By Chris Satullo
Mike Johnson, speaker of the U.S. House, calls himself a Bible-believing Christian and a Constitutional “nerd.” He’ll tell you that, whatever’s in the Good Book, that’s what he believes and will conform to in his private life and his public actions. And he vows that whatever the Constitution says, that will be the North Star for his politics.
Yet, somehow, the Bible and the Constitution never seem to contradict what Mike was already fixing to do.
This comes across clearly in a fair-minded, yet critical profile of Johnson written by David D. Kirkpatrick in the March 25 issue of the New Yorker.
Johnson seems nowhere near as mean-spirited and hypocritical as some members of the unruly Republican caucus that he must perpetually try to prevent from veering off a cliff. He seems sincerely to want to be a good Christian. He seems sincerely to care about the principles of the Constitution. He told Kilpatrick, “It doesn’t matter what anybody tells me. I am going to follow the Constitution.”
Still, as Kirkpatrick writes, “In Johnson’s hands, the Constitution’s dictates always appear to coincide with his politics” – on gay rights, on Stop the Steal, on government regulation, on pretty much anything.
Similarly, Johnson says the Bible dictates his positions on “any issue under the sun.” Yet, the political caucus he’s proud to lead seems not to have absorbed the Gospel passages about welcoming the stranger and the outcast, about not casting the first stone, about the meek inheriting the earth. His buddies don’t seem to get the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan: In the Israel of Jesus’ time, Samaritans were despised foreigners, kind of the Hondurans or Yemenites of their day. Yet this Samaritan showed mercy to a wounded man whom members of Israel’s priestly class left to die.
Johnson is an exemplar of a mindset I’ve been noticing and calling out for some time now. Fundamentalist Christianity – with its belief that the Bible is an inerrant, consistent, conclusive, specific and comprehensive guide to all life questions – is first cousin to Constitutional originalism. In Johnson – as in many justices on the Supreme Court – the two views merge seamlessly, reinforcing one another.
Here are tenets of the mindset:
— There must be a sacred text that governs all situations.
— They know authoritatively how that text came to be and what its writers intended, with no room for reinterpretation.
— The text is always and everywhere clear, with no ambiguity, no internal contradictions.
— They are defined by their perfect obedience to the meaning of the text.
— Their understanding of the meaning of the text is flawless.
— Other views on the text’s history, its gaps and ambiguities, its openness to new interpretations…those are in error. Those views attempt to elude the text’s true meaning and the duties that flow from it.
It must be nice to have such certainty about foundational texts. Yet other equally smart people who revere those texts, who’ve spent much time pondering them, find them to be much more nuanced, much more contingent. They view them as ever-unfolding, not fixed in stone.
The fundamentalist/originalist view that the text is inerrant and fixed in meaning – and that you have mastered that meaning – leads to some pitfalls.
If we’re talking about the Bible, here are some of them:
— If you’re reading the Good Book in English, you’re reading a translation of the original and what’s more, in the case of Jesus’ words, a translation of a translation or a translation of whatever he might have said originally in Aramaic. The finicky insistence on the exact meaning of some familiar verse – e.g., “suffer the children,” “turn the other cheek”- might be ignorant of both cultural context in ancient Galilee and the phrase’s meaning to the long-ago translator who chose it.
— Scholarship is continually unearthing nuances and connotations of words and idioms used in Scripture. Meanings and understandings evolve.
— The books of the Jewish Bible, which evolved over hundreds of years, are full of contradictions and tensions. The Christian Gospels offer several distinct understandings of who Jesus was, what his ministry involved and meant, and who he was in relationship to the Divine. What the Bible says about “any issue under the sun” is never crisply clear. Driving moral or political guidance requires study, reflection and humility.
— Scripture is vast. You can – and many people do – cherry-pick verses (often dimly understood) to justify either side of many controversial issues. Personally, I think Christians should spend more time focusing on what Jesus taught – things like mercy, radical welcome to the outcast, and putting others before self – than on plucking judgmental tidbits from the Jewish Bible or the misogyny of Paul’s Epistles.
And talking about the Constitution, here are some pitfalls of originalism:
— Ever notice how much the originalists’ (often ahistorical) view of what the Framers believed and intended, tends to a) ignore the strong disagreements among the Framers themselves and b) miraculously conform to the originalists’ own retrograde politics?
— Ever notice that the originalists’ reverence for the supposedly unerring wisdom of the Framers (that group of all white, male property-owners, often slave-holding) doesn’t extend to the people from other eras who pushed through amendments to repair the mistakes, bad guesses and blind spots of the original document? James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, left Philadelphia depressed that he hadn’t done a better job but consoled by the potential for amendment. I’m guessing he would show more respect for the work of the amendment-framers than, say, Sam Alito does.
— Originalism refuses to acknowledge how nonsensical it to expect that these men, who rode horses or horse-drawn coaches to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, would’ve left us flawless answers to all questions arising from a world with electric cars, supersonic planes, artificial intelligence, Instagram, and a broiling planet? The Framers bequeathed us values and principles, not a thick maintenance manual.
— Finally, the Constitution’s First Amendment is emphatic that no single religious viewpoint should be privileged by law or given control of civil government. The two documents are meant to live in fruitful tension with one another, not to merge into one.
To sum up, it seems Mike Johnson does what the Bible tells him – unless, apparently, his caucus or Donald Trump want something different.
He hews rigorously to whatever the Constitution says must be done – unless the Supreme Court interprets that document in a way he doesn’t like. Then he opines, “The Supreme Court has been wrong a lot of times.” Unlike Mike Johnson, apparently.
Johnson is no worse a hypocrite than thousands of politicians across our political spectrum. But his certitude that he gets the Bible and the Constitution in a way that others do not…well, that makes him a particularly dangerous one.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia