'Erode the 1st Amendment': Religious scholars expose Mike Johnson’s 'malignant' Christian nationalism

After Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was ousted as speaker, some Democrats worried that House Republicans would nominate someone even further to the right — which is exactly what happened when Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) was confirmed as speaker after Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-Ohio) nominated failed three House votes.

Johnson, unlike Jordan, isn't known for being loud, boisterous or flamboyant; he has even been described as "soft spoken." But Johnson's history is hardly that of a moderate, and critics — including veteran Democratic strategist James Carville — are sounding the alarm about his long history of pushing far-right Christian nationalism.

Johnson's alliances with extreme Christian nationalists are the focus of a report published by The Guardian on December 22.

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According to The Guardian's Peter Stone, "Links between the new Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and key Christian nationalist leaders have sparked fears the devout Louisiana congressman might seek to erode elements of the First Amendment, which protects key U.S. civil liberties, including freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. Long before the evangelical conservative Johnson became speaker, he had forged close ties with Christian nationalists like David Barton, whose writings claiming the country's founders intended to create a Christian nation have been widely debunked by religion scholars."

Barton, Stone notes, has been promoting the "flawed idea there should be no separation between church and state" in the United States — a view that is shared by Johnson but rejected by religious scholars.

Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and religious historian at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told The Guardian, "Johnson has bought into the malignant cancer about America being a Christian nation, which Barton has propagated. For Barton and Johnson to subvert the First Amendment is both dishonest and myopic — dishonest because the founders were abundantly clear that they intended church and state to be separate entities, myopic because the lack of a religious establishment, the separation of church and state, has been the best friend that religion ever had."

David A. Hollinger, who teaches religious history at the University of California, Berkeley, is equally critical of Johnson — telling the Guardian, "It is dangerous to the country that the speaker of the House is relying for his understanding of American history on a writer who has zero credibility in the history profession."

READ MORE: Christian nationalism is 'a political identity more than a religious one': expert

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.