Fogbow

bill_g wrote: ↑Sat Nov 04, 2023 8:50 am If God appointed Mike Johnson, then God must really love Nancy Pelosi. She has served longer than any Republican.

The sudden elevation of Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., to House speaker pushed his record's vetting to after his election. So it was only once he became second in line to the presidency that most people learned Johnson played a key role in the House’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is virulently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ Americans, and has promoted teaching the Bible as a history book in public schools.

Now Johnson and his allies are hitting back against his critics. Remarkably, their response to the exposure of Johnson’s turbocharged theo-politics is not to argue that media reports exaggerate or misapprehend his record as a lawyer or legislator, or his intentions as speaker. Instead, Johnson’s closest allies are amplifying his extreme views, and recasting them as mainstream “truths” that are beyond challenge.

This week Johnson gave an interview to the Daily Signal, the news site of the Heritage Foundation, an agenda-setting hub for the right, and particularly the religious right. Johnson was able to “open up,” as the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan put it, about how his Christian faith “informs his politics.” While he’s hardly been tight-lipped about that topic, this fresh clarification of his central political philosophy makes his rapid, uninterrogated ascension even more worrisome.

“It’s a central premise of the Bible that God invented civil government,” Johnson told Olohan, who added that, “like many Americans of faith, Johnson sees government as a ‘design of God’ and ‘a gift to mankind in a fallen society.’” If those jarring statements do not comport with your own understanding of the Bible, or of the constitutional separation of church and state, you are not alone.

The Washington Stand, the news site of the Family Research Council, whose president Tony Perkins is a longtime friend of the new speaker, similarly assailed Johnson’s critics. In an article entitled “Johnson Critics Mistake Christianity, American Principles for ‘Theocracy,’” the Stand senior writer Joshua Arnold turned to the director of FRC’s own Center for Biblical Worldview, David Closson. (The Center for Biblical Worldview, according to its website, says that “a person exhibits a biblical worldview when their beliefs and actions are aligned with the Bible, acknowledging its truth and applicability to every area of life.”)

Closson defended Johnson’s beliefs as “just basic Christian belief coming right out of the Bible.” That “basic Christian belief,” argued Closson, includes that “God is the one that ordains authority. God is the one that gives delegated authority to human beings to wield it on his behalf.” Closson went on to suggest that Johnson’s critics are biblical illiterates who lack any understanding of Christianity. He described them as “folks who don’t have any reference to what the Bible teaches, trying to scare millions of Americans, when so many of us would just be saying ‘Amen.’”

If anything has come into sharper focus over the past week or so, it’s that Johnson has spent his legal and political career immersed in an insular world where everyone around him believes there are certain “truths,” like regressive gender roles, or creationism, or that separation of church and state is a “myth.” Or, as Johnson stated this week without equivocation, “God invented civil government.”

While these views are commonplace on the Christian right, they are far from commonplace among Christians more broadly. “Most Christians wouldn’t say that this is a ‘central premise’ of the Bible, but Johnson’s focus on authority, as well as the way he distinguishes ‘civil government’ from other forms of government, tracks with the language of Christian reconstructionism,” Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida and author of “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction,” told me. As Ingersoll’s work has illuminated, reconstructionism, a movement developed in the 1970s, teaches that God ordained separate “spheres” of governmental authority — the family, the church and “civil government.” In the reconstructionist view, “civil government” should not do anything that interferes with (conservative Christian) families or churches or what they consider to be their inviolable right to impose their religious beliefs in the public square.

There is virtually no one in today’s religious right who would claim the label “Christian reconstructionist,” largely because they do not want to be tied to the positions of its founder R.J. Rushdoony, who cited supposed “biblical law” to support slavery and the death penalty for homosexuality. But the broad contours of Rushdoony’s framework, as Ingersoll has documented, has left an indelible mark on the modern religious right. The insistence that a “biblical worldview” should bear on every government decision shapes right-wing Christians’ positions on a range of issues. Their objections to abortion and marriage equality, for example, is based on their claim that civil government lacks the God-ordained authority to create laws that (they say) conflict with the Bible. They also consider public education to be an improper, unbiblical exercise of government authority. Because of that, they have undermined public schools, created their own Christian schools, and advocated for and shaped the Christian homeschooling movement.

These kinds of crude dismissals of Johnson’s critics serve two purposes: they reassure the GOP base that their “biblical worldview” is the only correct way to view both the Bible and the government, and that any critiques of it evince a lack of “understanding of just basic Christian tenets,” as Closson put it. Second, and more crucially, they aim to bully reporters and political opponents into retreating from examining Johnson’s record and drawing attention to the ways it threatens pluralism, democracy and the rights of others. By repeating the lie that Johnson’s beliefs are “basic” Christianity, and accusing anyone who fails to understand that of ignorance, the Christian right, and the Republican Party it controls, want scrutiny of Johnson to evaporate. We can only hope their efforts will backfire, as millions of Americans wake up to what it really means to have a top government official proudly tout his supposedly “biblical worldview.”

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 05, 2023 11:12 am Johnson saying he will pray to god for guidance every morning is worrisome for many reasons. Among them: He thinks he talks to god.

AndyinPA wrote: ↑Sun Nov 05, 2023 11:20 am Worse. He thinks God talks to him.

bob wrote: ↑Sun Nov 05, 2023 5:12 pm
SO MANY QUESTIONS!

Rolodex wrote: ↑Sun Nov 05, 2023 6:30 pm I read also that he advertised for this app (called Covenant something or other - it was the same app on Josh Duggar's computer that he set up a work-around for in order to not get caught), for which he got $20/click.

Speaker Mike Johnson Promoted an Anti-Porn Cell Phone Spy App

A video was recently unearthed of House Speaker Mike Johnson promoting an app called "Covenant Eyes" which tracks all activity on cell phones and other devices and sends a weekly report to a so-called accountability partner.

Ostensibly an app to allow parents to track online activities of their kids, this type of technology allows complete surveillance over an individual's electronic devices and online activity.

Johnson said he was made aware of the app at a Promise Keepers event, an organization for Evangelical Christian men.

Receipt Maven @receiptmaven wrote: COMPROMISE ALERT: Speaker Mike Johnson uses software Covenant Eyes (learned about at a Promise Keepers retreat) that scans all his electronic devices & gives a weekly report an "accountability partner" his 17 yr old son (so basically don't watch porn or your son/dad will know)

Newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been extremely vocal about his strict Christian beliefs, going so far as to say that reading the Bible will teach you everything there is to know about his world view. But an online Christian group called Faithful America isn't buying it, launching a petition to condemn him as a false prophet.

According to Newsweek, the group is in the midst of their second-annual "False Prophets Don't Speak for Me" campaign, which aims to show that false prophets "will never speak for Jesus" for the Christian community. Alongside Johnson — for whom they've collected over 12,000 signatures in favor of condemnation — they've listed other Christian-nationalist leaders such as Donald Trump, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, Bridget Ziegler.

"It's hard to overstate the threat that anti-democracy, anti-freedom Christian nationalism poses to both democracy and the church today, especially now that Rep. Mike Johnson has become the most Christian-nationalist speaker in U.S. history," Faithful America's petition states. "Christian nationalism is also a leader-driven movement. The threat is not from voters or people in the pews, but from the greedy liars and con men who spread disinformation, deploy the us-vs-them politics of fascism, and attach themselves to the fervor of faith in an attempt to build their own power and egos. These are the False Prophets that Jesus warned us about."