Moses Johnson delivers sermon tantamount to theocracy

Mike Johnson, Speaker for the House of Representatives where the Republicans are hanging tenuously onto a slim majority, recently remained true to his label as a Christian nationalist. There was no sign of an interest in constitutional secularism at a GOP retreat intended to discuss and plan for a continued majority past the November 2024 elections.

It's not as if Johnson has tried to hide his Christian nationalism as we have reported previously at OnlySky.

The presentation he gave to the attending captive audience was a prolonged sermon that surprised many who were there. This is the stuff of theocracy. Two people who had collected with other Republican lawmakers at Miami’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel indicated their alarm to Politico.

Instead of strategizing about appealing to a modern pluralistic society in a way that would be unifying, 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 both people in the room."

Without God in people's lives, the government steps in. And as we know with such republicanism, the state is the enemy. However, the sermonizing did little to appeal to some of those in attendance. The "horrible" presentation led one to opine, “I’m not at church.... I think what he was trying to do, but failed on the execution of it, was try to bring us together. The sermon was so long he couldn't bring it back to make the point.”

Although other topics were discussed, religion and history supposedly took up about a third of the presentation.

Johnston's position Johnson's position, of late, has been seen to be vulnerable as he is doing the bidding of the loud but minority fringe MAGA lawmakers and Donald Trump himself. He is refusing to table a bill for aid to Ukraine (which has sadly become a partisan issue) on the behest of the former president, even though it passed the Senate with a decent bipartisan majority of 70–29. The Speaker is caught between a rock and a hard place: If he does table the bill, those MAGA lawmakers will vacate his seat, and if he doesn't, he will be unpopular with others and appear unable to lead and reach across the aisle.

The moral of the story is that working in lockstep with Donald Trump is something of a poisoned chalice. But for those of us in the secular community, the concern is about the creeping religiosity inside the corridors of power. In previous years, GOP lawmakers would only have paid lip service to the ultra-religious evangelists lobbying them on the sidelines. Now one of those is second in line to the throne.