Newly minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been generously described as a “Christian Nationalist in a nice suit." The Louisiana Republican wants to nullify the Constitution in order to make America into a White Christian theocracy. A White Christian Nationalist flag hangs outside of Johnson's office in D.C. as (further) proof of his loyalty to that cause.
As part of that project, Johnson wants to take away women's civil and human rights, end the right to privacy, and criminalize gay and lesbian people. Johnson’s “Christian values” also include giving even more money to the very richest Americans and corporations and destroying the country’s already threadbare social safety net. But, as seen with last week's elections in Ohio and other parts of the country, because the Christian right’s politics are so extremely unpopular with the majority of Americans, there is a desperate effort by the right-wing propaganda machine to throw Johnson’s previous statements and policy positions down the memory hole.
This attempt to present Johnson as a relatively “normal” and “mainstream” “social conservative” as opposed to an outright fascist and member of the American Taliban is seen in his recent “interview” with Fox News where he played the misunderstood victim who is being unfairly persecuted by the mean liberals and secularists because he is a "good Christian":
"I just wish they would get to know me….I’m not trying to establish Christianity as the national religion or something. That’s not what this is about at all."
In an attempt to better understand Johnson's rise, the dangers that he and the Christofascists represent to American democracy and what may come next, I recently spoke with Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism." This is our second conversation about the right’s plans to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
We spoke only a few weeks ago, and now Mike Johnson, a white Christian nationalist, is speaker of the House. How are you navigating these suddenly shifting tides?
For those of us who have been paying attention, the election of a hardline Christian nationalist as speaker is not a surprise. But more importantly, I’m encouraged by the reaction, at least from much of the press. The days when Johnson’s Christian nationalism could be waved aside as simply “social conservatism,” or just a quirky part of America’s rich tapestry of belief — those days are gone, and there has been some excellent reporting out there that has exposed Johnson’s deep ties to the authoritarian movement in our midst. Dozens of writers have brought his extremist positions, and his connections to extremist organizations, to light and connected the dots. Whether that information reaches the people who need to hear it the most is uncertain, but we take what we can get.
Who is Mike Johnson? What do we know about him?
Johnson is a creature of the modern Christian nationalist movement. He built his career through organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has for decades served as the legal juggernaut of the Christian Right, and he has adopted the theocratic positions representative of the movement. His anti-abortion extremism, his election denialism, his climate denialism, his bogus commitment to “religious liberty” – these aren’t just a laundry list of bad ideas. They are part of the package of the Christian nationalist movement and its anti-democratic aims. I’d like to stress that his economic positions – his desire to defund the Internal Revenue Service, which is a gift to rich tax cheats, his efforts to slash government services to the impoverished — reflect the movement’s understanding of “biblical” economics – which works to enhance the plutocratic wealth of its super-rich funders.
Let’s review some other key facts:
*Johnson was instrumental in advancing Donald Trump’s attempted coup against the United States government.
*Johnson wasn’t just the legal muscle for the young-earth creationist outfit, Answers in Genesis. He blogged on the organization’s website and spoke at a conference it hosted in 2022.
*He has advocated the criminalization of gay sex.
*He says he doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.
*He has bashed democracy in his speeches.
*He has spoken at events and conferences organized by Seven Mountains dominionists, he has praised dominionist religious leaders, and referred to his work in Congress as part of a “spiritual battle.”
*He does not believe in human-caused climate change.
*He has blamed school shootings on birth control and abortion.
*He has proposed cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid so severe that they would leave millions of Americans in misery.
Some reporters express surprise that one politician could hold so many cruel and fanatical positions. But I see a highly representative, plain-vanilla apparatchik of the Christian nationalist movement. This movement is the actual base of MAGA, and it is now the dominant faction in the Republican Party. It is grounded in a much more fundamental lie than Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. Their big lie is that the United States was founded as a government of, by, and for reactionary Christians.
How is Mike Johnson a product of right-wing institutions and movement building?
Mike Johnson spent a decade as a lawyer and spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is most famous for engineering the Supreme Court’s decisions to overturn Roe v Wade and to grant conservative Christians a license to discriminate against people of whom they disapprove. The ADF runs a budget of $102 million dollars per year and sits at the center of a network of donors and politicians committed to obliterating any wall separating church and state. It also works to divert taxpayer money to conservative and reactionary religious organizations.
An association with the ADF makes the careers of people like Johnson. Early in his career, Johnson attempted to criminalize gay sex in Louisiana and his political career follows from there. In 2023 he won a “True Blue” award from the Family Research Council, one of the leading policy groups of the movement, for his unwavering devotion to its aims.
Some people tie Johnson’s climate denialism to the fact that he comes from a fossil fuel-dependent district in Louisiana, but there’s more to it than that. Christian nationalists tend to see everything through the lens of a supposedly biblical mandate for dominion over the earth and all its people. So climate denialism is extremely congenial to this movement.
Similarly, election denialism isn’t just something Johnson did just because it was politically expedient for him to suck up to Trump. He didn’t just do it because it was good for his career. Christian Nationalists were the backbone of Trump’s attempted coup, and that’s because this movement does not believe in democracy.
What is Mike Johnson an example of in terms of a political type?
If you want to know what Johnson stands for, you need to remember that he delivered a speech at a 2013 anti-abortion gathering in which he praised “18th-century values.” I don’t want to get too hung up on a “type” because the interesting point for us to remember is that he is unrepresentative of anywhere near a majority of Americans. Some of his views do have support, but every single one is opposed by majorities. Put them together and you have an overwhelming majority against him. So, the question is: how did Mike Johnson end up with so much power? What is it about the structure of our politics that gives us these incredibly unrepresentative leaders?
There are a number of factors, but several are really significant. One is that the internal dynamics of the Republican Party have tilted very much in favor of the extremists. Gerrymandering and division between red states and blue states has produced a world in which Republicans must compete mainly against other Republicans, and where – thanks to the religious right’s voter turnout machine — the candidate furthest to the right has the best chance of winning.
A second dynamic is the fact that Christian nationalists have captured a disproportionate share of safe Republican House seats. In an excellent recent analysis, Michael Podhorzer, who is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, shows us how right-wing evangelicals have captured this disproportionate share — mainly because they succeed in winning wherever there is a safe red district with an evangelical majority.
There are other factors too, including the fact that propaganda and disinformation bubbles leave many people in the dark about who and what they are really supporting with their vote.
Will the Christian Right and larger neofascist movement ever moderate or change?
In recent years, some representatives of the movement have made noises about moving toward an economic populism. Figures including Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, and some others argue for what can look like left-wing redistribution programs. I think the chances of grafting that kind of economic populism onto this authoritarian movement are extremely low, given the fact that many of the funders of the movement are determined to obtain policies that will help them increase their vast fortunes, including low taxes for the rich and the privatization of public resources. Another factor that makes it unlikely is the long and successful history of indoctrinating the base in the allegedly deep connection between free market fundamentalism and biblical fundamentalism.
So much of the mainstream political writing and commentary on the Age of Trump and the escalating democracy crisis is very much “downstream." It is focused on the surface and output instead of what is driving these changes at a much deeper level. This leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the democracy crisis was decades in the making and is not something sudden or a surprise.
You’re right, we need to keep pursuing the long perspective. In my reporting on Christian nationalism, I try to bring in the fact that forms of this phenomenon have existed in America from the beginning of the colonial period. I also try to draw attention, when I can, to the extraordinary increase in economic inequality over the past 50 years and its role in driving some of these events.
There are also plenty of inspiring examples of the American past to draw upon, from emancipation to the success of the progressives in the early 20th century and the efforts of FDR and Truman to build at least a somewhat fairer economic system. And of course, we have to understand much of what we’re seeing in American politics today in terms of backlashes to the Civil Rights and women’s rights movements. So yes, it is difficult in a 24-hour news cycle to tell complex stories, but there are so many great writers out there doing this work. We must keep supporting them and amplifying their voices.
What did you "see" in the recent "struggle" over who would be the next Republican Speaker of the House?
In one respect, there is nothing new. The House Republicans over the past 10 years have been viciously divided between the so-called “chaos caucus,” a small hard-line caucus, and a larger but ineffective establishment group. Over the past decade, the establishment mainstream has nominally held the speakership even as the chaos caucus had ultimate control. The only difference now is that the speaker is no longer a nominal establishment figure but rather is a hardliner.
Remember that establishment figures such as John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor left because they couldn’t take the crazies. It was the chaos caucus that took down Kevin McCarthy, who was notionally an establishment figure even though he did nothing substantive to criticize Trump’s coup attempt or rein in the extremists. The game was to pretend there was someone reasonable in that seat. But since the real driver was sitting in the passenger seat and grabbing the wheel, they crashed the car.
Does Johnson have a better chance of uniting Republicans around a hardline agenda of abolishing Social Security and Medicare, defunding the IRS, abolishing gay marriage, banning some forms of birth control and a total ban on abortion, funding religious organizations with taxpayer money, and basing the law on a certain reactionary, fundamentalist interpretation of religious principles? It’s unclear. The “establishment” was basically saving the chaos candidates from their own extremism. It let them shriek and howl while holding up their drastically unpopular policy positions. The calculus doesn’t really change just because Johnson has been put in the chair. So, he will either try to find ways to placate the maniacs while preventing them from blowing up the Republican Party along with our national economy or go all in on theocratic authoritarianism. The thing to remember is that those ideas are so out of step with what most Americans want — and even what most Republicans really want.
Mike Johnson’s Christian Nationalist beliefs do not exist in a vacuum. There is an entire system of propaganda, indoctrination, and knowledge production that he is a product of.
Outside observers don’t appreciate the extent to which many Christian nationalists live in an insulated world where up is down – not just in current events but in the interpretation of American history. The hermetic quality of their history is perhaps best represented in Mike Johnson’s admiration for David Barton, the political propagandist who poses as a “historian” to spread the distortions of Christian nationalist history. For over three decades, Barton has peddled a falsification of the American founding, according to which America’s founders were Bible-thumping Christians intent on building a nation that would pound the Bible truth into every schoolchild across the nation. His revisionist claims have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, but that does not diminish his popularity among Christian nationalists, and it has not lessened Johnson’s admiration. David Barton has had a “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do,” he said. Barton, in turn, has celebrated Johnson’s elevation as a turning point in the Christian Right.
Parroting Barton’s talking points, Johnson has disparaged the constitutional principle of church-state separation by misreading Thomas Jefferson. “Jefferson clearly did not mean that metaphorical ‘wall’ was to keep religion from influencing issues of civil government,” Johnson wrote in a Facebook post. “To the contrary, it was meant to keep the federal government from impeding the religious practice of citizens. The Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.” Johnson has been praised by many other movement leaders, including Michael P. Farris, the CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom and the founder of Home School Legal Defense Association; Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council; and Bob McEwen, Executive Director of the Council for National Policy.
Once you understand where he is coming from and who he runs with, it’s easy to understand how Johnson’s fanatical policy positions fall into place. Johnson’s decision to join in Trump’s conspiracy against the United States government wasn’t just opportunism; it follows directly from Christian nationalist doctrine. Christian nationalists believe that the function of government is to impose a specific set of what they call “biblical” values on everybody; they’ll take democracy if it delivers on the promise, but they’ll just as happily dispense with democracy if it votes for the wrong values or the wrong people. That’s why Johnson, like many movement leaders, insists that we live in a “republic,” not a democracy – because he believes in a system ruled by the righteous few, not of, by, and for the people.
The cruelty that runs through Johnson’s politics is also quintessential Christian nationalist. It’s worth reiterating here: Johnson doesn’t just want to express his disapproval for gay people; he wants to punish them. He doesn’t just want to balance the budget; in fact, his plan to defund the IRS would substantially increase the deficit. The point of drastic cuts to the social safety net is to make life harder for the less privileged. He wants everyone in America who does not conform to his vision of a “biblically sanctioned” society to feel like they don’t belong.
Many people argue that this cold and punitive spirit has little to do with the Christian gospels, and they are probably right about that. That’s because Christian nationalism is a political ideology, not a theology — specifically an authoritarian ideology. And like all authoritarianism, its guiding impulse is to coerce and dominate. What it offers to its many rank-and-file supporters is not better economic prospects – quite the contrary – but the sense of superiority and satisfaction that comes from exercising cruelty on the less fortunate.
On that point, how do you intervene against those who are outside of the Christian Right's political project and therefore continue to underestimate the serious nature of its challenge to American democracy?
We need to continue to bring out the facts, and not just the well-known facts. People may have the sense that Trump had cheerleaders on the New Right, for example, but if we can help them to understand the New Right’s connections with the fascist past, they have a greater understanding of the threat that movement represents.
Also, we also shouldn’t shame people for being late to the realization of the threats we face. It’s a natural human thing to want to tell yourself that everything is fine. We should just be grateful whenever the message gets through.
One of the great and recurring errors I saw in these discussions of Johnson and the power struggle in the House (and about Trump and the MAGA movement more generally) by the mainstream news media is the easy narrative of "disarray" and "chaos." I see an old pattern in history playing out where fascists and other illiberal forces continue to consolidate power over the more "traditional" and "mainstream" elements of the “conservative” party and movement.
You are right on.
Historically, the decisive move in the rise of fascism is the capitulation of the center-right. Traditional conservatives delude themselves into thinking that they can control the movement, and they tell themselves that the alternative on the Left is worse. But fascists are relentless, determined, and uncompromising, and in the end they eat the center-right.
This is the drama that has played out in the Republican House. The so-called “chaos caucus” was manipulating events behind the scenes. Now, with Mike Johnson, they are out in the open and in control. Most of the so-called “moderates” have already folded.
The movement has produced, in Mike Johnson, a true believer whose views would surely make him unelectable in any fair national election, and it has placed him second in line for the Presidency. With Johnson, it is fair to say, America’s homegrown iteration of authoritarianism has scored a major victory.
What comes next?
I think we need to stay focused on the next election. If we can win an election, and it is decisive enough, we can start to address structural reforms, such as the influence of big money on our judiciary and politics, gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics that disproportionately benefit right-wing voters, the influence of malevolent propaganda operations, and a host of other issues. If we don’t win elections, those challenges are much harder to meet. We also need to help people see the big picture and understand that elections are not just about front-runners. They are about judges, voting rights, economic issues, institutions, personal liberties, and the future of democracy itself.
