Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

(Speaker Mike Johnson leads GOP Members of Congress in prayer on the House floor – CSPAN)

Critical assistance for Ukraine, which was approved by the Senate, is languishing in the House. The same is true for assistance for Israel. The impending budget crisis which threatened to shut down the government was punted down the field again with an agreement that keeps operations going until the end of the fiscal year in September but threatens to come back in full force two months before the election.

Instead of tackling these tricky policy issues, the House has taken a two-week vacation, the Presidents’ Day recess.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican from Louisiana, is not laying in the sun. But he’s not doing the nation’s business either. The speaker and his leadership team went to Miami for a retreat and, according to a Politico story based on multiple first-hand accounts, Johnson’s presentation there “took on a surprisingly religious tone.”

Quoting people who were in the room, the Political story says, “Rather than outlining a specific plan to hold and grow the majority, these people said, Johnson effectively delivered a sermon.” Portraying Johnson as just a pious Christian causes the public to overlook the way he manipulates Christianity to exert power. “I’m not at church,” one told Politico.

Two people quoted by Politico said that Johnson “attempted to rally the group by discussing moral decline in America — focusing on declining church membership and the nation’s shrinking religious identity.” According to them, Johnson “contended that when one doesn’t have God in their life, the government or ‘state’ will become their guide, referring back to Bible verses.”

Like everybody else in America, Johnson is entitled to his religious views. And he is entitled to express those views in appropriate settings. But the House floor is not the proper venue. More disturbingly, Johnson has taught classes miseducating Americans about church-state separation and perpetuated the myth that the United States, which has no national religion by Constitutional design, is a “Christian nation.“

Those same Republicans advocate adherence to the views of the framers of the Constitution. And while it is true a majority would have identified themselves as Christian, they explicitly considered, and rejected, the idea of declaring Christianity, or any other religion, as the offical religion of the new nation.

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”  begins the great First Amendment. Its langugae, and its prominent position as the first item in the Bill of Rights, make its meaning clear. In his sermon-like speeches, Johnson cherry-picks statements of the founders and distorts the historic background of the Religion Clause.

Johnson would be best served by reflecting on another quote from President James Madison written in 1822: “We are teaching the World the great truth, that Governments do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson, that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.”

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