color, religion and creed," he wrote in the editorial.
He also praised Answers in Genesis, Ham's organization that teaches Noah carried pet tyrannosaurs with him on the boat for forty straight days, as aiming "to encourage critical thought and respectful public debate."
David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
October 27, 2023
Then-President Donald Trump is greeted by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) before the State of the Union address in the House chamber on Feb. 4, 2020, in Washington, D.C. Leah Millis-Pool/Getty Images
Newly sworn-in Speaker Mike Johnson's record is being rapidly unearthed and critics are expressing anger and outrage that House Republicans have elevated what some are calling a far-right Christian nationalist to become the third most-powerful elected official in the country.
"While preaching a sermon in 2016," MeidasTouch Network reports Thursday, "Johnson blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution."
During his sermon at the Christian Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, Johnson said: "Some of you were around in the late 60s, you remember that what that was about? The counterculture revolution, Woodstock, and drugs and peace and free love and all that, but," he claimed, it was "more about the undermining of the foundations of religion and morality."
"Because 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," he said.
"All these things happened because as collectively as Americans, we began to get together in growing numbers and thumb our nose at the creator and say, 'We don't believe that anymore, we're rejecting the founders natural law philosophy in favor of moral relativism, and we're going down another path.' "
"Now, what we tolerate in moderation our children excuse in excess. What happens when you fast forward another 30 or 40 years?" he asked. "We know that we're living in a completely amoral society. And people say, 'How can a young person go into their school house and open fire on their classmates?' Because we taught a whole generation, a couple of generations now, of Americans that there is no right and wrong. That it's about survival of the fittest and you evolved from the primordial slime, why is that life of any sacred value because there's nobody sacred to whom it's owed."
"None of this should surprise us," Johnson claimed.
Critics blamed the new House Speaker.
Chris Harris, vice president of communications for Giffords, the anti-gun violence group founded and led by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, responded by saying, "You know what doesn’t lead to gun deaths in schools? Teaching kids science. What does? Giving kids easy access to guns."
The Atlantic's Norman Ornstein responded with one word: " Lunatic."
And The Daily Beast's Goldie Taylor served up this response: " Speaker Froot Loops."
Watch at this link.
Evangelical Christian conservatives have long had allies in top Republican leadership in Congress. But never before have they had one so thoroughly embedded in their movement as new House Speaker Mike Johnson, a longtime culture warrior in the courthouse, in the classroom and in Congress.
Religious conservatives cheered Johnson's election Wednesday, after which he brought his Bible to the rostrum before taking the oath of office. “The Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority ... each of you, all of us," he said.
“Someone asked me today in the media, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?’” Johnson said Thursday in a Fox News interview. “I said, ’Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”
But progressive faith leaders are sounding the alarm about Johnson’s opposition to LGBTQ rights and his rallying of Republicans around former President Donald Trump’s legal effort to overturn the 2020 election results. And, more broadly, they are concerned about Johnson's “desire to impose his narrow religious vision upon the rest of us," in the words of Paul Raushenbush, president of Interfaith Alliance, a broad coalition of progressive religious groups.
Related video: Rep. Mike Johnson, a staunch conservative from Louisiana, elected House speaker (The Associated Press) Duration 1:42 View on Watch
To be sure, Christian conservatives have held the House speakership with Republican majorities in the past, from Catholics such as Paul Ryan and John Boehner to Newt Gingrich, who was Southern Baptist when he was speaker in the 1990s and later converted to Catholicism.
In fact, the 2023 House speaker drama has been in some ways an intra-church affair starring Southern Baptists — including Johnson himself, short-term speaker Kevin McCarthy and the representative who led the revolt to oust McCarthy, Matt Gaetz.
But Johnson is a bona fide culture warrior, with a resume reading like a roadmap of powerful institutions of the religious right.
He has served as professor at the government school of Liberty University in Virginia, a Christian school and conservative bastion.
From 2004 to 2012, Johnson served on board of the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose 13 million members comprise the nation's largest Protestant denomination. During his tenure with the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, it rallied members to place strong emphasis on "values voting." Such activism helped reinforce Republicans' opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Brent Leatherwood, the commission's current president, said he met with Johnson in the early days of his own tenure. “It was clear to me he carries an abiding devotion to our convention of churches, subscribes to the principles that are dear to so many Southern Baptists, and has a deep pride in our nation," Leatherwood said.
Johnson served as an attorney with what's now known as Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the foremost legal advocates of causes valued by many on the religious right.
With the ADF, Johnson championed a 2004 Louisiana ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage, writing in the Shreveport Times that “homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural” and that society should not approve “such a dangerous lifestyle.” In 2003, after the U.S. Supreme Court nullified state laws banning same-sex sexual relations — which the ADF had urged it to retain — Johnson lamented the decision, writing that by “closing these bedroom doors, they (the justices) have opened a Pandora's box.”
Johnson's own public interest law firm, called Freedom Guard, helped win a legal battle regaining tax incentives on behalf of a Noah’s Ark theme park in Kentucky, overcoming state concerns that the project’s mission had shifted from tourism to ministry.
Johnson recently led a congressional hearing on transgender issues, saying in a statement, ”Gender affirming care’ is anything but 'affirming’ and ‘caring.’ It is adults deciding to permanently alter the bodies of children who do NOT have the capacity to make life altering decisions on their own.”
Religious conservatives embraced Johnson as one of their own as they cheered his election as speaker.
“His commitment to unity and passion for protecting freedom will benefit all Americans,” ADF president Kristen Waggoner said on X (formerly Twitter).
The Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, welcomed Johnson’s speakership not only because of his conservative political record, but also because he is a “a self-consciously committed evangelical Christian.”
“He has somehow pulled off the task of being very convictional and I believe right on most of these issues, and at the same time considered to be respectful and gracious even well-liked by members of his own party, and presumably by members of the other party as well,” Mohler said on his podcast.
Johnson invoked images cherished by Christian conservatives as he ascended to the speakership, pledging “servant leadership,” leading fellow Republicans in a prayer, touting the national motto, “In God We Trust” and highlighting the Declaration of Independence's statement that humans "are endowed by their Creator” with rights.
John Fea, who studies religious conservatives and is a professor of history at Messiah University in Pennsylvania, said Johnson is a Christian nationalist, part of a movement that fuses Christian and American values, symbols and identity and sees the United States as having a divine destiny similar to the biblical Israel. Johnson has paid tribute to the “profound influence" of Wallbuilders, an organization promoting the view that America was created as a Christian nation, on his own career.
“We should not be fooled by his aw-shucks style,” Fea added in Current, an online journal. “He is a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right. One might call him a happy warrior.”
Progressive faith leaders expressed alarm at Johnson‘s election, and his remarks on Wednesday evoking the Bible as saying authorities are chosen by God.
“He must remember that he was elected by the people, not by God,” Raushenbush said.
Similar concerns were expressed by the Rev. Nathan Empsall, executive director of Faithful America, an online Christian community advocating for social justice.
Empsall, in a statement, depicted Johnson as “an insurrection-supporting politician who will do anything to grab power, no matter who it hurts, simply to enforce his brand of right-wing Christianity on the rest of us.”
After the 2020 election, Johnson organized more than 100 House Republicans to file a brief supporting Trump's challenge to President Joe Biden's election — a challenge that appalled many legal observers and that the Supreme Court rejected.
On Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress prepared to certify Biden’s win and just before Trump’s supporters overran the Capitol, Johnson tweeted: “We MUST fight for election integrity, the Constitution, and the preservation of our republic! It will be my honor to help lead that fight in the Congress today.”
He later tweeted a condemnation of the rioters who beat police and broke into the Capitol. He still voted with most House Republicans to overturn Biden's victories in two states.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said via email that Johnson “has an obligation to serve all Americans," those of all faiths and none.
“Johnson’s brand of Christian nationalism is bad American history and a betrayal of the historic Baptist commitment to religious freedom,” Tyler added.
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AP journalists David Crary and Holly Meyer contributed to this report.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Peter Smith, The Associated Press
Story by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement •
U.S. Department of Agriculture© provided by AlterNet
He’s now the most powerful elected Republican in the nation, second in line to the presidency, and the third most-powerful elected official in the country, but just five years ago Mike Johnson was a freshman U.S. Congressman from Louisiana who had made a name for himself as an attorney fighting for far-right Christian causes.
In 2018, U.S. Rep. Johnson was scheduled to deliver the keynote speech at a Bible conference hosted by infamous “Kill the Gays” Pastor Kevin Swanson, as this social media post from Brian Tashman, formerly of Right Wing Watch/People for the American Way showed in April of that year:
Swanson, who supported Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” that called for LGBTQ people to be executed or face life in prison, made headlines in 2015 for saying gay people should be put to death.
Related video: Who is the new House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA)? (MSNBC)Duration 5:11 View on Watch
As Right Wing Watch has reported, Swanson has called HIV/AIDS, “God’s retribution.” He has “defended Uganda’s kill-the-gays bill, warned that the Girl Scouts, women’s soccer and movies like ‘Frozen’ turn girls into lesbians, and accused gay people of causing devastating floods and hurricanes.”
Swanson also “frequently claimed that the government should put gay people to death,” Right Wing Watch had also reported, “and blamed natural disasters on gay people and women who wear pants.” He urged “people to hold up signs telling gay couples to die on their wedding day, and agreed “that gay marriage is like the Sandy Hook school massacre.”
Johnson had been slated to deliver a speech titled, “The Bible: Equipping the Man of God for Politics and the Culture War,” at Swanson’s Bible Family Conference. He also has ties to at least two groups designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-LGBTQ hate groups: the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council.
“Throughout my career,” Johnson wrote in a 2018 Facebook photo, standing with anti-gay hate group leader Tony Perkins, “I have worked tirelessly to support legislation that protects conservative values of faith, family and freedom.”
“This week, I was honored by the Family Research Council with the True Blue Award for my vote on critical bills that protect life and promote fiscal responsibility.”
READ MORE: ‘Lunatic’ Speaker Johnson Blasted for Tying Mass Shootings to Teaching Evolution and ‘Inventing’ No-Fault Divorce
NCRM published a report on May 1, 2018, on Congressman Johnson being scheduled to deliver the keynote address, and before publication reached out to the Congressman’s office but did not receive a response – until after our article ran.
Here’s the update we published the following day, May 2, 2018:
Rep. Johnson’s office responded to our inquiry. They first claimed:
“Congressman Johnson was invited to speak to a Christian conference in August. He was unaware of Mr. Swanson’s participation and of his previous comments. Once this was brought to the congressman’s attention, he immediately denounced those comments and withdrew his participation.”
When NCRM replied, noting there was no record of Rep. Johnson denouncing Swanson’s remarks, Johnson’s office responded: “The Congressman was asked by a friend not associated with Swanson or his organization to join a Bible conference in D.C. Once he learned of Swanson’s connection to the conference he immediately withdrew his participation.”
After NCRM’s article ran, Johnson’s name was removed from the schedule at Swanson’s Bible Family Conference.
It does not appear Speaker Johnson has ever denounced extremist anti-LGBTQ hate.
In a separate May 2 article, NCRM reported, “Rep. Johnson still appears to support the anti-LGBT movement. Last week he posted praise for his ‘good friend, law school classmate and former colleague, Kyle Duncan, on his confirmation today to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.'”
READ MORE: New GOP Speaker: Separation of Church and State Is Only a ‘Shield for People of Faith’
LGBT civil rights group Lambda Legal calls Duncan, “a lawyer who has built his career around pursuing extreme positions that target members of the LGBTQ community.”
This week, on Thursday, speaking to Fox News, Johnson said: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘Curious, 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.”
Watch Johnson’s remarks below or at this link.
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・Speaker nominee Mike Johnson is a 'virulent Christian nationalist' and anti-LGBTQ 'MAGA extremist': critics
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