Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist - Be Very Afraid.

The Republican Party claims to be the party of "family values" and "Christian values" although the latter in today's Republican Party have little or nothing to do with the New Testament or Christ's social gospel.  Instead, it is all about carefully cherry picked Old Testament passages that denigrate and condemn others and revel in violence.  Mike Johnson, the new Republican Speaker of the House is the personification of this warped and dangerous religious dogma.  Indeed, as the Christian Post reports, Johnson said his favorite bible verse is about god killing the evil enemies of the righteous.  In Johnson's view, those evil forces are gays, liberals, racial minorities and non-evangelical Christians, particularly Muslims.  Worse yet, he opposes the concept of separation of church and sate and has edited out the prohibition against an established religion completely out of the First Amendment.  He is also a virulent supporter of gun rights seemingly so that the righteous - i.e., far right "Christians" can defend themselves against those who are "evil" (see the above listing for who those are) as he pushes to make America a "Christian nation" regardless of the wishes of a majority of Americans.   A column in the Washington Post looks at Johnson's extremism.  Here are excerpts:

The day after he was elected speaker of the House, which was also the day after 18 people were shot to death in Lewiston, Maine, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) smoothly executed the rhetorical three-point turn that Republicans often use after mass shootings: (1) invoke prayer; (2) declare that now is not the time for politics; and (3) dismiss the foolish notion that gun violence is related to guns. To that point, Johnson told Sean Hannity, “At the end of the day, it’s, the problem is the human heart.”

In a statement, the Biden administration rejected “the offensive accusation that gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because of Americans’ ‘hearts’” and instead blamed congressional Republicans’ fealty to gun industry lobbyists.

No doubt gun industry donations have shaped Republicans’ uncompromising position on gun-control legislation. But there’s another force at work here, too.

The House will ignore calls to ban assault weapons — a ban the majority of Americans want — not only because its new speaker is a Republican but also because he is a Christian nationalist.

A Christian nationalist is someone who, like Johnson, believes the United States is a Christian nation and does not believe in what Johnson dismisses as the “so-called ‘separation of church and state.’”

Indeed, Johnson got right to work mixing church and state in his first speech after he won the speakership.

“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority,” he said from the pulpit — er, the House rostrum. “And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.”

Johnson must have been so surprised when God brought together a majority to pass the Respect for Marriage Act last year! He himself voted no, of course, since, as he once opined, “Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

Experts project that this kind of nonsense will spew from the Capitol now that the most powerful man in Congress is someone who has said that “every Christian should seek to bring industry, government and society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness,” as Johnson told a campaign rally — er, a Shreveport, La., congregation, in 2016.

For Johnson, those principles include protecting not just fertilized eggs and children at risk of learning that gay people exist but also guns. Especially guns.

“At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves,” he told Hannity, “and that’s the Second Amendment.”

This should surprise no one. According to a 2018 study by the sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead, Landon Schnabel and Samuel L. Perry, “Americans who desire that religion, specifically Christianity, be officially promoted in the public sphere are deeply opposed to federal gun control laws.”

A 2021 survey Perry and a colleague conducted found that “among Whites who said America should be a Christian nation, more than 4 in 10 named the right to keep and bear arms as the most important right. Not freedom of speech. Not even freedom of religion. Gun rights.”

Why? Because they think violence is good.

In “The Flag and the Cross,” Perry’s book with Philip S. Gorski, the authors show that the higher White people rate on the Christian-nationalist scale, the more likely they are to agree with the notion of “righteous violence” — specifically that “the best way to stop bad guys with guns is to have good guys with guns.

Those with a casual knowledge of Christian theology might have trouble squaring this pro-violence stance with Jesus’ reported instruction to “turn to them the other cheek.”

Johnson has an answer for that. . . . . “We serve the Lion of Judah, not some sort of namby-pamby little king. … ‘Our weapons are for pulling down strongholds’ — this doesn’t sound like a namby-pamby gospel.”

No. It doesn’t sound namby-pamby. It sounds like exactly the sort of ideology that might encourage rioters, who were told Christianity was under threat, to charge the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, carrying twin symbols of Jesus and guns.

On the same day he became House speaker and 18 Mainers were gunned down with a weapon that most Americans want outlawed, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute released a survey about threats to democracy in advance of the 2024 election. It found growing support for political violence, especially among people who believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the country has changed for the worse since the 1950s and that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Is charging the gates of hell a figure of speech? Will Johnson fight like a lion by genially ignoring calls to bring a gun-control bill to a vote? Or should Americans, accustomed to enduring political inaction when it comes to guns, begin to fear something even worse?

This man is very dangerous.