Speaker Johnson has done a lot to keep his personal views hidden, telling reporters asking about his worldview: “Go pick up a Bible.” That’s both a huge humblebrag, implying that all his earthly actions are in accordance with the literal word of God, and a disingenuous dodge that obscures the practical details of his politics.
But Johnson is sticking with that line, as seen in this interview with the Heritage Foundation’s outlet the Daily Signal. And it’s clear from the piece that when it comes to the history of religion and politics in America — both at the founding and in recent decades — Johnson doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. (I hope you were sitting down for that.)
First of all, as Warren Throckmorton has noted here on Substack, Johnson is not surprisingly a devotee of the Religious Right’s favorite pretend historian, David Barton, whose books are so divorced from the actual history that his conservative Christian publisher once had to recall one of them for passing along fake quotes from the Founding Fathers.
In the interview, Johnson does a very familiar routine, cherry-picking a few select quotations from the Founders to imply that they basically wanted a theocratic government, and ignoring the many other quotations from them making clear that these Enlightenment figures absolutely did not want that.
For just one example, Johnson quotes John Adams, who wrote in a letter that “Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for government of any other.” He doesn’t note that, in his duties as president, Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which stated quite clearly that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
The first quote, which he leans on heavily, is the private expression of a single man; the second is an official government position in a binding treaty that was launched by Washington, signed by Adams and ratified by a U.S. Senate whose ranks were half-filled with men who crafted the Constitution. Which one is more indicative of “the Founders”?
And that’s a key point here. When the Religious Right tries to engage us in a game of “quote/counterquote,” we should look past the varied and often contradictory words of the Founding Fathers — who were often said contradictory things because they were, you know, arguing with each other — and instead focus on the actual deeds that they accomplished as one.