Rep. Mike Johnson Isn’t Scary

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/15

The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, in the United States isn’t scary. He’s genial. That’s the selling point. It is how to sell Dominionism to the public in a palatable trough.

The previous Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, was taken out of office on October 3, 2023. Johnson is a new face. In an increasingly secular America, where church and state continue to separate more, men like Johnson represent the advertising wing of Christian nationalists with a pleasant, well-spoken exterior.

That is how to sell terrible ideas. Johnson used to work as an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom. Johnson is known for the extreme conservative Christian views.

According to RationalWiki, these include “Christian nationalism, a nationwide ban on abortion, gay marriage, and covenant marriage laws. He frequently, if not always, conforms his political views with Christianity; likewise, he frequently insinuates that America is in decline due to the country turning its back on the ’18th-century’ religious and moral “values” that the country was (allegedly obviously) founded upon. To give you an idea of how religiously deludedhe is, Johnson believes mass shootings are caused by abortions, secularization, and even the teaching of evolution, and prayer is the solution to the issue.”

These put the new Speaker of the House on a non-secular footing. Johnson, by definition, is a theocrat and against reproductive rights for women, which should be in the interest of men and women and the next generations of children who have a better chance of developing under planned circumstances rather than ‘divine’ or often unplanned accidents. Where I grew up, I’ll tell you something I’ve never let anyone know.

I went to an Evangelical Christian dinner one time, which was from Trinity Western University. In the conversations at this dinner, I never expressed personal atheism relative to the Christian convictions of compatriots present. However, one older woman proclaimed, “If it is not God’s Law, then it’s not real law. It’s illegitimate.” That’s a common private opinion. It’s unsurprising as much as the election of former President Trump was unshocking. 

You never hear things this prominently except when in the presence of insane individuals, like many in my hometown. A huge number of creationists or denialists of evolution. You get this language from Johnson’s positions above. They play themselves in the polity as if respecting the secular. In private, they don’t give a hoot.

He has made remarks about radical secularists. This reflects projections; I believe he and his collaborators are radical theocrats. Typically, this means non-theist individuals looking for an assurance of equality under the law for all rather than a religious privilege over non-religious individuals or a particular religion’s legal privileges over other religions and those without religious affiliation.

Other religious denominations in the United States, particularly mainline Protestant and liberal Catholics, can be powerful allies for secularists here. Johnson et al. make the case clear. They will fight for their rights to special privileges through misrepresenting a) us, b) the law, and then c) stirring fear in his base in casual language.

It has long been known, before and after the legalization of or the actualization of reproductive rights through reproductive services for women, that when women lack the right in reality, they will get abortions. When legal, they will get abortions. These actions punish women’s safe access.

Because legalization reduces the total number of abortions over time, the ones that are done by medical professionals are more likely to be safe for women who need them. So, why ban them? Their God, according to their selective literalist denominations, tells them to stop it. Which is to say, in real terms and with predictable consequences, they don’t like free women. Because women are harmed, and their lives are impaired forever. And I will not simply stand by and not state the obvious ethics here.

Naturally, this public acceptance and private denial of secular international rights for all and desire for special public legal privileges becomes a long-term vision. It’s not only that they won’t do it; they can’t not. It’s divine command via their interpretive lens.

As with most of these people, this will extend to the young who will be targeted through the educational system. We can see this with the creationist and Intelligent Design movements looking to impose their views on others in the past and the charter school movements.

As it happens, Johnson is a Young Earth creationist, which is to say willfully ignorant about the biological sciences and the origin of both species and human beings within this proverbial tree of life. He holds to Biblical literalism – amongst the most ignorant of positions possible. He has complained of the persecution of Christians in American society.

This can happen, of course. Individual people of other Christian sects, other religions, and non-theists can mistreat theists of a Christian scriptural standard. Of course, common sense would attest to this. People are individuals, first and foremost.

However, there is a pervasive sense of jocularity within the secular communities because of the vast dominance, though rapidly declining, of the Christian faith in many Western countries, with the skeletons of religious privilege ubiquitous in all institutions of those societies.

Only being removed in the more recent past, even only a few years ago by some. It’s humorous in the irony of millennia-long persecutors crying persecution. I don’t believe in individually abusing Christians. I don’t.

Because I believe when they have done the same, to the point of the most creative forms of torture imaginable for imaginary crimes, I do not believe in stooping to their historic cruelty or sense of victimhood and entitlement now. And it’s not persecution to point out the irony of the injustices continuing in the name of Christ.

The Satanists have done the most creative and hilarious work in getting this equality going forward. At the same time, they are a limited group, as there is a fear of joining them and a non-coercive aspect in becoming a part of the non-theist Satanists. They’re a secular activist and rights advocacy group using Satan as an image of a hero, not an ideal. A personification of freedom from theocratic and authoritarian overreach. That’s, in fact, fair and admirable.

John Oliver, in LastWeekTonight, praised the efforts of The Satanic Temple over the work of providing reproductive rights services in the wake of the banning of Roe v Wade. Abortion rights, as stipulated by Human Rights Watch, are, first and foremost, a human right. It would be nice if the efforts for secularization of society, reproductive rights actualization, religious freedom, and scientific education for the young weren’t interrelated.

However, due to the consistent efforts and vocalization of goals (or those leaked, e.g., The Wedge Strategy) to undermine several sectors of society, these objects of public discourse become one-of-a-piece. They have to be tackled simultaneously and not simply as they arise. And there’s a paranoia in Johnson and cohort of Christian persecution, of a homosexual agenda, and so on.

He advocates for traditional gender roles. That’s fair for many people worldwide; that works for them. For others, more fluid social norms for men and women work better. I’m all about giving people more freedom to express their natural selves and actualize rather than not. For some men, staying at home is their calling, while working as the primary breadwinner is it; for others, a more egalitarian setup is ideal, and vice versa.

Yet, following the denialism of the biological sciences, we come to the same on anthropogenic climate change. These aren’t partisan issues. These are matters of the evidence and the expert consensus on the preponderance of the evidence. I trust Johnson on his frame and angle on the Bible and the interpretation inculcating his views in his mentation.

Similarly, I trust most individuals who spent many years and jumped the hurdles to become expertly proficient in the sciences. These are the areas in which religious ideology imperils proper comprehension of the world, which become politically and socially consequential when officials in office adhere to them and feel as if they are on the persecution end of things.

As far as I can tell, most secular people use freedom of expression and freedom of speech for humour in Canada and America, respectively, and then argue for equality. This loss of privilege feels like an attack on some Christians. In other cases, individuals like Johnson simply want to rewrite countries like America into a theocratic one. He doesn’t believe Americans live in a democracy.

Johnson has stated, “What’shappened, Alex, over the last 60 or 70 years, is that our generation has been convinced that there is a separation of church and state. Most people think that that’s part of the Constitution, but it’s not.“

I return to the title of this meandering article. Johnson is not a scary figure. I am brought back to Trinity Western University and Fort Langley. There has been a study on this hometown for me. These individuals argue for a theocratic governance formulation, as in removing a separation of church and state.

They become more conservative in a reactionary sense with the increasing secularity and liberalization of society, and speaking as a non-liberal – something else entirely. Johnson merely amounts to the furtherance of this reactionary trend of conservatism interpreted through a dominionist Christian lens.

I do not use dominionist as an epithet but as a descriptor. Similar to Christian nationalists. Many are accepting the title with glee. “I’m a nationalist. I’m a Christian. Therefore…” That sort of stuff. They’re not scary because they tell us precisely what they stand for and want in society. Many, like Pastor Mark Driscoll, would embrace the terms Masculine, affirmative, and “Dominion for Dudes.”

Yet, when individuals like Johnson affirm, they must reject others. He is not in support of same-sex marriage and believes homosexuality is a sin and destructive. He’s free to that opinion since I am free to the opinion of the opinion as doltish and predictable. Same-sex marriage denial becomes a legal issue of equality.

Consider: If you deny same-sex marriage rights for homosexuals, then the reverse argument would be valid but unpalatable for this strand of Christianity. In that, with an individual who denies marriage as an institution for opposite-sex Christians based on convictions, would this be fair? So, same-sex marriage is legal, and Christian opposite-sex marriage is illegal.

Would Johnson accept this? Of course not, yet; if this argument formulation is unsound, then the reverse is unsound. It is an opinion of his, which he can hold. Yet, the concern enters when this individual and others in institutions are devoted to the reversal of this equal right for homosexuals to marry. This is more than a concern. It’s an equality issue. It’s a public opinion expressed by a public figure, implying an illegal reality and denial of equality.

Johnson views equality for same-sex couples as a slippery slope, leading to the eventual equality for polygamists, polyamorists, and even pedophiles. “I sense great fear in you, Skywalker.” Why? Really, why the argument? It’s a sincere belief in the degradation of society when equality is given to others in an institution, which has been declining in importance. Who cares? How does two people’s love who will never affect Johnson, because they’re gay men, for example, even impact his life?

It’s about orienting ‘divine’ control over others’ lives. It’s the loss of control. It’s a world going its natural way without the intervention of religious extremists preventing real humane and human sentiments from emerging as they will in their positive manifestations, e.g., love.

Yet, this comes from viewing homosexuality as a lifestyle, hence the partnering with Exodus International or the organization for conversion therapy. It’s a discredited therapy and amounts to torturing homosexuals. The fundamental premise is the misunderstanding of homosexuality as a lifestyle. Wherein, if a lifestyle, then one chooses to enter into this ‘sinful’ lifestyle and activity against ‘God’s Will.’ What’s the moral of the story?

You need an empirical basis first to make valid and sound ethical decisions. Your matrix must involve those, or those become invalid from the start. Then we get people suffering by giving real homosexuals fake therapeutic interventions to not cure because it’s a non-problem. Even Lee Kuan Yew admitted they were born that way, leaving them alone.

What does all of this say about Johnson? He’s a clean and well-spoken figure for dominionist theology and Christian formulations of national identity. A man devoted to a selective literalist interpretation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s dangerous, if implemented, for everyone except a small cohort of one denomination of Christianity.

It’s not scary, though, because it’s predictable and something one can combat proficiently. The reactionary elements represent a fundamentalist faith on the decline, thus on the defensive. It’s a dying gasp and a desperate series of attempts. Let’s get to work!

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

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