'Yearns for theocracy': Mike Johnson once suggested 'religious litmus test' for politicians

31 October 2023

More details are emerging about new House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-Louisiana) long-held fundamentalist Christian beliefs and how they could impact his political views.

In a new report, Mother Jones DC bureau chief David Corn wrote about how Johnson and his wife, Kelly, once led seminars promoting the false idea that the US is a "Christian nation." The seminars, which ranged from two-hour lectures to retreats of two days or more, encouraged attendees to evaluate the worthiness of a candidate for public office by their willingness to blend church and state. In one 2019 video, Kelly Johnson reportedly told seminar participants that "biblical Christianity," or a literal interpretation of the Bible — including the belief that the Earth is just 6,000 years old — was "the only valid worldview."

"You better sit down any candidate who says they’re going to run for legislature and say, 'I want to know what your worldview is. I want to know what, to know what you think about the Christian heritage of this country. I want to know what you think about God’s design for society. Have you even thought about that?' If they hadn’t thought about it, you need to move on and find somebody who has," Mike Johnson reportedly said in 2019. "We have too many people in government who don’t know any of this stuff. They haven’t even thought about it."

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Aside from the proposed Christianity-based litmus test, Johnson also reportedly compared environmentalists to the devil when leading a seminar.

"When you take God out of the equation, and you remove absolute truths...you got to make all this stuff up," Johnson allegedly said. "So what they’ve done is, as the devil always does, they take the truth and they turn it upside down. So the radical environmentalists—they actually believe that the environment is God."

In commenting on the video, Corn noted that while Mike Johnson encouraged anyone wanting to know more about his views to "go pick up a Bible," his suggestion to seminar participants to subject public officials to a religious litmus test was a signal that Johnson was in favor of "theocracy."

"Johnson, of course, is free to follow his values, back politicians who are fundamentalist Christians, and press others to do the same, believing that only people who follow his take on Christianity are worthy of holding elected office," Corn wrote. "But doing so demonstrates a narrow and rigid view of life and suggests that he yearns for a theocracy—a government run only by Christian fundamentalists who base all their decisions on what they consider to be the 'absolute truth' of the Bible."

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