The Haunting of the House on the Hill

 

The thing that alarms me about the new Speaker of the House is he's explicitly against the separation of church and state in a way that a lot of Republicans just aren't that outspoken about. They very well might well be theocrats to some degree: they just aren't that obviously so. Ted Cruz's dad is Seven Mountains dominionist. We don't talk about it that much. Josh Hawley has some Christian nationalist vibes. 

But Mike Johnson is just a flat-out a denier of the separation of church and state, to the extent that he credits supernaturalism (God's providence, or anointing) for the raising up of leaders (including an embrace of the historical revisionism of David Barton regarding the subject). It's a problem: the halls of Congress really should not be haunted by assorted head spooks like the various religious notions of its members. We elect leaders by popular choice: that means that the people vote for them, not that they are picked by someone's idea of the cosmic creator of all the things. I could suggest an empirical experiment of the success of God doing the things by inviting all the Bible-believers to stay home on election day, and I would probably find myself shocked! by their lack of faith that works aren't actually getting electoral things done IRL. 

Johnson is like the Forrest Gump of theocracy: he took down his podcasts so we wouldn't know how fringe he is. His wife, who is all about the LGBT conversion, took down her website, too.  Almost as if people might be horrified at what their actual beliefs are. But he's been associated with crisis pregnancy centers. His "adoption" of his 14 year old son at age 25 while still unmarried via the troubled Young Life Ministries is suspect as hell. 

He owes a lot to the movement that fueled the Big Lie--a bearing of false witness that Trump won in 2020 when he did no such thing. A lie of complete political convenience. 

If you have to cover your tracks about your religious affiliations, why? It isn't because of the bigotry "we" have against religious faith--I promise you, it's because if those faiths were made law for other people, those people would have no interest at all in being so governed. 

He operates on story-telling: Amanda Marcotte wrote a good piece on this mechanism where religious conservatives tell scary stories and then act "as-if" they believe in them. It isn't about actually belief, but power. We heard people use this aphorism just post 1/6: Who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. Venezuelan voting machines linked by Italian satellites to German servers and controlled by Chinese thermostats are bizarre lies only a conman would put out there: and people especially associated with religious conservatism (especially in the Q -related Flynn/Powell alternative universe) were conditioned to not find them so far-out.  Why? Haunted heads. Apparitions of armed Black Panthers and antifa in every polling place, and weird multistate ballot counting conspiracies that would never have logically worked. 

And look at the virulent homophobia and the Great Replacement Theory: projection. We know who really are the fucking creeps, We know who really is trying to purposefully change American society via indoctrination. The misogyny. The source of so much bigotry. Criticizing the mote in the eyes of others disregarding the beam in their own. 

I do not relish the idea of the People's House haunted by Johnson's worldview. It's actually pretty scary. Let's exorcize it with a very cleansing election.