FALSE PROPHET

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has been called “the most unabashedly Christian nationalist speaker in history.” He is a far-right evangelical leader who has referred to running for office not as "public service" but as "legal ministry" akin to pastoral ministry. Johnson sees the government and secular law as a way to control and force religion on those different than him, advancing an anti-freedom, theocratic, anti-LGBTQ, Christian-nationalist political agenda. In his own words, Johnson told the Louisiana Baptist Message in 2016, “I was called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideas like these.” Johnson is also an election denier who worked to discount the ballots of disproportionately Black and Brown voters in 2020. According to the New York Times, the new speaker “played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results and was an architect of Mr. Trump’s bid to object to certifying them in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.”