Everybody in the South has known somebody like Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson: an amiable, polite, well-dressed religious crackpot who’s either completely out of his mind or pretends to be for career purposes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
If you’re an ambitious politician in someplace like Shreveport, Louisiana, there’s no penalty for professing belief in all manner of absurdities calculated to reassure God-intoxicated true believers in backwoods churches that you’re one of them. Everybody understands, especially the people who put up the money.
