Mike Johnson's Christian nationalist 'snake oil' torn apart by Princeton historian

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) not been shy about espousing claims associated with Christian nationalism, which is the idea that the United States must be subordinated to Christian law — or more specifically, a right-wing interpretation of Christian law.

He has even proposed a religious test for politicians. And he has tried to imprint those beliefs on the law, even proposing up to ten years of "hard labor" for abortion performed for any reason and at any stage of pregnancy.

Princeton historian Kevin Kruse took a sledgehammer to Johnson's beliefs in a Substack post released on Thursday where he dismantled the historical basis for Johnson's arguments.

"First of all ... Johnson is not surprisingly a devotee of the Religious Right’s favorite pretend historian, David Barton, whose books are so divorced from the actual history that his conservative Christian publisher once had to recall one of them for passing along fake quotes from the Founding Fathers," wrote Kruse. And in a new interview with the right-wing Daily Signal, "Johnson does a very familiar routine, cherry-picking a few select quotations from the Founders to imply that they basically wanted a theocratic government, and ignoring the many other quotations from them making clear that these Enlightenment figures absolutely did not want that."

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In the interview cited by Kruse, Johnson noted that second U.S. president John Adams wrote in a private letter, “Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for government of any other.” However, said Kruse, he neglected to mention that Adams also wrote in the Treaty of Tripoli, which concluded the United States' first overseas war, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

"Don’t listen to a cherry-picked Adams quote about who the Constitution was written for, look at what the Constitution actually says!" wrote Kruse. "The only mentions of religion in there are measures that keep religion and government at arm’s length from each other — no religious tests for office holders, no establishment of a national religion, no interference with individuals’ rights to worship or not as they saw fit. That is what the Founders actually wanted." Nonetheless, wrote Kruse, "Johnson, selling the same snake oil as David Barton, hand waves past all that to imply that the Founders unanimously agreed that Americans had to be religious and that their common government — so carefully constructed to keep religion out of it, and it out of religion — was actually a religious compact."

Ultimately, concluded Kruse, Johnson's agenda of imposing religious doctrine in American law doesn't have anything to do with what the Founders advocated. Rather, "Mike Johnson is doing what Mike Johnson wants. And no matter how hard he tries to wrap it in the flag and the cross, his agenda is quite extreme."