In God We Trust!

The separation of church and state many believe that the Constitution is wrong, that we are a “Christian Nation” and many Republicans believe that. And of course it isn’t any old Christian sect but only evangelical Christians.

The website "The Conversation" last year had an article about the “Christian Nation,”

According to a May 2022 poll from the University of Maryland, 61% of Republicans favor declaring the United States a Christian nation – even though 57% recognized that it would be unconstitutional. Meanwhile, 31% of all Americans and 49% of Republicans believe “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that would be an example for the rest of the world,” a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found.

Those statistics underscore the influence of a set of ideas called “Christian nationalism,” which has been in the spotlight leading up to November 2022 midterm elections. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has openly identified as a Christian nationalist and called for the Republican Party to do the same. Others, like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, have not claimed that label but have embraced its tenets, such as dismissing the separation of church and state.

[…]

Christian nationalism is more than religiosity and patriotism. It is a worldview that guides how people believe the nation should be structured and who belongs there.

 

Christian nationalism is a religious and political belief system that argues the United States was founded by God to be a Christian nation and to complete God’s vision of the world. In this view, America can be governed only by Christians, and the country’s mission is directed by a divine hand.

They believe that they are on a mission from god and the ends justifies the means! Our Speaker of the House believes in their worldview. They are the Christian Taliban.

Mike Johnson's "biblical” economics: Using Christian nationalism to "enhance plutocratic wealth"
Author Katherine Stewart on how Mike Johnson ended up with so much power
Salon
By Chauncey DeVega
November 13, 2023

Newly minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been generously described as a “Christian Nationalist in a nice suit." The Louisiana Republican wants to nullify the Constitution in order to make America into a White Christian theocracy. A White Christian Nationalist flag hangs outside of Johnson's office in D.C. as (further) proof of his loyalty to that cause.

As part of that project, Johnson wants to take away women's civil and human rights, end the right to privacy, and criminalize gay and lesbian people. Johnson’s “Christian values” also include giving even more money to the very richest Americans and corporations and destroying the country’s already threadbare social safety net. But, as seen with last week's elections in Ohio and other parts of the country, because the Christian right’s politics are so extremely unpopular with the majority of Americans, there is a desperate effort by the right-wing propaganda machine to throw Johnson’s previous statements and policy positions down the memory hole.

It is the Christian right that is driving the anti-LGBTQ+ and the anti-abortion movement in the Republican party. As people drop out of organized religion the evangelical Christians feel that they are in a battle for their beliefs.

Mike Johnson spent a decade as a lawyer and spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is most famous for engineering the Supreme Court’s decisions to overturn Roe v Wade and to grant conservative Christians a license to discriminate against people of whom they disapprove. The ADF runs a budget of $102 million dollars per year and sits at the center of a network of donors and politicians committed to obliterating any wall separating church and state. It also works to divert taxpayer money to conservative and reactionary religious organizations.

Let us not forget the ADF’s billionaires donors.

If you want to know what Johnson stands for, you need to remember that he delivered a speech at a 2013 anti-abortion gathering in which he praised “18th-century values.” I don’t want to get too hung up on a “type” because the interesting point for us to remember is that he is unrepresentative of anywhere near a majority of Americans. Some of his views do have support, but every single one is opposed by majorities. Put them together and you have an overwhelming majority against him. So, the question is: how did Mike Johnson end up with so much power? What is it about the structure of our politics that gives us these incredibly unrepresentative leaders?

When you stop and consider that the evangelical Christians had a hand in picking the Supreme Court justices the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle start to fit together!

The Key to Mike Johnson’s Christian Extremism Hangs Outside His Office
The newly elected House speaker has ties to the far-right New Apostolic Reformation — which is hell-bent on turning America into a religious state
Rolling Stone
By Bradley Onishi, Matthew D. Taylor   
November 10, 2023

[…]

 He’s also a dyed-in-the-wool Christian conservative, and there’s a flag hanging outside his office that leads into a universe of right-wing religious extremism as unknown to most Americans as Johnson was before he ascended to the speakership.

Johnson slots firmly within the more hardline evangelical wing of the Republican coalition. He holds stringent positions on abortion, thinks homosexuality is a lifestyle choice that should not be recognized under legal protections against discrimination, defends young Earth creationism, blames school shootings on the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and questions the framework of the separation of church and state. “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” he has said.

One of the keys to understand the conservatives is “thinks homosexuality is a lifestyle choice…” understand the fact that the Republicans are living in the 1950s helps understand where the Republicans are coming from. They believe that the APA succumbed to the arm twisting of the “gays’ to take homosexuality out of the DSM and they believe that it is only our chromosomes determine our gender. They long for the 1950s where Blacks knew their place, gays were in the closet, and we didn’t exist.

Sheets and his fellow New Apostolic Reformation leaders were the tip of the spear of Christian Trumpism, endorsing Donald Trump’s candidacy early on and championing his cause to their fellow Christians. Over the course of the 2016 campaign, the Appeal to Heaven flag and the NAR’s vision of a Christianity-dominated America became entwined with Trump, a potent-though-covert symbol.

Since 2015, you can find these Appeal to Heaven flags popping up over and over: in the background of pictures of far-right politicians and election deniers like Doug Mastriano; as wall decorations in state legislators’ offices; at right-wing rallies. It even flew over the Illinois State Capitol for a time at the instigation of the Illinois Apostolic Alliance, a local NAR activist group.

The Republicans climbed into bed with the far-right Christian movement and remember Speaker Johnson is two heartbeats from the presidency!