When House Republicans ended weeks of chaos by unanimously electing Speaker Mike Johnson, a virtual unknown, the political world didn’t know what to make of him. Some tried to normalize him, some portrayed him as extreme — a virulently anti-gay, anti-abortion extremist who wants to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and was a key figure in persuading 60% of GOP House members to sign on to an election-denying lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court. But almost no one had any idea just how extreme he actually is, because he comes out of a world where the normal metrics of politics simply don’t apply. His beliefs are shaped by dominionism, the theocratic idea that Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.
Sarah Posner, author of “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind” was a clear exception. “I’ve been thinking, since yesterday (the day after the Speaker vote), about how political reporters missed Johnson’s ascent,” she wrote on Bluesky, the day after his surprise election. “I heard one yesterday talking about how he’d had scant fundraising, thus making him an odd choice for speaker. But in 2017 I’d pegged him as a rising star. Why? Because political reporters are looking at far different factors and metrics. To them, he was a backbencher who didn’t know how to do the main work of Speaker: raise money,” she explained.
“But to me, he was an exemplar of what the base has been trying to elevate for decades, someone who is so steeped in the ‘Christian worldview’ he’s incapable of seeing outside of it. Thinks that everyone can — or can be made to — see as plain as day that the Bible should dictate law and policy,” Posner concluded.
As Madison Pauly reported for Mother Jones, “Johnson grew up in a rural area outside Shreveport, Louisiana, hometown of the evangelical leader James Dobson,” and entered Dobson’s world while in law school as a volunteer in a state-level Dobson-affiliated organization, the Louisiana Family Forum. “By 2003, Johnson was working for another group that Dobson helped create: ADF, which had been founded ten years earlier as the conservative movement’s answer to the ACLU.”
As has been widely reported, at this time Johnson wrote anti-gay op-eds describing homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle.” Arguing against same-sex marriage, he wrote, “If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group…. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”
But the influence of dominionism was also reflected in his claim that the loss of opposite sex marriage’s status as “the exclusive form of family relationship endorsed by government” will “place our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundations.” And in 2004 — five years before the Manhattan Declaration drew national attention by claiming the flag of “religious freedom” in the name of anti-gay bigotry, Johnson was there first, writing, “the extremists who seek to redefine marriage also want to deny you the right to object to immoral behavior. Our precious religious freedom hangs in the balance.”
ADF has been crucial in pushing anti-gay litigation, even winning a Supreme Court case — Masterpiece Cakeshop — that essentially began reversing the civil rights era precedent that personal prejudice could not over-ride anti-discrimination law. So that’s the kind of lawyer Johnson was. It’s the kind of legislator he is today. Normal political metrics simply aren’t calibrated to measure him.
“Johnson, like the party he now represents, is an extremist and a reactionary. By calling him a conservative – a ‘staunch’ one at that – the mainstream media coverage normalizes him. It even glamorizes him,” media critic Dan Froomkin wrote at Press Watch. But it goes even beyond that.
Unknown to most journalists, this manifested in Johnson’s first major legislative move — a proposal not just to fund military aid to Israel, but not Ukraine, but also to pay for it by defunding the IRS an equal amount, effectively slashing its ability to audit and collect taxes from high-income tax cheats. While cutting IRS funding is a popular position among Republicans, and has been going on for a long time, Johnson’s background in dominionism provides a deeper drive: its proponents see the income tax itself as either ‘unbiblical’ or at best ‘tyrannical’ in biblical terms, and thus illegitimate. Is that why he made this a top priority? Ignorance of who he is — and of dominionism itself — means this question isn’t even asked. It’s off the spectrum that’s used to understand politics — by mainstream media, but not by Johnson and those who’ve so swiftly elevated him.
Pence Out, Johnson In Signals Tectonic Change: Rising Power of Dominionism
It’s particularly telling that Johnson became speaker just days before Mike Pence dropped out of the GOP presidential primary. In 2016, Trump chose Pence as a signal to evangelical voters — Pence was their guy. But no more. Pence, after all, had chosen the Constitution over Trump. Johnson chose Trump.
Even the label “Christian nationalist,” which astute commentators use, doesn’t really go far enough. Johnson rise reflects the influence of dominionism, a powerful under-appreciated, anti-democratic religious worldview, which derives from two distinct Protestant sources, one conservative Presbyterian, whose founding figure, R.J. Rushdoony was inspired in part by 19th-century pro-slavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney, the other Pentecostal/charismatic, identified with figures like C. Peter Wagner and Lance Wallnau, though the two have long interacted and intertwined, now more than ever.
As noted above, Johnson’s first political involvement was with the Louisiana Family Forum, whose co-founder (along with Dobson) and close Johnson ally, Gene Mills, is an open proponent of the latter, identified variously as “the “New Apostolic Reformation” or Seven Mountains Dominionism (mountains of culture Christians are called on to rule), as reported by Barbara Forrest in a deep dive for the Bayou Brief in 2019.
An influential, but media-ignored book by Wallnau played a key role in selling Trump to the evangelical base — the beginning of the dynamic that’s made Pence dispensable and Johnson arguably almost inevitable — as Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, who’s studied and written about both intensely since the 1990s told Random Lengths.
“One of the great under-reported stories of American politics is the role of the neo-charismatic New Apostolic Reformation,” Clarkson said. “It goes back to at least author (and apostle) Lance Wallnau’s 2016 book, ‘God’s Chaos Candidate,’ which sought to provide a biblical justification for the candidacy of mobbed-up, sexual predator so far out of synch with conservative Christian values it would be hard to imagine anything but repulsed opposition.”
A spirit of disruption, if not chaos, has long been central to the NAR. Leaders claim to be apostles and prophets chosen by God, unaccountable to any congregation, unlike ministers and priests, whom they seek to replace as religious leaders. That spirit of disruption is an inheritance from antecedents going back to the 1940s, when the “Latter Rain” movement was denounced as a heresy by a leading Pentecostal church, the Assemblies of God.
“It turned out that Trump became the favorite of the Christian Right and they remain his base to this day. Wallnau’ book and public advocacy undoubtedly played a role,” Clarkson said, going on to elaborate:
“NAR leaders really delivered for him. Apostle Paula White Cain was his spiritual advisor and faith outreach leader. Leading Apostle Joseph Matter was a member of a small invitational committee that brought a thousand evangelical leaders to New York to meet with the then, 2016 GOP presidential nominee to allay their fears and gain their support. In 2020, Trump launched his Evangelicals for Trump campaign at the megachurch of Latinx Apostle Guilermo Maldonado — but there was no mention of the Apostle or the movement of which he is a part. Leading apostles, including Maldonado and the late African American apostle, Harry Jackson, actively campaigned for him.
Those famous photos of Trump praying with evangelical leaders in the Oval Office, always include apostles.
If the media is able to ignore all that, from a deliberately disruptive religious movement, it’s hardly surprising they’ve also ignored the more “sober-minded,” legalistic Calvinist “Christian Reconstructionists” who have a much more detailed theological/policy framework, which Johnson is even more troublingly tied to, not least because of his own background as religious right lawyer — promoting the “religious liberty” to discriminate freely, among other things. Julie Ingersoll, whose 1995 book, “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction” is an essential guide to its history, content and influence, explained how Johnson should be understood in relationship to the world he comes out of.
“Johnson began his term as Speaker by claiming that it was God who put him in authority and said in an interview that the bible is the source of his views on all issues. Most Americans hear these kinds of statements as traditional ways politicians have sought to solemnize our civic life; akin to ‘in God We Trust’ on our money. Some of us may not like it, but we generally see it as harmless.” Ingersoll told Random Lengths.
“But for Johnson, these kinds of statements are a window into the way he understands the relationship between religion and government,” she said. “We should be paying attention. He’s not just suggesting he looks to the wisdom of the biblical traditional to inform his positions, he’s echoing a version of Christianity that literally teaches that the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) ‘speaks to every area of life.’ He’s drawing on a way of reading those texts that prescribes everything from tax rates and the necessity of having insurance to whether regulating the Internet is permissible.”
As an example of this line of thinking, Gary North, the most prominent Christian Reconstructionist after Rushdoony (and his son-in-law), edited a book in 1983, “The Theology of Christian Resistance.” Resistance to what? To America’s existing modern secular democracy. “The history of Western civilization is the history of Christians’ struggles against unlawful State power and the anti-Christian theologies that have undergirded it,” North wrote in the introduction [italics in original]. It included a chapter, “What’s Wrong With Human Rights?” excerpted from a book of the same name, which attacked the whole concept of human rights. Introducing the chapter, North called rights ‘nonsense upon stilts.’ That’s how extreme this worldview is at its roots. Johnson may not subscribe to all of it, but he’s been heavily influenced by it, and recognizably speaks its language for those who know it. He is one of them, closely aligned with prominent promoters.
David Barton, Johnson’s Long-Time Ally:
Key Figure Pushing Dominionist Worldview
“Johnson’s ideological orientation is perhaps best represented in his admiration for David Barton, the political propagandist who poses as a ‘historian’ to spread the distortions of Christian nationalist history,” Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers, told Random Lengths. “Barton’s revisionist claims have been repeatedly debunked, but that 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.”
They’ve known each other for a quarter century, sharing a vision of America akin to ancient Israel.
“On his admiration for pseudo-historian David Barton, whose doctored ‘American history’ is wildly influential on the Christian right, House Speaker Mike Johnson is clearly a Christian Nationalist. But he’s also, as Barton seems to be, very close to Christian Reconstructionism” journalist Bruce Wilson wrote on Twitter. “Christian Reconstructionism allows for the enslavement of non-Christians when certain conditions are met (CR is very legalistic), “Back in 2011, I covered David Barton’s apparent endorsement of ‘biblical slavery’, so it’s fair to wonder if Johnson does.”
Barton has strong ties to both Christian Reconstuctionism, documented by Ingersoll, and to the NAR, documented by Wilson. Kyle Mantyla, at Rightwing Watch summed up what Barton’s dominionist-influenced version of Christian Nationalism means:
“Barton falsely insists that our Constitution and entire system of government are based on the Bible and thus asserts that everything from the minimum wage to the income tax to the teaching of evolution are unconstitutional because they supposedly violate Biblical teachings.”
“Mike has a background in biblical worldview that’s really clear,” Barton said in an recent interview. “There’s not that many people who understand American history from the founder’s perspective and what they intended. So he’s very good at that,” Barton said. “This is the God and we thank God for putting the God guy in this time in our history.”
Barton’s “history” is so deeply flawed that the evangelical publisher of his 2012 book “Jefferson Lies” recalled it saying “basic truths just were not there.” This followed an outpouring of criticism from evangelical historians and others. Leading the way was Chris Rodda, author of the 2006 book, “Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.”
“When I started debunking Barton’s lies two decades ago, and began to grasp the breadth, depth, and intricacies of his carefully constructed alternate version of American history, I found it unnerving and maddening that such a blatant liar had the ear of certain members of Congress, something he’s always boasted about,” Rodda told Random Lengths. “But what I found merely unnerving and maddening twenty years ago, I now find terrifying,” she said. “Barton’s brand of Christian nationalism has now gone virtually mainstream. Am I surprised that a Barton-admiring Christian nationalist could rise to the rank of Speaker of the House. No, not particularly. But I’m sure the very thought of it would come as a shock to the founding fathers who Barton has concocted so many lies about.”
“Donald Trump is, of course, a transactional politician. He made deals with the Christian Right — and he kept them — on abortion, the Supreme Court, and more. He made deals with them, but he was never one of them. Mike Johnson is one of them,” Clarkson said. “In fact, his religious identity is at the core of his politics. From what I have seen, Johnson’s politics are driven by his religious identity more than any senior politician in modern American history. This may very well be of historic consequence.”
Normalization Obscures Stark Reality
Perhaps the worst example of normalizing Johnson came from CNN’s Harry Enten (formerly with data-driven 538), “Mike Johnson is well within the mainstream of today’s GOP.” He points out that many of Johnson’s controversial positions — such as election denialism — have majority GOP support. But this neglects the reality of what Johnson has done. It’s one thing to passively believe this lie, either propagated or tolerated by almost the entire GOP political establishment. It’s quite another to play such a key active role in promoting it and muscling others into line. As Luke Broadwater and Steve Eder reported for the the New York Times in “Johnson Played Leading Role in Effort to Overturn 2020 Election.”
As the subheadline summarized, “Representative Mike Johnson recruited House Republicans to back a lawsuit to overturn the results, and he was a key architect of his party’s objections to certifying President Biden’s victory.” Over 60% of GOP House members signed on. And what was the lawsuit — which made it to the Supreme Court, but was quickly rejected?
The scandal-plagued attorney general of Texas filed suit to have the Supreme Court block the House of Representatives from accepting the results in four battleground states won by Mr. Biden. The court refused to even hear the case, with a brief unsigned order, stating the obvious: “The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing.” t No state has any business telling another state how to run its elections. “States rights,” remember? But that’s just one of three distinct power-grabs the suit attempted: seeking SCOTUS’s intervention in the first place sought to over-ride the power of the House of Representatives, and in turn force them to over-ride the will of the voters in four states.
It was, in short, a wildly lawless “lawsuit,” cobbled together with crazy legal reasoning. But that’s exactly the kind of reasoning that Johnson’s whole legal career revolved around, and as the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision proved, sometimes the Supreme Court says, “Sure, why not?”
So two things can be true: On the one hand, Johnson’s personal and professional history places him so far out of the mainstream that he enthusiastically pushes crazy legal theories, utterly ignoring the actual history and text of the Constitution (as well as the conservative shibboleth of “states rights”), while on the other hand, there’s always the possibility that the Supreme Court — and who knows else? — might agree.
In this sense, Enten may have had a point — the whole GOP is becoming more and more extreme. But even so, his normalization of Johnson fails on two levels: a flawed, myopic use of standard metrics, and a reliance on them to the exclusion of underlying realities they fail to capture. First, Enten uses the standard political scientists DW-Nominate measure of roll-call voting to argue that “37% of House Republicans are more conservative than the new speaker. That puts Johnson right in the middle third of today’s House Republican Conference.” But only barely. And that figure was 31% when he first entered Congress in 2017-2018.
Most importantly, Enten’s analysis understates how extreme Johnson is compared to the man he’s replacing: His four-term record shows him more conservative than 66.5% of his fellow GOP representatives, compared to 41.75% for McCarthy over the same period — an unbelievable 24.5% shift to the right, almost a quarter of the GOP political spectrum. That’s a huge shift without any historical precedent, staring Enten right in the face, but he completely missed it, because he’s dominated by a normalization narrative that blinded him to the most basic fact an expert like him should have seen.
I bring up Enten’s analysis because it boils down to cold hard numbers and clearly shows how wildly mistaken the normalization narrative is. He misreads the most significant thing DW-Nominate has to tell us, and DW-Nominate tells us nothing about Johnson’s hyperactive role as an election denier, or any number of other profoundly anti-democratic things he believes in as a dominionist — or at least a fellow-traveler. How much worse is the normalization narrative when it comes to understanding Johnson himself, the extremist religious worldview he comes out of, and how it threatens the very core of what America stands for? To put it simply: that worldview sees America as we know as sinful and satanic, as Clarkson gingerly explains.
“A lot has already been and will be published about Johnson’s Christianity. The key term to listen for is ‘biblical worldview.’ He has been forthright in explaining that he views all of life, including government and public policy through the lens of the Bible. This idea, going back to theocratic theologians of the 20th century, means that anything that cannot be seen as biblical, is at best a delusion sent by Satan,” Clarkson said. “It means that the laws and policies that flow from them must conform to his notion of ‘biblical principles.’”
That’s not to say we’re suddenly going to be living in Gilead. “Of course, just because he takes his biblical worldview seriously (and we should all take this seriously), that doesn’t mean he will be consistent in his application of biblical principles,” Clarkson added. “He is, after all, just a politician.”
A politician who’s risen faster and is more extreme than anyone at his level since the pre-Civil War era. Recall Robert Lewis Dabney. Recall “biblical slavery.” They are key elements of the tradition Johnson comes from. There is very good reason to be afraid. And to be fully informed about who he really is and what he truly believes.