Highlights: There are two moments from Mike Johnson’s early days as speaker of the House that almost perfectly encapsulate the broken way that so many Republican evangelicals approach politics. The first occurred just after the House elected Johnson. ABC’s Rachel Scott started to ask Johnson about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But before she could finish, Johnson’s Republican colleagues started to shout her down. Johnson simply shook his head. “Next question,” he said, as if the query wasn’t worth his time. It was the kind of conduct that led the Florida Republican Matt Gaetz to dub the new speaker “MAGA Mike Johnson.”
The second moment came in his first extended interview as speaker, when Johnson shared the basis of his political philosophy with Sean Hannity of Fox News: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are 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 quote is less illuminating than many people think. The Bible says a great deal about a great number of subjects, but it is open to interpretation on many and silent on many more. (It says nothing, for example, about the proper level of funding for the I.R.S., Johnson’s first substantive foray into policy as speaker.)
Johnson and I have such similar religious convictions that we once worked together at the same Christian law firm.
It turns out that the Bible isn’t actually a clear guide to “any issue under the sun.” You can read it from cover to cover, believe every word you read and still not know the “Christian” policy on a vast majority of contested issues. Even when evangelical Christians broadly agree on certain moral principles, such as the idea that marriage is a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman, there is widespread disagreement on the extent to which civil law should reflect those evangelical moral beliefs.
Though the Bible isn’t a clear guide for American foreign policy, American economic policy or American constitutional law, it is a much clearer guide for Christian virtue. Here’s one such virtue, for example: honesty.
Which brings us back to Johnson’s refusal to answer a question about the effort to overturn the 2020 election… According to a comprehensive Politico report on Johnson’s efforts to steal the election, he was a “ubiquitous contact for Trump at key moments” during the plot. He said there was “a lot of merit” to completely false claims about voting machines being “rigged with this software by Dominion.” Like most House Republicans, he voted against certifying the election.
Mods, I know that’s a lot of words from the post. It’s about 440/1100 words from the article.
I’m not the biggest fan of Louis Rosman, but he sometimes has a point.
People who start from a position being assured of their own self-righteousness, can very easily convince themselves that they can do no wrong. In many ways, they justify eveything for some mythical greater good that demands accomplishing a thing without regard for how they get there.
hyper-evangelic christian politicians are easily the low hanging fruit to pick on for examples.
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This is what they meant by Separation of Church and State. These people had just fled a nation that routinely slaughtered any amount of the population that wouldn’t convert to the King’s religion. Those are the days we are screaming back to. Except, its a state religion, which just moves the historical reference to the 1940s.
These idiots want a theocracy, they want the state to sponsor their religion and “make it official”. We should be clawing these motherfuckers out of their seats. But we fucken can’t cause our own people are so handicapped with education they have to breath through their mouths and assholes exclusively.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
There are two moments from Mike Johnson’s early days as speaker of the House that almost perfectly encapsulate the broken way that so many Republican evangelicals approach politics.
He helped mobilize Republican support for Texas’ utterly frivolous lawsuit to overturn the Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin elections.
According to a comprehensive Politico report on Johnson’s efforts to steal the election, he was a “ubiquitous contact for Trump at key moments” during the plot.
In the same interview in which Johnson called out Dominion, he said that the Georgia election was “set up for the Biden team to win” through “massive fraud and error and irregularity.” By whom?
Another Christian man helps lead one of the most comprehensively dishonest and dangerous political and legal efforts in American history, and he gets the speaker’s gavel.
Evangelicals’ loyalty to Trump — in spite of several other options — is placing one of the most malignant figures in American politics within striking distance of the presidency, again.
The original article contains 1,172 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
