{"id":19343,"date":"2023-11-07T15:36:50","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T20:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/?p=19343"},"modified":"2023-11-07T15:40:16","modified_gmt":"2023-11-07T20:40:16","slug":"new-house-speaker-mike-johnsons-faith-faces-scrutiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2023\/11\/new-house-speaker-mike-johnsons-faith-faces-scrutiny","title":{"rendered":"New House Speaker Mike Johnson\u2019s Faith Faces Scrutiny"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The election of Republican Mike Johnson from Louisiana as Speaker of the House after the unprecedented ousting of former speaker Kevin McCarthy has ignited a firestorm of criticism, with many aiming the charge of religious fundamentalism against the new speaker. Jen Psaki, who previously served as President Biden\u2019s Press Secretary and now hosts a segment on MSNBC, <\/span>warned<\/span><\/a>\u00a0against a \u201cwolf in a suit.\u201d Psaki warned against Johnson\u2019s apparently benign image, writing for MSNBC, \u201cMost Americans might not be able to pick Mike Johnson out of a lineup, but in reality, he\u2019s far from benign. Johnson is a true Trump believer. He was an architect in the House of Trump\u2019s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and served as one of the former president’s impeachment lawyers. He is opposed to any form of abortion access. He once supported criminalizing gay sex.\u201d She accused Johnson of being \u201cbasically a Christian fundamentalist.\u201d She stated that despite his ability to dress well and having a fairly clean past, the new Speaker is far from \u201charmless.\u201d In one of her\u00a0<\/span>segments<\/span><\/a>, she shared a clip of Johnson calling himself a \u201cBible-believing Christian.\u201d \u201cI am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, \u2018Well, it\u2019s curious. People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?\u2019\u201d he said in the clip. \u201cI said, \u2018Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That\u2019s my worldview.\u2019\u2019 \u201cYou heard that right. The Bible doesn\u2019t just inform his worldview. It is his worldview,\u201d Psaki said of his comments.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

CNN shared equal concerns of Johnson\u2019s religious views. \u201cIn his own journey, the Louisiana Republican embodies the merger between different generations of public priorities for the movement of conservative evangelical Christians in which he launched his career and still strongly identifies. Long identified with issues revolving around sexuality, religious conservatives have also become the bedrock supporters of a Trump movement rooted in hostility toward demographic and racial change,\u201d wrote <\/span>Ronald Brownstein for CNN<\/span><\/a>. He equated the religious right\u2019s tight immigration policies to maintaining whiteness in the United States. The article also accused Johnson, without directly quoting him, of fearing that the Democrat party was importing immigrants into the country to replace white people. \u201cWhile Johnson has not framed that issue in overtly racial terms, he has repeatedly described illegal immigration as \u2018an invasion\u2019 and insisted that Democrats are deliberately enabling it for partisan gain,\u201d the article asserted. Johnson was also criticized for seemingly placing a religious requirement on candidates for president, with\u00a0<\/span>Mother Jones<\/span><\/a>\u00a0quoting him as saying, \u201cYou better sit down any candidate who says they\u2019re going to run for legislature and say, \u2018I 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\u2019s design for society. Have you ever thought about that?\u2019 If they hadn\u2019t thought about it, you need to move on and find somebody who has…We have too many people in government who don\u2019t know any of this stuff. They haven\u2019t even thought about it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For his part, Johnson appears to have the views expected of a conservative Christian member of the GOP. He strongly opposes abortion, though he faces accusations of <\/span>extremism<\/span><\/a>\u00a0due to voting against the Right to Contraception Act in 2022. To date, Johnson has been unclear about his specific legislative actions against birth control, telling\u00a0<\/span>Fox News\u2019s\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Shannon Bream<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that he does not remember supporting any legislation that banned IVF treatments. His concerns against the Right to Contraception Act, although not explicitly stated, appear to be due to the concern that certain pills that fall under the label \u201ccontraception\u201d may act as abortifacients, such as the morning-after pill.\u00a0<\/span>Rolling Stone<\/span><\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/em>criticized this view, stating that the morning-after pill only stops a pregnancy; it does not terminate an existing pregnancy. Whether Johnson maintains this view is unclear.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The election of Republican Mike Johnson from Louisiana as Speaker of the House after the unprecedented ousting of former speaker Kevin McCarthy has ignited a firestorm of criticism, with many aiming the charge of religious fundamentalism against the new speaker. Jen Psaki, who previously served as President Biden\u2019s Press Secretary and now hosts a segment…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":19346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nNew House Speaker Mike Johnson\u2019s Faith Faces Scrutiny<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mike Johnson's faith faces scrutiny after his election in Louisiana.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2023\/11\/new-house-speaker-mike-johnsons-faith-faces-scrutiny\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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