Before entering elected office, Mike Johnson, the new Republican speaker of the US House, praised “18th-century values” and told an audience that Americans should live by them when it came to morality and religion.
In video footage of a forum hosted in 2013 by Louisiana Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, Johnson, a devout Baptist and then an attorney for rightwing groups and causes, is asked about the “condition of conscience” in Europe and Canada regarding abortion policy.
Saying he has just given “a seminar … to a bunch of high school kids in Shreveport”, Johnson quotes George Washington and John Adams, saying the first two presidents and other founders “told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today”.
Johnson, 51, became speaker on Wednesday, as Republicans’ fourth candidate for the job since Kevin McCarthy was ejected by the far right of the party.
Having maintained a low profile since entering Congress in 2016 (a year after he became a state representative in Louisiana), his arrival on the national stage has led to widespread examination of his political record and views.
As well as his work in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his work against abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights has been widely noted.
In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Maine on Wednesday night, in which 18 people were killed and 13 wounded, a clip circulated of Johnson blaming mass shootings on 20th-century American reforms. Listing “no fault divorce laws”, “the sexual revolution”, “radical feminism” and “government-sanctioned killing of the unborn”, he said had liberals had created “a completely amoral society” in which young Americans were “taught there is no right and wrong”.
He covered similar ground in his 2013 comments to Louisiana Right to Life, claiming religious motivations for those who declared independence in 1776 and wrote the constitution thereafter – regardless of their care to erect, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, the third president, “a wall of separation between church and state”.
Johnson said: “Washington said in his famous farewell address: ‘Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.’ And Adams said: ‘Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’”
He added: “The founders warned us. They said if you … do not maintain religion and morality, the right of conscience being the most fundamental bedrock principle of them all, then the republic is not going to stand. This will not work.”
Johnson’s own predictions of American decline have been widely noted. In 2004, he called same-sex marriage a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic”.
In his 2013 remarks, Johnson said the US was “still an experiment on the world stage. We’re only 237 years old, youngest form of government known to man. It’s a great model. The founders were divinely inspired … They set it up in accordance with biblical principles.
“… But the point is that the religion and morality had to be maintained and now we’re being led from the White House on down to reject and marginalise religious values … to just erase all of our moral codes and look down upon those who would try to stand up and say, ‘No, we have to maintain those.’”
Barack Obama was then president. To Johnson, America under Obama had become a “post-modern culture … defined by the absence of truth”.
“That makes the claims of the Bible inherently intolerant,” he said. “You know, truth has been replaced as the greatest virtue in society by tolerance. Well, we’re the inherently intolerant ones who say, ‘Wait a minute, life is sacred because we’re endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.’ We have to stand up for those.”
Assuming the voice of an opponent, he said: ‘Oh, you bigot. Can’t you be a little more open-minded? Come on, that’s so like 18th-century, you know?’
“Well, [the founders] told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today.”
