After the nation’s news media looked at newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson’s past statements and stances and some people found them to be extremely unsettling, Johnson is retreating to Fox News for yet another round of image polishing. The first time was with host Sean Hannity. This time, it’s a gauze-filtered sit-down interview on “Outnumbered.”
The focus of the interview appears to be the horror of Johnson being asked to account for a career of hateful and theocracy-promoting statements, padded with Johnson claiming that he didn’t actually mean those things. And foremost, says the politician whose first act as House speaker was to declare that God Himself had put him in the role, he is “not trying to establish Christianity as the national religion or something. That’s not what this is about at all.”
Via Acyn on the hell site (X) that I will never, ever stop calling Twitter:
There’s a lot to unpack even in that brief clip, but the notably unaccomplished backbencher counting himself as one of Washington’s “effective political leaders” is a particular eyebrow-raiser. The meat of it is Johnson’s declaration that he has no intention of pushing his uniquely fascist version of Christianity into government, and his assertion that it is “impossible” for someone who “truly” believes in the Bible to be a “hateful person.”
Johnson may be the only person in America—or, for that matter, the world—to have never met a hateful Christian. If he would like to immediately have his bubble burst, he might try this video of a prominent conservative Christian “influencer” calling for the execution of Catholic Charities workers who help undocumented immigrants.
It’ll probably take Johnson a while to chew on that one, so we’ll all just sit over here while he does that. Take your time, buddy. If you don’t know who the guy is, you might ask Donald Trump Jr., Michael Flynn, Paul Gosar, Pete Sessions, or Roger Stone to introduce you. He’s very popular among your fellow election deniers. There are also quite a few historical Christians who can plausibly be called “hateful”; for extra credit, you might see if you can name a few!
As for Johnson’s assertion that he is not, in fact, trying to “establish Christianity as the national religion”—funny story here. It turns out Johnson has a long history of insisting on a “biblically sanctioned government,” by that or other names, according to investigative journalist David Corn. On Tuesday, Corn broke yet another story about Johnson appearing on video to tell an audience that they had “better” start applying a litmus test to ensure they’re electing politicians who know of “God’s design for society.”
You better sit down any candidate who says they’re going to run for legislature and say, “I want to know what your worldview is. I want to know what, to know what you think about the Christian heritage of this country. I want to know what you think about God’s design for society. Have you even thought about that?” If they hadn’t thought about it, you need to move on and find somebody who has…We have too many people in government who don’t know any of this stuff. They haven’t even thought about it.
Again, this comes in the context of those videotaped Johnson-and-wife seminars premised on fundamentalist biblical literalism being the only “valid” worldview, in the words of Johnson’s wife, Kelly.
Technically, Johnson is threading a needle here; he may indeed not be “trying to establish Christianity as the national religion,” but he’s spent his adult life incessantly attempting to rewrite American laws to ensconce the views of one particular far-right version of Christianity as legally protected while criminalizing the views of other Americans.
Does that count as America enforcing a “national religion”? Kinda seems like it. But Johnson’s been on the big stage for a very short time; it’s to be expected that he’ll struggle a bit as he tries to explain away a lifetime of far-right extremism.
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