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.
