"The Handmaid's Speaker": Making America safe for White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals

All others can go f**k all the way off, they aren't even real Americans

Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.

• David Wong, John Dies at the End

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.

• Abraham Lincoln

It’s perhaps the saddest commentary yet on the particularly depressing state of the Republican Party that the new Speaker of the House is a wannabe theocrat who believes Church and State should be one.

To refer to the GOP as a “freak show” seems wildly inadequate to the task of describing just how inept, evil, and incompetent one of America’s two major political parties has become. Not that Democrats are perfect- far from it, but at least they understand why they’re in Washington.

The speaker of the United States House of Representatives has no bank accounts of any kind, and believes people and dinosaurs lived together 6,000 years ago. He is second in line to the American presidency.  

He is a dangerous man because he is a fanatic, a true believer. The abysmal state of American journalism has kept the American people chained to a very specific type of congressional miscreant.

So, the new Speaker buries his money in coffee cans in his backyard? At least the portion that he doesn’t give to his church? How else does a man making upwards of $175k/year NOT have a bank account? That’s not even possible and seems as if it should be a huge red flag when it comes to financial disclosures.

Even more concerning than Mike Johnson’s potential financial shenanigans are his ideological and theological leanings.

Mike Johnson is indeed the “Handmaid’s speaker.” For whatever reason, his interpretation of Jesus Christ’s gospels of peace lead him to despise, denigrate and dehumanize millions of Americans in pursuit of happiness. Think about the cruelty of gay conversion therapy and the psychological torture inflicted on generations of our fellow Americans with its insanity and malevolence.

The idea that the new Speaker is willing to “despise, denigrate and dehumanize millions of Americans” simply because he believes his religious beliefs are superior to anyone else’s is frightening. No one should be allowed that sort of power in America. And yet such a man is now the second-most powerful man in the GOP…and second in line to the Presidency.

Rather than try to justify or soften his beliefs and the impact they could potentially have on millions of Americans, Johnson’s apologists are attempting to portray him as just a “regular guy” kind of Conservative.

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.

Truths? Beyond challenge? So he’s just a regular guy, then? Not a theocratic, American Taliban proto-fascist who’d turn America into a modern-day Gilead?

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.

So he talks to a friendly “news” outlet that caters to the Far-Right and the American Taliban to make his views more palatable to Joe and Ethel Sixpack?

I’m not sure his words provided the result (or the comfort) he was after. They certainly didn’t put the minds of those who aren’t fire-and-brimstone, kill-’em-and-grill-’em Christian fascists at ease.

“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.

I have no idea what Johnson is basing his theory of civil government on, but from where I sit, it’s pure, unadulterated bullshit. It has no basis in legal or theological reality.

The problem with fundies like Johnson is that they tend to believe that the world, American governance, and everything else is theirs…because the Bible says it is (it doesn’t say that). To them, the Bible is the infallible, unaltered Word of God, handed down directly from the Almighty himself.

That is itself also a load of crap. The Bible has been translated, retranslated, transcribed, and transcribed by innumerable hands, some barely literate, each with its own interpretation and agenda. The Old Testament stricture against homosexuality, for instance, was added hundreds of years after the original text was written because it was determined that gay sex should be forbidden.

The Bible is anything but the Word of God, but rather what many, many people believe to be the Word, which can virtually be guaranteed as untrue. For Mike Johnson and his fellow travelers to act as if the Bible in the inerrant Word of the Almighty is as arrogant and misguided as it is just plain wrong,

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.”)

There’s no connection between Christianity and “American Principles,” save for those who’d turn America into a functional theocracy.

A “biblical worldview” is merely a misguided attachment to a book that is nothing if not a means for American Taliban leaders to exercise social and political control over the gullible and easily manipulated.

There’s no credible scholarship that proves the Bible is the product of one line of thinking and then translated and transcribed with that in mind.

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.’”

I’d turn around Closson’s criticism and suggest that Johnson’s critics are the ones who understand the true nature of the Bible and recognize that it’s not a unitary manual for living.

It’s, in fact, a very haphazardly organized book notable for what documents were left out as much as what was included. But that inconvenient fact somehow never gets acknowledged by the American Taliban, whose authority depends on the Bible being recognized as the be-all and end-all.

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.

And yet Johnson and his apologists in the American Taliban are trying to convince us that the new Speaker is just a nice Christian boy trying to live by his “basic Christian beliefs.” The problem is that those “basic Christian beliefs” involve despising, denigrating, and dehumanizing millions of his fellow Americans because of his intolerance.

Those who recognize this as an attempted end run around the separation of Church and State cannot be silent about what’s happening because silence, in this case, may become permanent.

Mike Johnson is a very dangerous man who has no business being in the position of power he occupies. That he is should be taken as a frightening omen for the future of American democracy.

That’s not me being alarmist. That’s me saying watch your backs because we could wake up one morning and discover that our freedoms are no longer what we’ve taken them to be.

What will you do when they come for you?

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