Mike Johnson’s “commitment is not to democracy”
“If Republicans vote for a medieval insurrectionist, and nobody knows, does it count?” Brian Beutler recommended on Friday at Off Message, meaning the new Republican speaker from Louisiana. Make Mike Johnson famous:
Instilling an idea about a person in the social consciousness and making it stick is an unending and tedious process. Republicans didn’t define Al Gore as a wooden teller of Big Fish tales in one day, it required relentless scoffing; same with John Kerry as the out-of-touch cheese-eating surrender monkey, Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Emails. Nancy Pelosi as Mrs. San Francisco values, and so on.
Nancy Mace wants to wear a Scarlet Letter? How about two? MJ. Republicans hung “Nancy Pelosi liberal” around Democratic candidates’ necks for decades. Two parties can play that game.
The press is obliging. Politico’s Katelyn Fossett spoke with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian of evangelical Christianity and politics.
Du Mez describes Johnson as “incredibly standard in terms of being a right-wing, white evangelical Christian nationalist” in the tradition of David Barton of Wallbuilders. Barton (for those unfamiliar) is a self-trained historian — pseudo-historian in her professional opnion —who has spent decades claiming the separation of church and state is a myth:
It’s really hard to overstate the influence that Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces. For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation. What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray. It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.
Johnson’s viewpoint is not so much white supremacy as Christian supremacy. Every knee shall bow, meaning yours. As Du Mez sees the movement today, “conservative evangelicals are much more comfortable in just making that plain and no longer feeling a need to pay lip service to democracy or voting rights or those sorts of things.”
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.
It’s Christian nationalists’ country. Behave yourselves and they may let you live in it under their minority rule.
I’ll interject here that in the same way Republicans use racist dogwhistles — coded language — to send sub rosa messages intended for a select audience and not the press and general public, Christianists do the same. If a particular phrase strikes your ear as odd or off-key, it’s likely sending a message not meant for you. If you’re not reading the line through Christianist glasses, you’re not getting the real meaning.
“So really, Christian supremacy and a particular type of conservative Christianity is at the heart of Johnson’s understanding of the Constitution and an understanding of our government,” says Du Mez. (Below, emphasis mine.)
You’ll see this in some of his speeches. In his speech on Wednesday, he incorporated a G.K. Chesterton quote about the U.S. being based on a creed. And he said the American creed is “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”
But he goes much deeper than that, and really roots that in what he would call a biblical worldview: The core principles of our nation reflect these biblical truths and biblical principles. He has gone on record saying things like, for him, this biblical worldview means that all authority comes from God and that there are distinct realms of God-ordained authority, and that is the family, the church and the government.
Now, all this authority, of course, is under this broader understanding of God-given authority. So it’s not the right of any parents to decide what’s best for their kids; it’s the right of parents to decide what’s best for their kids in alignment with his understanding of biblical law. Same thing with the church’s role: It is to spread Christianity but also to care for the poor. That’s not the government’s job.
And then the government’s job is to support this understanding of authority and to align the country with God’s laws.
So, a kind of civic trinity: family, church, and government. Separation of church and state being a myth (Barton), church and state are at once separate and one. God has not charged His government with caring for the poor, but His church. That the church sucks at meeting the need is unimportant.
Du Mez adds:
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. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want.
It’s an evangelical trope that the country was founded as a Christian nation of, by and for Christians. Never mind the thin historical evidence for that notion. It is an idée fixe that evidence will not penetrate any more than science can uproot the creationist notion that the Earth is a mere 6,000 years old.
At a county Board of Elections meeting here on Tuesday, a Republican member recommended referencing state law sections in documents outlining staff procedures as the N.C. State Board does religiously. Seemed like a good idea.
I went looking for evangelical efforts to do the same with the Declaration and Constitution. As you might expect, attempts I found to shoehorn Bible verses into both stretch credulity and the language in all three documents. I won’t trouble you with them here.