According to Speaker of the House Mike “biblical worldview” Johnson, Americans misunderstand the separation of church and state: it’s supposed to let Johnson and people who share his worldview import their religion into government while protecting them from any government restriction.
Okay, that’s not how he puts it, but that is the gist. It’s Wilhoit’s Law again: government binds other faiths and doesn’t protect them; it protects conservative Christians but doesn’t bind them (much as he believes calling Republicans Nazis is bad but he’s fine when the shoe’s on the other foot). I’d quip that this proves Johnson’s the one who doesn’t understand but I suspect he’s more likely lying.
How does he put it? Quoting from the linked article: “To the contrary, the Founders wanted to protect the church and the religious practice of citizens from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” Johnson maintained, telling the audience that “our Founders understood that a free society and a healthy republic depend upon religious and moral virtue [to] help prevent the abuse of power [and] make it possible to preserve our essential freedom.”
I will state the obvious first: Johnson’s a devoted toady to the Toddler in Chief. Last week he gave the Toddler a made-up award for “solving all the domestic problems” (he hasn’t) and bringing on “the new golden era in America” (it isn’t). Ergo, Johnson doesn’t value moral virtue, nor does he object to the abuse of power.
Now, as to the main point of my post: yes, the Founders valued “religious and moral virtue” but those were the responsibility of churches — it wasn’t the government’s job to be the national chaplain. The government had no business enacting religious doctrine in law or laying down any sort of religious laws.
They’d also seen state churches in operation back in Europe and they saw where it led: violence, repression, revolution and civil war. They knew the only way to protect “the religious practice of citizens” was to keep government from aligning with any one faith or sect. As soon as the state does that, other faiths are in peril. As JFK put it when running for president in 1960: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”
Republicans have made it clear it’s attacks on their religious liberty — which almost always means nothing more than their freedom to hurt the people they hate — that they care about. Rep. Andy Ogles declared recently religious pluralism is dead and we should deport all Muslims. Johnson sides with Ogles, declaring they have to prevent the threat of sharia law — which is not a threat in this country (and calling for mass deportation is about bigotry, not about sharia). And if pluralism is dead, it won’t stop with Muslims — it’ll be whichever sects Ogles or Johnson thinks do not qualify as Christian enough for a Christian state. Not to mention people like Christian theocrat William Wolfe, who thinks its Christian to keep America white and that it’s his right to impose his concept of Christian law on everyone else. Or the Christians who claim it’s godly to deny women the vote or that we shouldn’t tolerate non-believers in America. “White Christian nationalism doesn’t protect Christians. It decides which ones deserve protections and which ones can be discarded.”
Does anyone imagine Johnson or Ogles would meekly accept if some branch of the Christian faith that disagreed with them began imposing its policies on a God Says So basis? They’d scream with outrage that their religious freedom was violated. Any pretense this is a principle rather than Wilhoit’s Law is bullshit. Just look at the outraged reaction to liberal Christian James Talarico.
The defense the religious right sometimes makes is that sure, the Toddler may be a shitbag, but God can use shitty people to accomplish good things. This does not excuse them staying silent when he does evil things — because he’s still a shitbag. As witness Paul Campos’ discussion of the Toddler embodying all the deadly sins, followed by this quote from Virginia Heffernan:
“The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I’m not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn’t care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There’s nothing he would die for — not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He’s not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, “the common man,” veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn’t care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he’s not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. He doesn’t — in a more secular key — even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel’s hand. Doesn’t even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn’t live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he’s very ugly and barely mammalian.”
