27 Oct 2023

‘His Commitment Is Not to Democracy’: The Christian Nationalist Ideas That Drive Mike Johnson

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On Wednesday, when newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s gave his first speech in that role, he quoted British statesman and philosopher GK Chesterton, who once said, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded upon a creed,” and that it is “listed with almost theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”

“That is the creed that has animated our nation since its founding and has made us the great nation that we are,” Johnson said.

That line caught the attention of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who specializes in evangelical Christianity and politics. The idea that America is founded on a creed is a common one among evangelicals, and it was a sign to her that Johnson adheres to a worldview that can be described as Christian nationalist.

Johnson, a Shreveport, Louisiana, native, entered politics after spending more than two decades defending conservative Christian causes as a litigator at the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, and throughout his career, he has argued in courts and drafted legislation to outlaw same-sex marriage and restrict abortion.

That was one reason I reached out Du Mez, who combed through his long record of statements about his beliefs and influences to help me understand how his faith drives his politics. “As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation,” Du Mez told me. “So really, Christian supremacy and a particular type of conservative Christianity is at the heart of Johnson’s understanding of the Constitution and an understanding of our government.”

I talked with Du Mez about Johnson’s roots in the Christian right, the figures in that world who have shaped his understanding of American politics, and the anti-democratic turn she has watched the Christian right take in the past several years — particularly the striking way it coincided with attempts by former President Donald Trump, and Johnson himself, to overturn the 2020 election.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Katelyn Fossett: I want to talk to you a little about Mike Johnson’s worldview and the belief system that has shaped him.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez: He is incredibly standard in terms of being a right-wing, white evangelical Christian nationalist.

Fossett: Tell me a little more about what makes someone a Christian nationalist. Does he use that phrase to describe himself?

Du Mez: I don’t know that he uses that. But I feel comfortable applying that; it’s not in a pejorative way. It’s simply descriptive. As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation. And he stands in a long tradition of conservative white evangelicals, particularly inside the Southern Baptist Convention, who have a distinct understanding of what that means. And this is where evangelical author and activist David Barton comes in.

Johnson has said that Barton’s ideas and teachings have been extremely influential on him, and that is essentially rooting him in this longer tradition of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want. So really, Christian supremacy and a particular type of conservative Christianity is at the heart of Johnson’s understanding of the Constitution and an understanding of our government.

You’ll see this in some of his speeches. In his speech on Wednesday, he incorporated a G.K. Chesterton quote about the U.S. being based on a creed. And he said the American creed is “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

But he goes much deeper than that, and really roots that in what he would call a biblical worldview: The core principles of our nation reflect these biblical truths and biblical principles. He has gone on record saying things like, for him, this biblical worldview means that all authority comes from God and that there are distinct realms of God-ordained authority, and that is the family, the church and the government.

Now, all this authority, of course, is under this broader understanding of God-given authority. So it’s not the right of any parents to decide what’s best for their kids; it’s the right of parents to decide what’s best for their kids in alignment with his understanding of biblical law. Same thing with the church’s role: It is to spread Christianity but also to care for the poor. That’s not the government’s job.

And then the government’s job is to support this understanding of authority and to align the country with God’s laws.

Fossett: Tell me more about David Barton.

Du Mez: Barton is a very popular author in conservative evangelical spaces, and he is the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders. It is an organization that for decades has been promoting the idea that the separation of church and state is a myth. He is a self-trained historian. Some would call him a pseudo-historian. He’s not a historian — I can say that, as a historian. He’s an apologist. He uses historical evidence, cherry-picked and sometimes entirely fabricated, to make a case that the separation of church and state is a myth, and it was only meant to protect the church from the intrusion of the state but that the church is supposed to influence the government. He’s the author of a number of very popular books.

Back in the early 1990s, Jerry Falwell, Sr., started promoting his teachings. I noticed that Johnson said he was — I think about 25 years ago —introduced to David Barton’s work, and it has really influenced the way he understands America. And that would be around that same time.

It’s really hard to overstate the influence that Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces. For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation. What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray. It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.

I should also add that Barton’s Christian publisher back in 2012 actually pulled one of his books on Thomas Jefferson, because it was just riddled with misinformation. But that did not really affect his popularity. And again, these are not historical facts that we’re dealing with. It really is propaganda, but it’s incredibly effective propaganda. If you listen to Christian radio, you will hear them echoed. It’s just this pervasive understanding of our nation’s history that is based on fabrication.

Fossett: I’ve heard this idea from reporters and analysts that Mike Johnson is sort of a throwback to an earlier era, mostly the George W. Bush era, when there was this split, and alliance, between the business establishment and the social conservatives, which included evangelicals. I’m wondering if Johnson is in fact an evangelical like those earlier ones, or if he represents something new in evangelical politics.

Du Mez: First, I would say that any kind of split between the business conservatives and the social conservatives is not so clear-cut. It’s important to realize that one of Johnson’s core principles of American conservatism — as he reiterated them in his speech on Wednesday — is free enterprise. For conservative evangelicals, they don’t really see much of a tension between these, whereas the pro-business, old-school conservatives certainly would.

So he’s very much rooted in this longer history of the Christian right, and his years working with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an American Christian legal advocacy group, certainly has placed him at the center of things. That’s an incredibly important organization and really a hub of the Christian right for decades now; it would have put him in close contact with the movers and the shakers of the Christian right for a long time. So he’s rooted there. And he also has this nice-guy persona. That may seem like a bit of a throwback in the era of Trump.

But he is very much of this political moment in terms of his level of commitment to democracy. He spearheaded the congressional efforts to overturn the election. He is on the record as an election denier. Some have suggested that’s why he got the votes to be elected speaker. He’s a Trump supporter and Trump supporter in this regard, specifically: election denial.

I’ve noticed also in listening to his speeches that he is explicit about describing this country as a republic and not as a democracy. Inside these conservative Christian nationalist spaces, that is par for the course: that this is a republic, and it is a republic, again, founded in this biblical worldview, and that it’s not a democratic free-for-all. And so again, this is Christian supremacy.

If you align with this value system, then yes, you have the authority to shape our laws. If you do not, you have no business shaping our laws. He once said: “We don’t live in a democracy, because democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.” Meaning, the country is not just majority rule; it’s a constitutional republic. And the founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.

I think that’s really important here: His commitment is not to democracy. He’s not committed to majority rule; he seems to be saying he’s committed to minority rule, if that’s what it takes to ensure that we stay on the Christian foundation that the founders have set up.

Now, he would say that there’s really no tension here — that, again, if the Constitution represents this kind of biblical worldview that he suggests the founders embraced, then there’s going to really be no conflict. But he’s on record repeatedly talking about our nation being a republic, and in one case explicitly saying this isn’t a democracy, and that also is a very common theme in Christian nationalist circles and in conservative evangelical circles generally.

Fossett: I want to make sure I understand; how do these Christian nationalists see the distinction between a democracy and a republic?

Du Mez: When you press them on it, you’ll get different answers. What they’re doing is suggesting that the authority of the people in a popular democracy is constrained by whether or not people’s views align with … they would say the Constitution, but what they mean is a particular interpretation of the Constitution — one that understands the Constitution as being written to defend a particular Christian understanding of this country.

If you want to see what this means … well, one of his core principles is human dignity. Well, does that does that extend to the dignity of gay citizens or trans citizens? No, absolutely not. His understanding of human dignity is rooted in his understanding of biblical law. One of his core principles is the rule of law. But clearly, he’s comfortable with election denialism. So all of these core principles — freedom, limited government, human dignity — are interpreted through a conservative Christian lens and his understanding of what the Bible says ought to happen and how people ought to behave.

One thing I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is whether we’ve seen an anti-democratic turn among the Christian right or if it was always at the core of the movement. And certainly if you listen to the kind of rhetoric of what we call Christian nationalism today, it’s been around a long time; they always understood America to be a Christian republic.

But I think what has escalated things in the last decade or so is a growing alarm among conservative white Christians that they no longer have numbers on their side. So looking at the demographic change in this country, the quote-unquote “end of white Christian America” and there’s where you can see a growing willingness to blatantly abandon any commitment to democracy.

It’s really during the Obama presidency that you see the escalation of not just rhetoric, but a kind of desperation, urgency, ruthlessness in pursuing this agenda. Religious freedom was at the center of that. And it was, again, not a religious freedom for all Americans; it was religious freedom to ensure that conservative Christians could live according to their values. Because they could see this kind of sea change on LGBTQ rights, they could see the demographic changes, and inside their spaces, they have really played up this language of fear that liberals are out to get you, and you cannot raise your children anymore.

This kind of radicalizing rhetoric has very much taken root through conservative media echo chambers. So I really see Johnson as very much a part of this moment. But he is also somebody who is offering to rise above it and to stand in and to restore the nation to its Christian principles. When he uses the rhetoric of being anointed by God, for this moment, that’s really the context.

Fossett: If the long trend was away from democracy, it’s kind of an unusual convergence of interests that Trump — even though he is not a figure from the Christian right — is the one who actually ended up calling an election into question. He seems to represent an opportunity for the part of the movement that would like to water down democracy, even if he isn’t the preferred candidate of Christian conservatives in a lot of other ways.

Du Mez: Right. For Christian nationalists, this is God’s country, and all authority comes through God. And the only legitimate use of that authority is to further God’s plan for this country. So what that means is any of their political enemies are illegitimate in a sense, and those enemies’ power is illegitimate, and they need to be stripped of that power. And it’s really been kind of shocking for me to have observed these spaces in the last handful of years, where conservative evangelicals are much more comfortable in just making that plain and no longer feeling a need to pay lip service to democracy or voting rights or those sorts of things.

The disturbing thing to me is that I’m a Christian myself, and I understand how this language of God’s authority really does resonate with conservative Christians across the board.

When push comes to shove, is your allegiance to God or to democracy? I see people talking about democracy as an idol. Democracy is not biblical, you’re not going to find democracy in the Bible. At the end of the day, if you are a Christian, do you want to honor God first? Or some secular system? And the answer is kind of clear.

27 Oct 2023

Inside Dean Phillips’ longshot presidential campaign

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CONCORD, N.H. — The presidential campaign Dean Phillips will launch on Friday is such a longshot that some of his colleagues call it a vanity project. Other top Democrats privately deem it a mid-life crisis.

It may also be the clearest distillation to date of the undercurrent of discontent with Joe Biden among Democratic Party voters, even if it’s not likely to represent much of a genuine threat to the president.

Phillips, a millionaire businessperson, sees his quixotic bid differently. In private conversations, the Minnesota Democrat has stressed that voters need a generational alternative to the 80-year-old president. A half-dozen people who have spoken directly to him say he has sincerely described feeling something akin to obligation to primary Biden, while also expressing concern about Biden’s ability to beat former President Donald Trump a second time. He is “seeing a problem that everyone sees, but no one is talking about,” said one of those people, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. They described Phillips as “frustrated” by it all.

“He was really earnest in his presentation of it. He framed it as this revelation he had when he was in Vietnam, visiting the site of his father’s death,” said another person who spoke to Phillips, citing the trip the lawmaker took last spring to the place where his father was killed in a helicopter crash during the Vietnam War. “But I don’t think he understands the institutional forces that he is going to be up against and how — even if a lot of Democrats privately share some of his fears — no one is going to line up behind him.”

Initially, Phillips told these people he wanted to publicly recruit another candidate to this effort. In August, he called for a “moderate governor” to step up. “I thought there was a way for him to raise this concern, identify if there was space for another candidate, get someone else in, and then gracefully bow out and resume being a member of Congress,” said a third person who spoke to Phillips directly.

“Now, I feel like he missed the window to land this plane,” the person added.

Instead, Phillips himself decided to run — formally filing paperwork for “Dean 24, Inc.” to the Federal Elections Commission on Thursday night. Several people said the campaign Phillips is likely to mount will bear a strong resemblance to his 2018 congressional bid.

During that contest, Phillips shunned much of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s advice, relying on his deep marketing background instead. He drove a 1960 International Harvester milk truck to 32 cities and towns across his suburban Minneapolis-based House district, running a retail-heavy election. He argued for spending less on TV than on digital ads, while largely refusing to go negative on his Republican opponent.

His approach infuriated many Democrats in Washington. He won anyway, flipping a seat that hadn’t elected a Democrat in decades.

Signs of Phillips dusting off that playbook are already evident. A “Dean Phillips for President” bus, seen recently driving around New Hampshire by two operatives in the state, is tagged with a 2018 slogan: “Everyone’s invited.” The “government repair truck” he used in 2018 is making another appearance, too, repainted with “Dean Phillips for President.”

“He wants to scale his 2018 campaign to New Hampshire, if not to the national level,” said one of the people who has spoken directly with the representative.

But a presidential primary is not a congressional race, especially when your objective is to take out an incumbent. And there are other clear and serious hurdles ahead.

Phillips has already failed to make the ballot in Nevada, the second presidential nominating state, and he’s relying, in part, on a bombastic former Republican operative to lead it. In New Hampshire, where he plans to ground his bid, he’s a total unknown, needing to introduce himself to the state party chair just two weeks ago.

He’s also squaring off against Biden, who’s sitting on $91 million in campaign cash with the entire party machinery arrayed behind him.

For its part, the Biden campaign is not expected to engage the Phillips campaign much, according to a source familiar with the campaign’s thinking. To the extent they do, however, the source noted that they would cast him as wealthy and out-of-touch, while highlighting his 100 percent voting record with Biden.

“Everyone I know, to a person, is mystified, perplexed and frustrated by this move, and Dean has not really offered any public explanation,” said Jeff Blodgett, a top Minnesota Democratic operative and donor adviser. “People here are all in on Biden and focused on the work to get him reelected.”

Steve Schmidt, a top campaign strategist to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, is working with Phillips, which several Democrats called a “red flag.” In 2020, Schmidt also advised former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, another wealthy businessperson who considered an Independent presidential run. In addition, Phillips has brought on Ondine Fortune as a media buyer, while a firm led by Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based ad-maker, obtained permits for Phillips’ Friday event. Several staffers from Phillips’ congressional campaign are also filling out the early operation.

Phillips’ New Hampshire-focused bid comes at a particularly fraught moment for Democrats in the state, who lost their first-in-the-nation primary status for the 2024 presidential cycle earlier this month. The Democratic National Committee, with Biden’s blessing, reordered the presidential nominating calendar last year, elevating South Carolina to the first-place slot.

But Phillips hasn’t yet reached out to South Carolina Democrats, a sign “he’s not serious,” said South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Christale Spain, who called Phillips “a distraction” because “any serious Democratic candidate, would understand that Black voters in South Carolina have been the backbone of the Democratic Party.” The state’s presidential filing deadline closes on Nov. 10.

New Hampshire, meanwhile, plans to run an unsanctioned contest, which is unlikely to yield any delegates for whomever wins the state in January. This week, the Biden campaign confirmed that the president’s name will not appear on the ballot, but top New Hampshire Democrats are expected to lead a write-in effort on his behalf. Marianne Williamson, who ran for president in 2020, will also appear on the New Hampshire ballot.

Turmoil over the calendar is a factor for former New Hampshire House Speaker Steve Shurtleff, who said he “hopes” Phillips runs “because of the way things have been lined up by the DNC,” who are “trying to take it out of the hands of the people.”

“I’ve got respect for Phillips that he may decide to get in the race, knowing what the price he might pay,” Shurtleff continued. “By challenging the president, for someone like Dean, it could be the end of his political career.”

That question about Phillips’ future is still baffling Minnesota Democrats, many of whom said they expected him to run for statewide office one day. Instead, Democrats are lining up to run for his House seat, where he’s already drawn a primary challenger in Ron Harris, a DNC executive committee member.

“I believe every other Democratic member of Congress in Minnesota is supporting Biden, so it doesn’t help when your home team is on board with the incumbent president, while you’re trying to mount a challenge,” said Mike Erlandson, a former chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “I don’t know that the congressman is particularly concerned one way or the other about what other people in political places of power think, though this probably doesn’t help him with a statewide office run at home.”

Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.

27 Oct 2023

‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ so bad it’s scary

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An instant candidate for a worst film of the year list, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” from Universal and Blumhouse is based on a 2014 video-game by Scott Cawthon. Directed by Emma Tammi (“The Wind”) and written by Tammi, Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback (“Mateo”), the film is at its best when it merely makes no sense. Meet Mike (Josh Hutcherson of those godforsaken original “Hunger Games” films). When Mike was a boy he was charged by his mother with keeping an eye on his little brother Garrett (Lucas Grant), who was taken by a faceless man in a car and never seen again.

Cut to sleep-deprived adult Mike (Hutcherson). He lives with his much younger sister Abby (“Stranger Things”-ready Piper Rubio), who obsessively draws pictures of her with Mike and some cartoon animals. Almost unemployable, Mike accepts a job offered by a weirdly menacing agent (Matthew Lillard) at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, an abandoned 1980’s-era pizzeria/arcade.

Like in the game, Mike’s job is to sit before an array of security camera screens at night and make sure no shenanigans occur. Mike has a habit of taking sleeping pills in order to induce a reoccurring dream in which he experiences the moment Garrett was taken while he, Garrett and his parents were on a camping trip. Ergo, Mike is the sleeping security guard. He relives the moment Garrett was taken over and over. If this sounds like the plot of a bad Stephen King story, it is. I would hazard a guess that King is the favorite writer of the creators of this film’s plot. But they in no way share King’s power to mine our collective dreams for horror gold.

The plot will further involve “ghost kids” who appear to Mike in his dreams, animatronic, giant robotic and cartoonish animals – a bear, a rabbit, a duck, a fox and more – that lurk at Fazbear’s and can track down and kill humans in hideous ways for a PG-13 movie and a strange police officer named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, “Once Upon a Time”), who appears to be the only police officer in town. We are reminded repeatedly that Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza was huge in the 1980s, and in some scenes the robotic animals can be seen performing The Romantics’ 1983 hit “Talking in Your Sleep” (Get it?). Mike takes Abby to work (?). She befriends the strange creatures in the shadows. How? Why? “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is only for the most gullible viewers. The rest will find their eyelids impossibly hard to hold up.

In an opening scene, a security guard at Freddy’s runs through a maze of hallways before being strapped to a chair and get his face chewed off (off camera). Someone else gets a head bitten off. One of the animatronic creatures is just a skull-like head. Somehow, this thing gets from place to place and flies through the air without appendages or explanation. Mike and Abby’s evil Aunt Jane (a scenery-chewing Mary Stuart Masterson, speaking of the ’80s) appears in a few badly-staged scenes to demand custody of Abby. If she had a mustache, she’d twirl its ends. Hutcherson does a lot of running in the film and not a lot of acting. But he is hardly to blame. The makers of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” appear to forget that you need a screenplay to make a movie, not just a collection of things that happen. The film wants awfully to be a variation on a theme of King’s “It.” It ain’t.

(“Five Nights at Freddy’s” contains gruesome imagery, violence and endangered children)

“Five Nights at Freddy’s”

Rated PG-13. At the AMC Boston Common, AMC South Bay and suburban theaters. Grade: D

27 Oct 2023

‘Fellow Travelers’ makes way through Scare-driven D.C.

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There’s real history in this week’s fictional gay “Fellow Travelers” series that highlights the political horrors of queer life in 1950s Washington, D.C., and the horrors of the ‘80s AIDS plague.

“Fellow Travelers,” beginning on Paramount+ Friday and Showtime Sunday, is adapted from Thomas Mallon’s book by the Oscar-nominated “Philadelphia” screenwriter Ron Nyswaner. He held the rights for a decade before making this eight-part series.

“I fell in love with the two lovers at the center of Mallon’s novel,” Nyswaner, 67, said in a Zoom press conference of Hawkins Fuller (played by Matt Bomer), a slick if closeted D.C. insider, and the very Catholic, closeted Tim Laughlin (England’s Jonathan Bailey).

“It was the kind of relationship I find compelling: A relationship of opposites. They’re not meant to be together but are powerfully drawn to each other. I was immediately taken with that — and then this is a drama with high stakes. I know about that! I did three seasons of ‘Homeland.’

“In the ‘50s everything — your life, your career, your future — could be destroyed if people discovered you were queer.”

Casting was a no-brainer.  Bomer, Nyswaner revealed, “was onboard for three years before we got to make the thing. Matt is so good at what he’s thinking and feeling — without saying what he is thinking and feeling.”

As for Bailey, who like Bomer is an out gay actor, “As soon as we had our greenlight Jonathan was at the top of our list. The only problem was he was busy shooting ‘Bridgerton’ in London” and they needed to coordinate filming schedules.

“Fellow Travelers” highlights the now-infamous Red Scare, led by Senator Joe McCarthy of Minnesota and his assistant, the now notorious Roy Cohn, to ferret out Communists in government.  It soon transmuted into the Lavender Scare, a witch hunt for “perverts,” gays and lesbians, in the State Department.

The series is an expansion of the book, including the creation of two major Black characters.  Explained Nyswaner, “There are two major changes. We go through several decades, from the ‘50s to the ‘70s and ‘80s — and the book is entirely in the ‘50s.

“To air a show in 2023,” he continued, “with no Black characters didn’t feel right to me. So we went to research. There were a lot of ‘Black newspapers’ and lot of representations of those in Washington. A couple of people came from Black journalism who went to white newspapers and we modeled the character of Marcus (Jelani Alladin) on that. He had to protect his Black identity and therefore has to hide his homosexuality at the same time. We’re proud we made our Black characters as complex as our white characters.”

“Fellow Travelers” streams on Paramount+ Friday and on Showtime Sunday