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Rep. Mike Johnson was sitting in the chairman’s seat in the House Judiciary Committee in April when a curious debate broke out over the biblical duty toward illegal immigrants.
Rep. David N. Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat who is Jewish, accused Republicans, particularly evangelical Republicans, of ducking God’s admonition found in Leviticus to welcome the foreigner and love him “as yourself.”
Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and evangelical Christian, figured it was time to set his colleague straight. Leviticus’ charge, he said, is a personal challenge to people, not a blueprint for writing a government’s laws.
“You have to see to whom the order is given. That order is not given to civil authorities and the government. That order is given to individuals,” he said. “We do reach out to the sojourner, but it is not the job of the federal government to do it.”
For good measure, he said the Bible “speaks favorably” about borders and walls, including Nehemiah, who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem.
“We don’t build walls because we hate the people on the outside. We build walls because we love the people on the inside,” Mr. Johnson said.
It was a striking example of faith in action. Mr. Johnson repeated it on Wednesday when he took the oath of office to become speaker of the U.S. House.
His 17-minute speech was laced with references to his faith, including a sense of heavenly ordained destiny.
“I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a matter like this. I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear, that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us,” the newly minted speaker told colleagues. “I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment and this time. This is my belief.”
That kind of faith in action would be familiar to many people in middle America, but it shocked the Washington establishment, where the dissolution of religion in public life is taken as an inevitable goal and forthright pronunciations of God’s will at work make people uneasy. News media struggled to understand this odd specimen.
People magazine broke from chronicling the doings of Hollywood starlets to deliver a piece exploring the “far-right Louisiana congressman’s” covenant marriage with his wife, Kelly.
MSNBC posted a piece labeling Mr. Johnson “the most unabashedly Christian nationalist speaker in history.” Left-wing publication Mother Jones fretted that Mr. Johnson would have “a larger audience” for his pro-marriage views and warned that people trapped in abusive marriages could face “disaster.”
Other outlets have pored over the speaker’s opposition to abortion and gay rights advances or pointed to his work at the Alliance Defense Fund, now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom, which battles in the courts for pro-religious and socially conservative wins. The Washington Post said Mr. Johnson is determined to “shrink the separation between church and state.”
To the faithful, Mr. Johnson’s elevation to speaker was a miracle.
Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, fired off an email to supporters saying that as the speaker election fiasco played out over the weeks, he had organized a prayer pledge that he delivered to House Republicans through Mr. Johnson, then a junior member of the party’s House leadership.
Mr. Johnson’s ascension to the rostrum was “a remarkable display of God’s grace and power,” Mr. Perkins said.
“The past few weeks have been chaotic and uncertain, but looking back, we can see the hand of God at work in our House of Representatives. We prayed for a strong, pro-Israel, America First Speaker of the House who was committed to biblical truth and God answered our prayers,” Mr. Perkins said.
Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and Republican presidential candidate who is no stranger to displaying his faith in his public career, said Mr. Johnson is as authentic as they get and that showed through in his acceptance speech.
“I thought it was refreshing,” Mr. Santorum told The Washington Times. “It was beautifully honest. There was no pretext, there was no manipulation. It was just an honest, authentic man who presented himself as plainly as he could and laid out what his objectives are.”
Mr. Johnson represents northwestern Louisiana. It’s an area where the congressman’s prominent personal faith is standard, as it is in much of the rest of the country that escapes notice on the coasts, Mr. Santorum said.
“This is the norm in a lot of places in America, and this is what causes a lot of the antipathy that you see,” Mr. Santorum said. “The idea that they have no right to be at the table with their points of view and that their philosophy of life should be marginalized or, worse yet, not permitted — that should be an affront to everybody.”
Mr. Johnson is a Southern Baptist and member of Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana. He earned his law degree from Louisiana State University, worked as a constitutional lawyer and served in the Louisiana Legislature from 2015 to 2017 before taking his seat in Congress.
His remarks upon taking the speaker’s gavel last week were indeed a break from the past. Among the previous half-dozen newly elected speakers, the only mentions of God in their acceptance speeches were a secular “God bless” or an occasional reference to history.
Nicole Carr, executive director at the American Humanist Association, said the new speaker’s remarks showed “that he will place his biblical beliefs above his obligations to act on behalf of all Americans.”
“Speaker Johnson has demonstrated his willingness to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people and those who need access to reproductive health care, based on his personal religious beliefs. We think that makes him the wrong person to elevate to a position of authority in our secular government,” Ms. Carr told The Times.
Mr. Santorum said Mr. Johnson isn’t seeking to impose his religious beliefs on anyone but it’s perfectly right that his political beliefs flow from his views on morality. That, Mr. Santorum said, is no different from someone on the political left whose beliefs flow from a “point of view that’s not biblical and may be out of some professor’s textbook that you’ve never heard of.”
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Johnson recalled serving as acting speaker during his first year in Congress and marveling in particular at the marble relief of Moses that looks down on the chamber. He also celebrated the decision to add the country’s motto, “In God We Trust,” to the chamber in 1962 “as a rebuke” of the godless philosophy of communism.
It goes without saying that Mr. Johnson likes to talk about the Bible.
During the Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat, said Mr. Johnson was wrong about the meaning of Jerusalem’s walls. Mr. Nadler said the walls weren’t rebuilt as a defensive measure but were symbolic: Jerusalem was still part of the Persian Empire, so the walls weren’t keeping anyone out.
“That’s not right,” Mr. Johnson countered. “Nehemiah was a cupbearer of the king, he was in Babylon at the time, he had the king’s favor and he went back and he saw that the walls were smoldering — the walls of Jerusalem, the great city of David — that the walls were broken down and burning with fire and it broke his heart and so he called upon all the people, all the Israelites, and he said, ‘Come let us rebuild the wall we will no longer be in chains.’
“It is offensive to me for people who don’t read the Bible to cite it out of context and tell me I’m not following it,” Mr. Johnson said.
That irked Mr. Cicilline.
“The presumption that, as a Jew, I didn’t read the Bible is deeply offensive,” he said. “The Old Testament belongs to us, in case you forgot.”
Mr. Nadler underscored that point by chiding Mr. Johnson over his pronunciation of Nehemiah. He said it would have had a hard “h” sound with the stress in the middle “in the original Hebrew.”
“Duly noted,” Mr. Johnson said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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