How the nonreligious in Congress view Speaker Mike Johnson

‘Most people … don’t want to live in a theocracy,’ says humanist Jared Huffman

November 13, 2023

As a congressman of faith, Mike Johnson is hardly alone. Like the new Republican speaker, 88 percent of House members called themselves Christian at the start of the 118th Congress. Like him, a majority are Protestants. Breaking it down further, Johnson is one of 57 Baptists, making it the second largest denomination in the House, behind the 122 Catholics.

Despite Christianity’s numerical advantage in Congress, Johnson has argued repeatedly that his religion is under nationwide attack by, as he put it in one 2006 op-ed, a “sprawling alliance of anti-God enthusiasts [that] has proven frighteningly efficient at remaking America in their own brutal, dehumanizing image.”

As a congressman of no faith, Jared Huffman is very much alone. He calls himself a humanist and is the only out apostate in Congress. “I’ve got to speak for the majority of Americans who actually aren’t churchgoing devout believers,” the California Democrat said. “That’s a heavy burden.”

So, when Huffman heard that Johnson believed that “very often religious viewpoints, specifically Christian viewpoints, are censored and silenced,” he chuckled ruefully.

“It’s laughable to anyone who’s not in their little echo chamber,” said Huffman. “It is the biggest fiction you could concoct.”

As much as the religious right has reveled in the good news of Johnson’s sudden rise, secularists like Huffman have worried it will deepen America’s already divisive culture wars.

“There are all kinds of universal values that we ought to be working together on,” Huffman said, adding that he sees eye-to-eye with other deeply religious members, like Missouri Democrat and United Methodist pastor Emanuel Cleaver II. “You could just read the Beatitudes and develop a pretty good list.”

“Where it breaks down is this tortured culture war that becomes a religious war for many of these guys,” he added. “Anytime you start trying to impose your religion on others, through the law and through our public institutions, that’s just a red line. And there’s no room for compromise on that.”

Johnson has often professed that his faith not only informs his politics, but is indivisible from them. “It is what you are — you can’t separate it,” he said on his podcast last year. “There is not a distinction or dichotomy between your ‘religion and your religious life’ and the rest of your life. It is all one.”

And in his first interview after winning the speaker’s gavel, Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked Johnson where he stood on the issues. “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it,” Johnson said. “That’s my worldview.”

Instead of the partisan fire and brimstone that often marks speeches on the House floor, Johnson used his inaugural remarks as the new speaker to acknowledge “that we live in a time of bitter partisanship.”

“We have to sacrifice sometimes our preferences because that’s what is necessary in a legislative body,” he said. “But we will defend our core principles to the end.”

What worries secularists like Huffman is whether Johnson’s “core principles” place fealty to his interpretation of the Bible above the Constitution; that the new speaker wants to “remake our government into a biblical Republic.”

“Most people, even devout Christians in most cases, don’t want to live in a theocracy,” Huffman said. “It is extreme and disturbing and totally antithetical to the way our government was founded and has existed for all these years.”

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By:  Jim Saksa
Source: Roll Call