by Paul Braterman
By now you will know that the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (Louisiana 4th District) was among those who voted against accepting the results of the 2020 Presidential election. You may also know that he is opposed to the concept of same sex marriage, which in some way he regards as undermining individual religious freedom, and wants to pass a law making abortion illegal throughout the US. You probably also know that he has denied that human activity is a cause of global warming, and has accepted more campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry than from any other source. There is a high chance that you have heard him share Marjorie Taylor Greene’s view that the problem in mass shootings isn’t guns, it’s the human heart (Guns don’t kill people. Human hearts kill people.) What you may not know are his views on the causes of the moral decline that, like authoritarian pulpiteers throughout the ages, he sees happening all around him. He has, however, stated those views very plainly, at a presentation he gave in Louisiana in 2016, available here. I have read the transcript of this, suffering so that you don’t have to, and despite many decades of following the utterances of people who share his views I was surprised by what I found.
Here he is, speaking at a less than overcrowded Shreveport Christian Centre, which describes itself as mandated “to participate with the Lord in establishing His kingdom in all areas of our culture. We desire to use the authority given to us to promote and participate in seeing the Lord’s purposes rule in the church, business, media, arts, education, government and family arenas.” The authority, of course, is given by God. He is standing at the front of a platform, and behind him are musical instruments and two flags. The flag of the United States, and the flag of Israel. The Israeli Right has been wooing the American Religious Right for decades, and the unquestioning support of the American Religious Right has done much to make Israel what it is today.
Here’s part of what he said; you can find the full text on the link. My account is rather rambling, although nowhere near as rambling as the original material, and I will quite understand if you just want to skip to the key points at the end.
He was called to the legal ministry, just as some are called to the pulpit ministry. He would rather have been born in the era of the founding fathers, but he is when and where God wanted him to be. The references to a truth that is self-evident show that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired. Like the rest of the congregation, he is a watchman on the wall in defence of liberty. The watchmen don’t have the luxury of complacency, because darkness is encroaching. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, therefore the spirit of the Lord has been with the United States since its foundation. But the spirit is being quenched, and people are turning their faces away from God. As good stewards and good citizens, it is our duty to diagnose what is wrong with the country.
Turning back to our origins, America is the only country founded on a Creed. We began as a Christian nation and in 1892 the Supreme Court affirmed that we were a Christian nation. So where did we go wrong?
In the 1930s, there was a new spirit of enlightenment and the academic elites, with the collusion of some Supreme Court justices such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, said we should be reading Darwin. The result was that people decided that we came from primordial slime and that there was no God and therefore no transcendent morality. This led to the introduction in the 1960s of no-fault divorce laws, radical feminism, the 1973 legalisation of abortion, and all this is a result of Americans coming together to thumb their nose at God, and 30 or 40 years later you have school shootings.
We are now raising our children in the age of amorality. In the World War II generation, 67% of Americans were Christians, but now only 4% believe in the unalterable reliable word of God. 70% or more of children are turning away from their parental religion, and when they go to university the professors ridicule them and accuse them of narrowminded bigotry if they believe in God. The results are cultural chaos, 60 million babies murdered, children born out of wedlock, mass murders commonplace, and even police officers being hunted down. We now have post-modernism, which denies the reality of objective truth, and claims there are a thousand ways to heaven. And if you remind people that there is only one way, “you might actually get a few fiery arrows shot in your direction… I got scars all over my back.”
We are the salt of the earth, told not to hide our light under a basket, fight the good fight, armour of God, breastplate of righteousness, helmet of salvation, sword of the spirit. Shields like the Roman shield, which click into place with their neighbour to form a wall. We are citizens of America but more importantly we are citizens of the kingdom of God. We are part of the Great Commission to go out into the world and spread the news of the gospel. Proverbs 29 say that when the righteous rule people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan.
More stuff about how the State of Kentucky wanted to penalise the Ark Encounter for being too Christian, but his law firm came to the rescue,1 Finally, a couple of very telling statistics. Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was speaking is the second most biblical city in the US. It is also the city with the largest number of abortions per head of popuation. So Mike Johnson is going to organise a march which will somehow put things right.
In case you missed it amid all that word salad, here are some of his main points:
- He thinks that he became a lawyer in response to divine calling.
- He would rather have been born at the time of the founding fathers, but thinks that he is where he is now because that’s where God wants him to be.
- He thinks that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired.
- He thinks that the United States is a Christian nation.
- He thinks that the only real way to be a proper Christian is naïve biblical literalism, so rigorously that nowadays only 4% make the grade.
- He thinks that the US is in moral decline, and that we must identify the disease that caused that decline.
- He thinks that the disease is teaching about Darwin, imposed in the 1930s by a liberal educational elite with the collusion of progressive Supreme Court judges such as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
- He thinks that darkness is encroaching, Christians are being persecuted, students who profess a belief in God are ridiculed in universities, and he himself has been shot at with flaming arrows for his religious beliefs.
- He thinks that learning about Darwin causes people to stop believing in God, whereupon they become completely amoral.
- He thinks that the results include no-fault divorce (I don’t know why he regards that as a bad thing, but I expect his audience would agree with him), feminism (the same comments apply), the legalisation of abortion which is murder (the Bible says it isn’t, but Bible believing Christians don’t seem to know that), and in due course to mass shootings.
This man is the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America. His duties include determining which bills come before the House, and he is second in line for the Presidency of the United States. He was elected to this position with the unanimous support of the House Republicans.
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1] In case you’re not familiar with the story, here’s what happened. Answers in Genesis, which owns the Ark Encounter, insists that all employees adhere to its six-day creationist creed. But the Ark Encounter project receives public funds because of its potential as a tourist attraction. And the State of Kentucky said that it could only practice religious discrimination if it was a religious organisation, but if it was a religious organisation it couldn’t receive State funding. Somehow, Mike Johnson’s law firm, acting pro-bono, got the State to back down, so now it is a non-religious tourist attraction for purposes of attracting tax subsidies, but a religious activity for purposes of hiring.