BREAKING: Mike Johnson Is Christian
Public records and facts and common sense show that the House speaker is not, as some have alleged, a non-Christian
The conflation of Christianity and morality is so powerful and so profound that even atheists do it unthinkingly. Which is not how atheists are supposed to do anything.
We see it constantly from the political left and the center. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) isn’t a real Christian. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) isn’t a real Christian. I’ll spot you Donald Trump, but he’s not a real anything. For pretty much everyone else, it’s fucked up to judge whether they are or aren’t a “real Christian.”
The unilateral, external declaration of someone else’s denominational affiliation is Orwellian, counter to the progressive principles espoused by people who make these declarations, and hugely problematic in many ways.
Problem #1 – Justifying religious wars.
Declarations of religious inauthenticity have fueled religious wars since the first shrub-worshiper took offense at the shrub-worshiper one shrub over who was doing it wrong. There’s the Irish troubles over whether Catholics or Protestants were Christianing wrong (I know it’s more tribal, shut up; the point is how’d we get the tribes). There’s recurring strife between Shiites and Sunnis. And of course the coming final war between Pastafarians and the Church of the Flying Cucuzza.
Religious strife often arises when one sect decides another sect is doing it wrong. That’s what we do when we say Mike Johnson isn’t a real Christian. Bad enough one side is hankering for an unholy holy war, thank you!
Problem #2 - Discrimination.
The statement that someone can’t be a real Christian if they do Bad Thing X implies that only non-Christians are doers of Bad Things. (It also implies that whoever’s doing the judging thinks they’re fit to judge. So, art thou fit to judge thy neighbor? Well, art thou?)
If Mike Johnson isn’t a real Christian, then what the Literal Hell is he? An atheist? A really lapsed Jew?
Christianity is not a moral identity any more than any other religion is. To say otherwise is to embrace a form of Christian exceptionalism. Which is bad.
A religion might have moral tenets, but one need not practice or even espouse them to be an adherent of that religion.
If you believe Jesus existed and was magically divine as advertised, then you’re an OG Christian. Dare I say, a mere Christian!1
And if one of the add-on tenets of Christianity is that we’re all sinners, then what the Literal Hell sense does it make to say that some sins magically make you not Christian? If the whole point of Jesus is that he forgives all sins, then how can there be a sin that unChristians you?
(A possible analogy: When an American citizen acts counter to the ideals of our founding documents, we call them un-American, not not-American. No matter how un-American Trump acts, no one’s going to make the argument he’s secretly not really an American. Hell, that was Trump’s tactic against then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), remember? We don’t wanna be doing that, I assume! So, if you wanna call someone un-Christian, that makes a lot more sense than not-Christian.)
Problem #3 - Denying agency.
I’m sure I read somewhere that the left respects individual assertions of identity. I’ve similarly been told that all opinions deserve respect (which in my opinion is a wrong opinion, but that’s just my right opinion).
When you factor in all of this opinion-respecting and identity autonomy, then if someone has spent their life studying Christianity, preaching Christianity and having Christianity preached at them, thinking of themselves as Christian, quoting Christianity’s D&D manual, and literally telling us with their face-hole of holies that they are Christian, who the Literal Hell has the right to decide otherwise?
If you wanna call someone a CHristian In Name Only — a CHINO, if you will — I guess go right ahead? But then maybe ponder whether that’s so different from misgendering, the (sometimes Christian) mislabeling of penis-havers, penis-once-havers, and penis-acquirers.
Problem #4 – Ignoring history.
The Jesus of history looks a lot more like the Jesus of Mike Johnson than the Jesus of Warner Sallman. If you’re wondering who Warner Sallman is, you may be familiar with his works. Well, a work.
This work, to be specific:
But history tells us that Jesus never even sat for Sallman. (Hey, He can’t be everywhere!)
And the Bible tells us that Jesus looked nothing like the guy that Sallman painted. In fact, Sallman’s Jesus — this classic, massively widespread depiction of Jesus — was only copyrighted in 1941. Sallman Jesus is only 83 years old!
Which means that even the peace-and-love Jesus that we all know and love (because He told us we have to) is not only literally a modern invention, He’s also younger than an actual demigod who for-real preaches the Nice Guy2 Creed of “Peace and Love!” to millions more people than allegedly heard it direct from Jesus.
For most of history, Christianity hasn’t been Sallman’s aura-lighting, Kathleen Turner-soft-focus Jesus. Christianity’s had centuries as a driving force for very much badness. Check out some of those fucking Popes! Yikes!
Remember McCarthyism? The Crusades? The Inquisition? Witch hunts? No, not just the Salem witch hunts. Dude, Christians are still killing witches today. There’s zero historical basis for claiming Mean Christianity isn’t just as real or realer than any other variety of Christianity.
Problem #5 - The appeal to authority … of a magic book.
Denying Johnson his Christianity implies that Johnson’s not doing the Bible right. That we in our superior Bible-knowingness have found him to be errant from The Way as Understood By We.
The only way you can make that case is by appealing to Biblical text. And that endorses the notion that we should judge politicians, or anyone, based on our own close reading of a 2,000-year-old book cobbled together by a committee of freelance editors 1,700 years ago, after it was written at least in part by the Roman Empire’s equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson (the author of the Book of Revelation, it has been suggested, was higher than heaven on psilocybin).
Appeals to authority are generally worthy of skepticism. Appeals to that authority are what political scientists call A. Bad. System. And besides, if you recognize The Bible as the authority here, The Bible itself never says any sin deChristianates you. The Bible itself says it’s belief in Jesus — by good people and bad — and only belief in Jesus, that matters.
Problem #6 – Letting Christian leaders off the hook.
Declaring bad Christians to be fake Christians lets leading Christians off the hook. It means we’re not holding Christian leaders accountable for the reality of what Christian adherents do in the name of Christianity.
And we should. Because if your religion inspires people to do bad things in its name, you should PROBABLY GIVE SOME THOUGHT TO HOW THAT HAPPENED. (This was extremely common thinking among Christians in the days after 9/11 and do not tell me those Muslims weren’t Muslim.)
Absolving “real” Christians of wrongdoing frees Christian leaders from the obligation to answer for the fruits of their religion. And it deprives us of the civic discourse we really need to have about religion.
Problem #7 - Misunderstanding Christianity.
If you think there’s a Christian essence that your political enemy lacks, it may be worth considering that the essential element of any successful religion is its lack of an essential element.
Does the Bible say “Never kill ever”? If you can figure out which Ten Commandments are The Ten Commandments, lmk if you see anything there about killing that says, “No, not war, not executions, not self-defense, not maximizing shareholder value by skimping on product-safety measures.”
If the Bible flat-out prohibited all killing — except for God, who does it in zesty abundance — Christianity wouldn’t have lasted 33 years, let alone two millennia. What defines Christianity is its memetic flexibility, its ability to replicate, iterate, mutate. Remember how creationism evolved into intelligent design, without even a shred of irony?
Christianity has survived because it’s hard to nail down (ha!) and anytime it’s in trouble, it just gets resurrected (okay, that’s enough) in another form. Is Christianity pro this or anti that? Sure, why not. There’s a chapter for that.
As an exemplar of ideological evolution, Christianity is the equivalent of H.R. Giger’s Alien: a perfectly evolved, terrifyingly effective engine of survival.
If we don’t grapple with that we’ll fall prey to it. Like this:
Problem #8 - First-stone casting.
Mike Johnson opposes gay rights because of what the Bible says. And, I’m sorry, but it’s in there. He didn’t make it up. Someone else made it up. And then whichever editor wanted to cut Leviticus might’ve been out that day, so…it’s in there.
Johnson and his brethren get called not-real Christians because they’re not seen as obeying another Bible thing: The whole love-each-other thing.
But what about interest rates? The Bible condemns interest-bearing loans about 100x more than it condemns hot gay stuff. So are Democrats not real Christians because they don’t forswear modern banking? Because for all the left’s focus on love and the right’s focus on LGBTQ+ stuff, when you look for the issues The Bible really seems to care about, its passages about bankers and lending read like its working title was Occupy Bethlehem.
So what does that make all the Christian Democrats who back our modern banking practices? I mean, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) represents Delaware, the Sodom and Gomorrah of banking!
Problem #9 - Blinding us to the threat.
What if, and hang in here with me, but what if the same religion that has given us wars and persecution for much of its history still can?
There is plenty of evidence that Christianity can and has fueled violent, dangerous movements in the past, not just within nations, but by nations. So there’s a very real danger in turning a blind eye to the historically numerous Christians who don’t turn the other cheek.
No less than the former head of the CIA’s Russia operations worldwide, Steve Hall, told me that religion generally and definitely Christianity get a pass from…deep breath:
Politicians
Law enforcement
The media
That’s, like, the holy trinity of secular accountability!
So how big a problem is this? A Senate committee did a massive report on the NRA ties of Russian operative Maria Butina and her handler, Alexander Torshin. The report glossed over Russian ties to The Family, the secretive Christian breakfast-lovers behind the National Prayer Breakfast — even though, as I reported, the religious ties predated the NRA ties.
Similarly, Democratic post mortems of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol consciously gave short shrift to its Christian elements. Even though religious leaders and evangelical then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) confronted this aspect head on.
It’s often people of squishy religion (“I believe in something!” “God is love!” “Everything has a reason.” “We’re all connected by a spiritual energy.”) who hesitate to address real religion on its own terms. (Plug: My faculty advisor, Dan Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, wrote Breaking the Spell about doing exactly that.)
And in my experience, it’s religious people, including Christians right and left, who want a political reckoning with this current-but-also-old Mike Johnsonian strain of Christianity. That’s because well-intentioned religious people want to stop this Christianity from becoming the dominant Christianity, whether it’s “true [sic] Christianity” or whether “true [sic] Christianity” is an incoherent concept.
We just can’t do that until we stop pretending it’s not Christianity at all.
PS: I wrote this on March 7 so I could schedule it to go out while I take a break, so if Johnson did something really un-Chri…I mean, bad…in the meantime, please imagine that I rebutted that, too. Thanks and I’ll be back on March 22! (Confession: I edited this right before sending it out on March 14 because I am bad at vacation).
Jonathan Larsen is a veteran reporter and TV news producer, having worked at MSNBC, CNN, and TYT.
Your regular TFN will return on March 22. In the meantime, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can keep my original reporting and the newsletter free for everyone.
Obligatory show-offy C.S. Lewis name-drop.
Little Nicene Creed pun there to send you theology nerds into rapture. (Did it again!)
What I find most interesting about these lapsed-Christian charges by those outside the teachings is you never hear of adherents of other faiths accused of falling short of their avowed theistic standard.
“He’s not a real Buddhist because…” is never uttered. Jews are most likely to face this critique from other Jews. (“Sure, but he’s not Orthodox.”) And as for Muslims, criticism of any sort is basically avoided.