After Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., was voted in as the speaker of the U.S. House, many on the left threw a fit about him. He has been described as:
• an "extremist" by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. (AOC) of New York City.
• a "Christian Nationalist" by a Christian professor (John Fea, Messiah College).
• a "staunch conservative on issues like abortion and government spending" by journalist Garrett Haake of NBC News and MSNBC.
And on it goes.
But the reality is that Mike Johnson stands in a long tradition of American leaders who looked to God and the Bible for guidance.
If you know history, you know that great Americans like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were regular readers of Scripture.
Today’s secularists have so successfully cut us off from our Judeo-Christian traditions that someone like Mike Johnson is supposedly an interloper in an otherwise blissfully secular America, to paraphrase the late D. James Kennedy.
Mike Johnson, is a constitutional attorney, and he first became known among many in the Christian community because of his legal work in the Alliance Defending Freedom (the ADF) --- an organization co-founded by D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, the late Bill Bright, Marlin Maddoux, Larry Burkett, and others.
At D. James Kennedy Ministries, we have had the privilege to interview Mike Johnson on occasion.
Here are some of his own words on what America is all about, or what the Framers intended it to be all about:
Our God-given Rights
"We are endowed by our Creator with these certain inalienable rights. [America’s Founders] put that in their writings, it’s reflected in all of their documents, their personal letters, and that’s what it’s really about."
On Religious Liberty
" . . . We call religious liberty our first freedom, for a reason of course, because it’s listed first. And that’s because the Founders understood: your right to believe and to act upon that belief is essential to who you are as an American, but even more fundamental than that, who you are as a human being. And so it’s critically important to protect it."
On Threats Against Religious Freedom
"And yet we’ve seen this increasing assault over the last several decades really, it’s been growing. And right now it’s just at a critical point.
"You have an empowered, kind of radicalized left, who is trying to steamroll over this idea of religious freedom, and they’ve had some success in recent decades. So we’re trying to roll back some of that to defend what’s left of that ground, and even take some back."
On a Growing Hostility to the Judeo-Christian Heritage
"Instead of seeing a tolerance for people of all ideologies and all faiths, what we’ve seen is a growing hostility, an outright hostility towards one particular faith. And that’s the Christian faith, in almost every case. The Judeo Christian heritage that we all revere, and those who live in accordance with those principles, are under assault."
On This Present Moment
" . . . We live in a postmodern era, as we know, and we live in a nation, sadly, of biblical and constitutional illiterates. It’s easy to take freedom away from a people if they don’t even know what those freedoms are. So it’s never been more important to be a bold voice."
Called to Be "Winsome Warriors"
"We’re called to be winsome warriors. We’re called to be gentle with those who disagree, we demolish their arguments, but we recognize they’re not the enemy.
"The enemy is the principalities, right? And I find that you can get a long way with being winsome about that. We don’t have any reason to be angry at anybody. I think [Mike] Huckabee said one time, 'I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody about it' . . . "
If Mike Johnson is an "extremist" and a "Christian Nationalist," then so were George Washington, John Adams, and most of America’s Founders.
I’ll gladly take more of that rather than less of it. At any time.
Jerry Newcombe, D. Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of D. James Kennedy Ministries, where Jerry also serves as senior producer and an on-air host. He’s written/co-written 33 books, including "George Washington's Sacred Fire" (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and "What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?" (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.). Read Jerry Newcombe's Reports — More Here.