Brad and Dan use the bulk of this episode to introduce listeners to the Christian nationalism of new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. They go over his right-wing record on abortion (near abolitionist), on LBGTQ rights (as homophobic as they come), on separation of church and state (doesn't believe in it), and his understanding of where your rights come from (his God).
They also discuss updates on SCOTUS and Clarence Thomas, as well as Trump's week in court - and the lawyers and allies who have flipped on him.
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Just wanted to say before we get going that We're all just living with the news of what happened in Maine this past couple days.
And it's heavy.
It's heavy in a way that somehow is also routine.
And so I just want to say we're thinking of all those folks affected.
It's a lot of grief.
It's a lot of pain.
It's a lot of trauma to digest.
We're also continuing, obviously, to do everything we can to stay abreast of what's happening in Israel and in Palestine, in Gaza, and in the region as a whole.
And we talk about it in this episode, but just want to say that we're really saddened by the violence against civilians and children in Gaza and are hopeful and
Some small way, I guess, that there will be an intervention, some kind of ceasefire to what's happening, and if nothing else, headway toward a different state of things in those places.
Anyway, I don't necessarily have the best words for this today.
But I wanted to mention it at the top to say all those things are weighing on us as I'm sure they're weighing on you.
We hope you're making it.
We hope you're finding ways to cope and you're finding community to support you as you digest.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And I should point out, if anybody sees this, right, I'm having to use the computer camera, so I look even paler and whiter than I normally do.
It's all for Halloween, right?
I've secretly been like hanging out in the dark for like weeks to get this pale.
I was gonna make a ghost Halloween joke.
I also feel a little bit like Blair Witch Project, if you're old enough to remember the Blair Witch Project.
So, anyway, last week, Dan, I told you that I had bought a minivan and you said, just, you blurted it out.
We didn't rehearse it.
You hadn't written it down.
You said, "That's like cargo shorts you can drive." And I have gotten feedback this week from several people who were like, that may be the best single line in the history of the podcast.
We have done 500 episodes of this show.
We've dissected Christian nationalism, the religious right, the history of American religion from every angle possible.
We've interviewed Congress people and distinguished scholars.
And I think that someday when we have a ceremony retiring this podcast, the single most beloved line will be, like cargo pants you can drive.
Do you feel proud of that?
I mean, when you come up with a line like that, does it just feel like everything you've trained for came into confluence?
Did you ever have to do one of those exercises where you have to write your own obituary and how you want to be remembered?
So clearly, my big takeaway is not, you know, parents of two kids, you know, who knew that they were loved and accepted or whatever.
Nope, it's that line.
So, uh, no, the reality is, basically, like, everybody knows that I'm not cool.
So, I'm allotted, like, maybe two good lines per year, and, and, like, that, that tops me out.
So, until at least the new year, that's as good as it's gonna get.
So I just want to say that I have taken what you said and I have really run with it because I've been driving the minivan for a week now and I feel, Dan, like I've reached a new level of spiritual enlightenment.
Because when you drive a minivan to the outside world, you're invisible.
People write you off as nothing.
You're not a big truck.
You're not a cool luxury sedan.
You're not a hot sports car.
You're just a minivan.
No one even looks at you.
So on the outside, you have to accept that you're nothing.
And on the inside, you're driving the minivan and you're so comfortable.
Just like with cargo shorts, there's pockets everywhere.
I find new pockets every time I drive it.
I can like control the seats.
I can see the kids in the back through some camera we have.
I can like fold down the seats and put in, you know, bags full of diapers and strollers.
It's like internally I'm free and out externally I'm no one and that feels like spiritual enlightenment.
You know what I mean?
I think you should like mix it and be like that person you know the person with a sports car that parks at the edge of the parking lot and takes like four spots so nobody hits their door.
You could do that but with like the minivan and be like you know I've got to have room for that automatic close hatchback to back up into every space.
Like every space I go I'm like I got to back it up because I want it.
I was about to ask if you're that person, because that's the person that I just can't deal with in parking.
So, one more comment, and then we're going to talk about real stuff, people.
So, if you're bored, just hit fast forward here.
You know, I left evangelicalism, Dan, 15 years ago.
For a long time, I've been online, hanging out with people who consider themselves ex-evangelical.
But now I feel like I truly embody the term as an ex-van.
No?
Okay.
Yeah.
I've had that.
We're not all Dan Miller.
We can't all make comments like the cargo shorts.
I had to practice it.
I wrote it down.
I tried it out on my two-year-old.
She didn't get it.
I just feel like my spiritual tradition now is van life.
And I don't mean the cool kind where you cruise around by the beach and camp.
I mean van life like I went from fundamentalist Christianity to van life as my spirituality.
I'm accepting that I'm no one on the outside and beautiful on the inside.
And if anyone wants a self-help book along those lines, I'm working on it.
The good thing about the minivan or any vehicle with kids is you hear these stories of people who, I don't know, maybe you're driving around the mountains of California, you slide off the road, you get stuck in a snowstorm, but you can always survive off the cereal in the seats and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
No, I think you're golden.
I think you're good.
I think it's a good life choice.
I have so many graham crackers stored up, I'm like a prepper at this point.
Okay, people, I'm sorry for this.
Dan and I had to get it off our chest.
We love you.
We appreciate you dealing with all this.
Let's get into it.
We've got a couple of things, Dan.
We've got to talk about the new Speaker of the House.
We've got a bunch of updates on people that we've been keeping track of, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump.
And if we get to it, and hopefully we'll have a few minutes, I also want to touch on the leader of the UAW strike being a mainline Christian.
So this is more, I mean, uplifting may be the wrong word, but a lot of you are always like, hey, the Weekly Roundup's great, but it's pretty tough to listen to.
That's an interesting story that I think will not be nearly as heavy.
And it's actually kind of, Fascinating to think about someone who's at the center of union collective bargaining being a leftist Christian.
And that's something that is part of this country's history, but has largely kind of been forgotten.
So hopefully we'll get there and we can talk about that for a couple of minutes too.
Let's start with some updates, Dan.
So, I'm going to give you the go at it here.
Developments with Clarence Thomas, with Donald Trump, with some other people.
Let's do that for a couple of minutes.
And then, friends, if you're like, wait a minute, there's a new speaker, and he's like a textbook Christian nationalist.
What about him?
We're going to spend a ton of time on that.
Don't worry.
We feel like this will set that up, though, in a way that's kind of nice.
So, all right, Dan, off to you.
So we'll start with Clarence Thomas.
Like you, another fan of van life, apparently.
So if you didn't know that Brad, Onishi, and Clarence Thomas have things in common, I guess that's it.
Clarence Thomas, we need almost like our own weekly sort of segment on him by now.
But there was another new report that came out.
I think it was New York Times that sort of broke it and then it's sort of been corroborated and followed up on by lots of other people.
But it was the New York Times reported this week that The Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee issued a report noting that Clarence Thomas had had a $267,000 loan to purchase a big RV.
I think this is in 1999, something like that.
Finance from a friend, wealthy friend, that kind of thing.
The reason it made news, though, is it appeared from the documents they have to look as if Thomas failed to repay a significant portion of that loan.
It also found that it looked like he only paid interest on the loan.
There was, again, an omission of a lot of this on disclosure statements, which raised for the committee tax questions.
I'm not a tax expert.
I hate doing my taxes.
I'm sure everybody hates doing their taxes.
But if you have a big debt or a big loan and somebody just writes it off, just basically gifts it to you, that becomes taxable income.
And it wasn't clear, isn't clear, Uh, that Clarence Thomas, if this applies to him, like, straighten all that out with the IRS and so forth.
So, another controversy that comes out.
It's worth noting that his attorney has, uh, countered these claims.
Uh, said that the loan was never forgiven.
Uh, said that the Thomas' made payments fully satisfying the terms of the loan.
I just want to note, as a side thing, that's, that's such a lawyer-y way of phrasing it.
Fully satisfying the terms of the loan.
Didn't say paid the loan off, said satisfied the terms of the loan.
It's a loan from a friend.
Whatever.
Anyway, call me cynical at this point.
But they haven't provided any additional documents to support this.
They haven't sort of responded to the specific questions from the committee.
So this is the topic.
Why does it matter?
It matters because, once again, when it comes to Clarence Thomas in particular, there's this sort of endless litany of evidence that, oh, it turns out that you're getting massive gifts and special treatment and things from friends and you're not reporting it, you're not disclosing it, you're not saying anything about it.
Clarence Thomas is not the only person on the court that these questions have come up about.
We know this.
I think for me, what it continues to highlight is that no matter what, right, I think for all of us like regular people, regular people who don't probably get, you know, trips on private jets and things like that, it all, like none of it smells, passes the smell test.
Like even if you disclose it, you're like, man, this sure like raises concerns about influence peddling, right?
When you have justices of the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, getting this kind of treatment and then not having to disclose it.
And it continues to drive this movement saying that SCOTUS should have a formal code of ethics.
And of course they don't.
And we've seen Thomas oppose that.
Roberts has been sort of trying to do what Roberts does and try to just kind of sit in the middle and not really commit himself to anything.
Samuel Alito just kind of comes out and says the quiet parts out loud regularly and sort of says that they don't need this.
But it's worth noting that Amy Coney Barrett, somebody we're not typically a fan of, right?
I came out recently and said that she supports the imposition of a code of ethics for SCOTUS.
I said that when she was speaking at the University of Minnesota.
Justice Kagan has said that she thinks an ethics code would be, quote, a good thing.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another person who's typically not our favorite when it comes to actual legal practice, He said he hoped for, quote, concrete steps toward ethics reporting and said that that would be, quote, soon he hoped.
So there's some movement on the court.
I guess maybe the last point to think about is, for me, I think it's interesting that some of these newer justices are the ones who are sort of the most willing to discuss this and say this is possible, while you have those who are more established figures in the court, Thomas in particular, but Alito as well, who are really opposed to this.
So again, as you say, something we've talked about.
We're not going to spend 20 minutes rehashing everything about Clarence Thomas, but I think it just keeps this issue in front of us.
And the fact that it stays in front of us, I think, is a good thing.
I think that ProPublica and others who keep reporting these things and uncovering these and keeping it in front of us, I think that's the only way you're ever going to get to something like a code of ethics for SCOTUS.
So, happy to hear your thoughts on this.
Well, you know, we could rehash Clarence Thomas, and I'm glad that we continue to pay attention to him and not look away.
But I want to zoom out.
There's a great new article at The Washington Spectator, which is an outlet I really appreciate.
It's by Lisa Graves, Evan Warpol, and Caitlin Mahoney.
And it begins like this.
American democracy has a billionaire problem.
It's not just that they're not paying their fair share of taxes.
They're trying to buy our highest courts to advance their personal agendas, bending the law to their will.
So, in the piece, the authors go through some of these examples of how this is happening.
One of the billionaires is Jeff Yaz, who is somebody who is trying to essentially take hold of the Pennsylvania courts through his influence and money.
You, of course, have Leonard Leo, who is In charge of a billion-dollar-plus trust, and that's all at the hands of another billionaire.
There's Dick Uline, who is somebody who is doing much of the same.
I'm not going to go through the whole article because we just really don't have time today, and we're going to run out of time to talk about the speaker and about some other stuff.
I'll just say that the Clarence Thomas issues, Dan, are a microcosm of bigger issues.
Right.
It's not like Clarence Thomas is this one bad actor who's seemingly always hanging out with billionaires who want to give him stuff because this is just something that is true now of American politics.
Big money is American politics, sadly.
And the judiciary has been identified by especially the American right as the place where if you have billions of dollars, you can really create a pipeline and a level of influence to have a overwhelming
So my comment would just be Clarence Thomas, all of these weird, suspicious, keeps getting free stuff, hanging out with billionaires, eating their food, riding on their yachts.
It's not like that's a singular thing.
It's a part of a system now.
And if you want to read more, check out the Washington Spectator on this, because I think it's a great piece that goes through a lot of the examples.
I think just one last point to make about that, if people go back and listen to like the really defensive remarks that like Alito makes, I feel like that's right between the lines.
There's a sense that it is so common in the echelons that they move in that he's just sort of incensed and outraged that anybody would even question it.
And I think that like that tells us everything we need to know about the sort of the mindset and the commonality of this.
Let's shift gears here a little bit, just in terms of people who exist in their own spheres and are incensed when they get held accountable.
Donald Trump was in court this week.
There was a lot of weird stuff that happened.
Again, let's spend a few minutes on this.
Give us an update on Trump, his trials, gag order, so on and so forth.
The trials and tribulations of Donald Trump or something like that, right?
Yeah, so a couple things.
As everybody knows by now, you've got sort of multiple fronts opening in the Trump legal battles.
On one hand, in federal court, you've had these issues where he's had a gag order placed on him to basically stop insulting court officers is what that one's about.
Others have asked for gag orders to stop him from potentially intimidating witnesses and things like this.
But in court this week, a few things happened.
One, Trump actually was called to the stand and challenged by the judge in his fraud trial to ask about comments that he made that the judge felt were aimed at the clerk and fined Trump $10,000.
Now, $10,000 for Trump is, I'm assuming, like, you know, pocket change that you find, like, I don't know, in the car seat of your minivan or somewhere.
That's like $8,000 for Dan Miller, probably.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah, of Monopoly money.
If we're talking about Monopoly money, it's true.
But I think it was interesting that he was called, and it was interesting, if people watch this or you read things about this, the body language.
The sense, like he was incensed, clearly that he would be questioned, that he is in this context where he has to do what somebody tells him to do.
He goes storming out of court, you know, it's just very theatrical.
So that's a whole piece about Trump.
I think the notion of gag orders, EACLU filing an actual sort of amicus with the court saying that this is unconstitutional, that the gag orders are too vague.
That would be a whole separate sort of thing.
But I think that's one piece, right?
You have Trump on sort of the macro level, as we understand, right, with all of these trials being called to account, which is something that has just never happened to him, his entire existence.
I don't even want to call it a career, right?
But even on like the micro level of within the courtroom having to be called literally to answer for statements that he's made and so forth.
I think this is sort of an interesting dynamic to watch moving forward.
Tied in with this though, what I think is more interesting, it happened in the fraud hearings and trial, and then I want to go down to Georgia, are the people turning against Trump.
Which again, also he is clearly incensed about.
In the fraud trial, which again, he's already been found to have committed fraud.
This is to determine what he owes and so forth.
But his longtime fixer, Cohen, was testifying against him, kind of with some mixed results.
It's interesting, again, when people talk about Trump's demeanor, the way that he views this, of course, the things that he tries to say about Cohen.
I've said for a long time, charisma is a weird thing.
We all know this.
We've all known people in our lives who just have that kind of ability to draw people in.
Trump has a very dark charisma.
We've seen that, right?
And I call it a dark charisma because he's very charismatic.
It goes in terrible directions.
It's directed at terrible ends, but it's this charismatic thing.
I've never understood the loyalty that people show to him when they know that he's only in it for him, right?
He's never going to give anything back.
I understand loyalty when people feel like they get something from it, right?
Or they know the person that they're loyal to would support them.
But we're seeing that fall apart for Trump.
And you and I have talked about this a lot.
We've been kind of waiting for this to happen.
It's happening in the fraud trial, but everybody knew that Cohen turned on Trump a while back.
So let's move south into Georgia, right?
The trial that I think is probably the most significant for Trump in a number of ways, not least of which because it's a state trial.
He chose not to try to relocate it to federal court.
Not clear that that would have worked, but he chose not to do that.
Which means that someday if he's president, or if he has a sympathetic person who's president, he can't be pardoned if he's found guilty in state court.
So I find that really significant.
It also gets to the heart that I think most of us are interested in, the heart of the issue of election denial, election subversion, connections to January 6th, all of that sort of stuff.
So in Georgia this week, The third Trump attorney turned against him.
So a little bit of a recap.
We mentioned this last week, but Sidney Powell was the first of his former attorneys to turn against him.
She pled guilty last week to six misdemeanor accounts, got six years of probation, but has agreed to work with prosecutors, right, as needed.
I think right after we recorded last week, Kenneth Chesbrough was the second attorney who pled guilty.
It was the day after Powell.
This is the person behind Trump's false elector scheme, right?
And we can all, this is one of the things we're going to come back to, but we can all now call it a false elector scheme.
That's not up for debate anymore because somebody pled guilty to it.
Somebody has now been convicted in a court of law Of a scheme to have false electors to disrupt the 2020 election.
I think that that's really crucial.
He pled guilty to a felony count of conspiring to file false documents.
This also links Trump to January 6.
These are the documents that were given and certified to Mike Pence.
So you have like a direct connection from somebody in the Trump orbit to efforts to get Pence to not certify the election.
And he also agreed to work with prosecutors.
And then this week, Jenna Ellis is the third of the attorneys to turn on Trump.
She worked with Giuliani to press state legislatures to overturn the 2020 election results.
So she was involved in that sort of that wing of the election conspiracy.
She pled guilty to a felony charge that she was part of an effort to make false statements to Georgia lawmakers.
Also agreed to work with the prosecution.
So you've got three Depending who you read, what you look at, significant or maybe less significant, or however many levels removed from Trump directly, people who have turned against him.
Here are my takeaways from this.
This is why I think it matters.
The first thing is, just on a tactical side, Prosecutors don't have to lay out their evidence to try to convict these people now, right?
I've been thinking about this.
All the law people can tell me that I'm wrong and I don't know anything about the law and legal strategy, which is all true.
But remember, some of these folks requested speedy trials.
There's this Georgia law that allows you to request a speedy trial.
And if prosecutors had had to go through into court and prosecute these cases, they would have had to show a lot of their evidence.
And I have a hunch that's something Trump's team was probably hoping for, right?
You get kind of a preview of all the evidence that's coming out.
You're better prepared when your trial starts and so forth.
Prosecutors don't have to do that now, right?
That's already been taken care of.
Point number two, Trump's team of course slammed these deals.
The fact that nobody's doing jail time, they all have probation and so forth.
One of Trump's attorneys said, quote, that the RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for wills.
Yeah.
Yep.
That's how RICO cases work.
Every legal strategist will say this is what it is.
You round up all these people, And you try to get the people lower down to flip so that you can get to the bigger names and the people further up the list.
We've talked about this before.
Rico was started because of organized crime, a sort of pyramid structure of power, and that's what this is aimed at.
And it's working.
I think the Trump team is scared of this and should be, right?
I can't imagine, going back to that loyalty thing, Why people at this point facing the prospect of jail time, of the ends of their careers, and getting zero support from Trump.
All Trump does, of course, is send out statements on X or Truth Social, I guess I should say, about how he didn't know them and he never knew them and they were always terrible and whatever.
So they're turning against him.
And the other thing that I would say with this is, you know, Trump will say it's a witch hunt.
It's not.
There are now people convicted for trying to subvert the 2020 election in the state of Georgia, just like there are people now convicted for Trying to create an insurrection and prevent the certification of the election on January 6th.
And I know that people will say, well, they're just making pleas to stay out of jail.
It's fine, whatever.
They'll get to appeal those.
Our legal system works that way.
But you can't say there's no evidence of anything, there's no wrongdoing here, nothing to see, because there are now convictions for this.
I think that this is real and it's significant.
And I think that Trump is in peril.
There are news stories, as I would expect, that prosecutors are talking to other people in the Trump orbit, other potential witnesses.
So I think all of this speaks to a lot of things that are going on right now.
We're seeing Trump, I think, breaking under the pressure a little bit of the gag orders and people turning against him.
I think we're seeing real legal peril.
And I think in Georgia, for me, this is the place where I think perhaps the legal peril is the greatest.
So I'm not going to spend too much time on this just because of everything we had to cover today.
What I'll say, though, is that in addition to everything you just outlined, Mark Meadows, we now know, has testified to a grand jury.
So Mark Meadows, you know, former chief of staff, has been given immunity by Special Prosecutor Johnson.
And, no, Johnson?
What's going on?
Anyway, I have a newborn.
I slept about three hours last night.
So in addition to everything happening in Georgia, we know that Meadows has also flipped, right?
So we are seeing all of these folks starting to turn on Trump in order to save themselves.
Jenna Ellis cried crocodile tears in court and said she didn't know any better.
And Sidney Powell and Chesbrough.
So we will see what happens.
But I agree, you know, we if you go back to the archives and listen for years and we were like, he'll never get convicted.
It's just not going to happen.
And I think now you and I are both like on that sort of lean Trump gets found guilty.
Now, when?
I don't know.
Of what?
I don't know.
What does it mean?
I don't know.
But it really does look like real accountability in the law system is coming for him.
So now some of you are listening and you're like, guys, you just spent the first 20 minutes talking about Thomas and Trump.
What about the speaker?
That's the big news this week.
We wanted to set all this up because I think there's a lot to tie in here explaining who Mike Johnson is By way of Thomas and by way of Trump and we'll cover that when we get back.
We'll take a break.
See you in a minute All right, so Dan You know, we have this new Speaker of the House, and his name is Mike Johnson.
He's from Louisiana.
I'm gonna bet that before this week, 98% of the folks listening did not know who he was.
Maybe you're from Louisiana, maybe for some reason you had encounters with Mike Johnson for something, whatever, but most of you did know who he was.
He's not Kevin McCarthy, he's not Jim Jordan, he's not Matt Gaetz, he's not Boebert, whatever.
He's not one of those people in front, all the time.
So now he's Speaker of the House, and now it's time to figure out, well, who is this guy?
So let's, you know, I want to give everybody a kind of rundown of who he is, but I want to say this.
He started his career, well, he's had a lot of different stages in his career.
One of those stages was as a lawyer.
Constitutional lawyer who worked for the Alliance Defense Fund and other things.
And that means that he was part of the conservative pipeline built to not only get people like Clarence Thomas on the bench, but then to lobby the likes of Clarence Thomas in order to overturn Roe v. Wade.
We'll get to his stances on abortion in a minute.
But the short story is Mike Johnson is a near abortion abolitionist.
He thinks abortion should be banned in almost every instance possible.
And so Him and his sort of work as a lawyer is part of the whole ecosystem that feeds into someone like Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Coney Barrett getting put on the bench in the first place.
Now, additionally, if we just go back to some of the events from the week, Dan, one of the people who was up to be speaker and some people thought would end up being speaker was Representative Emmer and Tom Emmer Looked good.
And at the last minute, he withdrew because he didn't have the votes.
Why?
Well, there's a lot of reporting saying it's because Trump called all his cronies in the GOP caucus.
And he said, this guy's not speaker because he criticized me after J6.
Emmer was critical of J6 and Trump's role in it.
And therefore, Trump was like, Trump literally said, right, a quote from him is, I killed him, meaning I killed his candidacy.
I want to stop for a minute, Dan, and think about that, okay?
You just outlined for us the ways that Trump is being tried in Georgia, that there are his own lawyers basically saying, yep, I plead guilty.
We tried to set up a fake elector scheme.
We tried to overturn a free and fair election in the state of Georgia, and we're going to see later on, right, that he tried to do that nationwide, essentially.
He's the guy, the guy that's been charged with 91 counts, got a fraud trial going on in New York.
He's the guy that can make one phone call and the GOP caucus is like, we got a boss, no problem.
And they kill the candidacy of a potential Speaker of the House after an embarrassing debacle that lasted weeks.
That's where we are with the GOP.
The guy who's being tried, the guy whose own lawyers have said, yep, guilty, we tried to fake elector this thing, he's still the guy that can call the GOP congresspeople and be like, I want this person, not that person.
That is a big weird thing that, I mean, it's hard to get your head around that historically.
Textbooks will say that someday, but anyway, go ahead.
I was just going to throw in there on that point, right?
We talk all the time about the contemporary GOP not being about governing, right?
That's been on display for three weeks as they couldn't find a speaker or whatever, but Think about the logic of Trump here, right?
Because we hear all the time that Trump is like the de facto head of the Republican Party.
He's the leader of the party.
And all of that is true.
Why does he want Emmer shutdown?
Is it because of policy?
No.
Is it because of his politics?
No.
Is it because he even thinks he's going to work with Democrats?
Nope, none of that.
It's because he doesn't personally like him.
He has personal animosity against him because of things he said about January 6th, right?
It's all about personal animus for Trump.
I know people are tired of me talking about that.
That's populism 101, right?
Populist leader is the people.
He is the embodiment of this.
If you criticize him, you're the enemy of the people, and that's what Emmer is.
It shows that priority from Trump But as you're pointing out, it shows the priority for the GOP that they would capitulate to this, that, again, wherever people are on the politics of Israel and Hamas, the House, and therefore the US, can't really do much because it has a minimalist Speaker of the House.
We have another budget issue coming up, or a spending issue, what, November 17th, I think it is?
On and on and on, this litany of things that they can't do.
I'm reading today about how their own Biden impeachment investigation is like fizzling right now because it kind of couldn't do anything for weeks, or it was so far in the background that nobody sees it, and it's all about political theater.
All of that is sidelined because Trump makes some phone calls and doesn't like a guy.
That's what it comes down to.
So it just illustrates how ridiculous the party is.
But what do you call a political party that is based on loyalty to one man?
You call that fascist?
You call that authoritarian?
You call that not democratic?
You call that not good for a nation that would like to be a healthy democracy?
So who becomes speaker?
Who becomes speaker is Mike Johnson, this relatively unknown figure.
Now, I want to say a couple of things.
If you're from the evangelical world, you know guys like Mike Johnson.
He's soft-spoken.
He's kind of nerdy.
He is not Jim Jordan.
Jim Jordan shows up and he's like, I'm not wearing a coat.
He's abrasive, right?
Dan, if you meet Jim Jordan at a barbecue, he's abrasive.
He's going to tell you you're not cooking the burgers right and you're not a real man, right?
He's going to brag about how his grill at home is way better.
He's going to talk about how he could wrestle anyone here and kill them even if they were 17-year-old or 25-year-old stud.
He's that dude where you're like, oh my God.
I will do anything I can to get away from this guy at the barbecue.
Mike Johnson- You're volunteering to do dishes to get away from that guy.
Yeah.
You're volunteering to just do what you'll take.
You'll watch the Bounce Castle with the 87 kids in there just to get away from this guy.
And Mike Johnson is that dude at church who doesn't talk a lot.
He's kind of, like I said, he's got glasses.
He's kind of Ned Flandery.
But he's a true believer, Dan.
He is a 100% dyed-in-the-wool purist.
He believes in Christian nationalism.
He is a textbook Christian nationalist, okay?
And so he doesn't have the acerbic flair of Jim Jordan.
But he does have the dyed-in-the-wool bonafides of a Christian nationalist who has, throughout the last decades, shown in every way as a politician what he thinks.
Let me go down the line.
Vanity Fair has a nice write-up.
I'm gonna draw on a whole bunch of sources right now.
Here's Vanity Fair.
Johnson is proudly anti-abortion.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, he called it a great, joyous occasion.
In Congress, he co-sponsored legislation that would have banned abortions at about six weeks of pregnancy.
He worked on efforts to shut down abortion clinics in his state.
He is an anti-abortion organizer with the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group, and they have given him an A-plus rating.
We'll get to this in a minute.
He blames school shootings on abortion in some way.
Here's a quote from him, if you don't believe me.
When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it's expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.
All right, that's one.
Let's go down to LGBTQ rights, shall we?
Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do.
This is a free country, but we don't give special protections for every person's bizarre choices.
That's pretty clear.
You can call homosexuality sinful or destructive.
Ultimately, it's both.
Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural, and the studies clearly show are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.
There you go.
Separation of church and state.
He doesn't really believe in it.
the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.
There you go.
Separation of church and state.
He doesn't really believe in it.
I'm going to give you one key quote on this.
The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.
Meaning, the founders wanted to protect the church from the state, but the founders did not want to protect the state from the church.
Okay?
Now, what he talks about often is that he believes in a biblical worldview.
Now, there's a lot of folks out there who are talking about Mike Johnson as a Reconstructionist or Dominionist.
We will get to that in later weeks.
I don't like to speculate, and there's good reason to see him as one of those.
He's talked about Jim Garlow.
So, if you want to do Inside Baseball on that, I will address that soon.
Don't worry, okay?
He's a climate denier.
He thinks evolution is also to blame for mass shootings.
I can go down the line.
Now, just to circle back to Trump.
Trump kills the candidacy for Speaker of Tom Emmer.
And yet, Mike Johnson is the guy that ends up being the one, ostensibly with Trump's blessing.
You know what this guy was, Dan, when it came to the 2020 election?
He was one of the architects of the scheme to overturn that election.
This was a guy that was working as a former lawyer, as somebody who knows the law, he was working to overturn the election.
And there's a lot of written about this already.
If you want to spend 15, 20 minutes, 2 hours, 10 hours, you can go read so many pieces and some of these will be in our weekly roundup, show notes, substack, research roundup.
There are so many pieces of evidence that show this guy, Dan, was an architect of stealing the election.
So I just, I'm going to throw it to you in 10 seconds.
I just want to stop.
You all ready for this?
The GOP did not elect someone speaker because he was not loyal to Trump.
The GOP got rid of Kevin McCarthy.
It went through a whole litany of people.
Who does it end up with?
I just want you to see who represents The GOP right now.
It's who we always say represents the GOP right now, Dan.
You know who it is?
An ultra-MAGA loyalist who is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian nationalist.
We say it all the time.
Show me the GOP.
Mitt Romney's retiring.
Blah blah blah.
You know who the GOP is?
Mike Johnson.
Anti-LGBTQ homophobic bigot.
Blame school shootings.
And we're going to talk about Maine and what he said about Maine in a minute.
Blame school shootings on abortion and on evolution.
Doesn't want people to have the ability to choose with their own bodies.
Does not want there to be a separation of church and state.
Does not think that that's actually a real thing.
I have so much more to say.
I have three hours worth.
Let me get some of your reactions at this juncture.
Yeah, so I want to pick up on that point about, you know, the fact that they did this.
So this is the compromise candidate for the GOP, right?
For weeks we see the GOP, it's fractious, it's divided, they can't agree on a candidate.
And there's the, you know, again, I think they're kind of between the lines or sort of background discussion that maybe the moderates are finally going to, you know, sort of put their foot down.
Or even not the moderates, but just not the like...
Super ultra MAGA people, this is their chance to refuse to give in to the more MAGA parts of the party and so forth.
That was a sort of story that was going.
This idea that, you know, we're not going to have a repeat of what happened with Mike McCarthy.
And so they all see this.
And so who do they unify around?
Kevin McCarthy.
Mike McCarthy is a football coach, Dan.
Yes, he is.
Get it together, Dan.
Get it together.
All right, sir.
I even had more than three hours of sleep.
So yes, you can tell that I watch football and don't think well at times.
Yeah, so thank you.
Kevin McCarthy.
But the idea is that, or I think a narrative, again, I think it's an aspirational, hopeful narrative that gets put out as if it's sort of a real thing, that this is going to moderate the House GOP.
And what did they unify around?
They unified around everything you would describe.
They unified around a Trump acolyte, MAGA true believer, Hardcore cultural conservative who has fought sort of the most extreme fringes of these kind of culture war issues for decades, who is still there, right, as we're talking about and we're going to hear about it with Maine and all the other stuff.
That's who they unified around.
And I know I keep, I beat this drum every week, but I guess maybe you'll have a Halloween party coming up, and it'll be Uncle Ron this time, or whatever, or whoever it is.
Maybe it's somebody else, and still, still this, well you know, MAGA doesn't speak for the party.
Not everybody in the party is about Trump.
Not everybody in the party is a Christian nationalist.
You and Brad, I really like your podcast, but you're always making everything about Christian nationalism and painting with too broad a brush.
I hear all of those things all the time.
I know that there are exceptions, but don't come at me with the line that somehow or another Christian nationalism is not the defining ethos of the American GOP right now, when the only person the party could unify around is this guy.
That's the thing for me, is that if we want to know who they are, there we are.
Another football quote years ago, a coach who made himself famous got very defensive at the podium because they got beaten by somebody who said, they were who we thought they were.
Well, guess what?
The GOP is who we thought they were.
They're who we thought they were before they kicked McCarthy out.
They're the same GOP, and they just keep doubling and tripling down on the bets, and it's on display every week.
We're going to prove it.
If you don't believe us about Johnson and his Christian nationalism, we'll prove it right after the break.
Be right back.
All right, I want to play for you all a clip of Johnson explaining where he thinks that rights come from.
Where do your rights come from as a human being?
Here you go.
And that's why it's so jarring to be sitting in the greatest deliberative body in the world, the United States Congress, and to hear elected representatives of the people.
Every member of Congress, every member of the House, represents roughly 760,000 citizens.
Right.
So there's a singular voice on behalf of all those people.
And some of these voices now are in this chamber arguing that our rights do not come from God.
Think about how scary that is.
If you believe your rights come from government, Then it means you don't really owe any allegiance at all to God.
Yeah.
You have no accountability.
Well, you're not free.
You're not free because the people who are governing you and giving you things in exchange for those things always come to sacrifice of your liberty.
absolutely all right Dan in that clip Johnson talks about how our rights come from God that God that your rights do not come from government they come from God and I I can see how even some of you listening to this show can be like, well, that kind of makes sense.
If God created the world, then your rights as a human being come from God, the creator of the world, not from the government.
I hear you.
I can see how that makes sense.
And I understand also why you might think that if you are a theist, if you're somebody who believes in one God, you might think, okay, it all goes back to that one source.
All right, that's fine.
But I just want to give a mini History lesson, Dan?
You and I trained for a long time as scholars.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I spent a long time in my life reading Reformation theologians, medieval church history, things about the religious wars of Europe, modern theology and its developments after those wars and before World War I. I don't know, you remember those days in Oxford?
Dusty libraries, head down, drinking lots of tea and other stuff.
Guess what we learned from that?
What we learned is, is that there are a lot of folks in Christian history who have claimed to be the ones who know how to interpret what God wants.
That since the Reformation, right, there have been thousands and tens of thousands of different Christian groups that have had their own interpretation.
And what happens in government, whether you go back to medieval Catholic Europe, whether you go back to Calvin's Geneva, the religious wars of centuries ago, is that if you start to talk like Mike Johnson is talking, that rights come from God, okay?
They don't come from government.
I totally get it.
You don't necessarily want the government to be this, you know, all-encompassing thing.
But Andrew Seidel, friend of the show, colleague, said it so well the other day.
God-given rights can be taken away by men claiming to speak for that God.
God-given rights can be taken away by men claiming to speak for that God.
So when Mike Johnson says, your rights come from God, or that we are all in this house, this Congress, we are all here to represent the Creator, right?
Who gives us the chance to be leaders in a place where He has given us the rights, blah, blah, blah.
The scary thing that Andrew Seidel is pointing out is whoever has the leadership, the power, whoever has the controls, and they think that they understand that the rights God gave you, those men can also tell you the rights God didn't give you.
Mike Johnson can tell you that God did not give you the right to live out your identity as a sexual human being who is gay or trans or bi, right?
A gender identity, a sexual identity, and so on.
He can say God did not give you the right to control your own body and choose how you conduct yourself when it comes to reproductive rights.
He can come and say God did not give you the right To live in a religiously plural republic where all people are treated equal.
You see how this gets sinister real quick?
It sounds benign coming from the dorky Flanders guy who just got elected Speaker of the House, and it turns into, if you say God gave us rights, you're the one who now decides which rights God gave us.
That's where it gets hella scary, Dan.
Right?
Okay, I got another clip I want to play us, but what do you think of this?
One of the themes that's come up a lot in the It's in the Code series that I say a lot is, no matter how much people talk about encountering God, having some immediate relationship with God, interpreting God, whatever, and I don't say this to slam everybody who's a Christian or anything like that, but the fact of the matter is, you never get to God.
You always get to somebody who claims to speak for God.
Whether you're talking about people writing the Bible, whether you're talking about people interpreting the Bible, whether you're talking about people telling you what these God-given rights are, it's never God speaking from on high in some unmediated way.
It's always other human beings that we're running into.
That's something I think all of us should be aware of.
And the other thing I'll just say about the people who want to appeal to the God-given rights is—and I've had this conversation, right?
It's not always productive, but it's usually fun.
I've had this conversation where I'll say to them and say, well, that's cool, but I thought you believed that God was the judge of everything.
I do.
I absolutely do.
It's God passing.
Cool.
So why does he need you?
Why does he need you to pass judgment?
What if we all accept that we're sinful and fallen and we're misled, all the stuff that the conservative Christians say they believe?
And so maybe let's take a model where we let people have pretty extensive rights, and if there are things they're not comfortable doing or they think are wrong or against their conscience, they don't have to do them.
But other people can do that if they want to, and we're going to trust that if there is a God that's the judge of the cosmos, God will sort it out.
God will punish the people that need to be punished.
The people that are out of line, God will work on their conscience and win them over to the faith, or whatever.
The point is, there are other ways even for theists or Christians to think about this that to me show everything that you're talking about.
Because I look at it and say, well, if you really believe that God's in charge, you really believe that God's the judge, How come you're busy fighting for political power so much?
How come you're the one who wants to judge everybody?
How come you're the one who wants to punish everybody?
I think that says a lot about motives and it should scare all of us, whether we identify as religious or not.
That leads us right to what happened in Maine and the incredibly tragic situation that's still unfolding.
So, 18 people dead at least, dozens injured, a manhunt still underway.
It goes without saying.
Like, Dan and I texted about this this week and we're just like, if you want us to be really transparent, friends, we don't know what else to say about these things in this country.
I mean, there is always more to say.
And there are victims.
There are families, communities that are beyond repair at the moment.
And it's just another day in the United States.
What does that tell you about this country?
Now, if we go back to Mike Johnson, what is What does he say?
Thoughts and prayers.
It's almost like you could have just, you know, written it for him.
And he says, it's not the time for legislation.
We can't let it's not the time to legislate guns.
Now, I want to play you a clip, Dan.
And this is from him speaking in a church.
And he talks about why we have entered a place where there are so many gun deaths in the United States.
And here's what he here's what he says.
You remember in the late 60s we invented things like no-fault divorce laws.
We invented the sexual revolution.
We invented radical feminism.
We invented legalized abortion in 1973, where the state, the government, sanctions the killing of the unborn.
I mean, we know that we're living in a completely amoral society.
And so people say, how can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?
Because we've taught a whole generation, a couple of generations now of Americans, that there is no right and wrong.
So in that clip, he blames violence and shootings and so on.
On what?
He says the 1960s.
Guys, I don't know.
It's like I wrote a whole book about it.
I did, actually, if you're wondering.
And I said that for a group of white Christian nationalists, the 1960s represented the time when they feel like the country lost its way.
And guess what?
That's what he says here.
The 1960s, the breakup of the nuclear family.
The 1970s and the legalization of abortion.
Rewriting what marriage can be.
He goes through all this and he says, this is when we went into moral relativism.
And that's how you end up with the sick and sad hearts that lead to tragic events like what happened this week.
We've pointed it out before, Dan, and I'll just tee you up if you want to say it again.
It's really weird that in these cases of mass shootings, gun violence, in a country where the leading cause of death for children is handheld killing machines, the answer is we cannot regulate that.
When it comes to abortion, oh yeah, we can regulate that.
I'm in.
And actually, I'm Mike Johnson.
I've been fighting for that for decades.
I want to regulate that.
Okay.
Homosexuality, you want to make Gay marriage not legal?
You want to make sure there's no special protections in the workplace because of sexual identity?
Oh, you want to regulate that.
Got it.
Got it.
Okay.
You want to make sure that there's no special protections for non-Christians, people who are not part of your faith, atheists, and so on?
I could go down the line.
We've said this a thousand times on the show.
People like Mike Johnson want to regulate everything except handheld killing machines.
It's the epitome of hypocrisy.
I got one more quote I want to throw you away, but what do you think about this?
Just a couple of things.
One, just on the LGBTQ thing, this goes way back, maybe before the time of some people listening, but back when Texas had anti-sodomy laws.
This is the guy who defended those, right?
And made arguments about them.
Not even just banning same-sex marriage, but wanting to criminalize same-sex intercourse between consenting adults, right?
So, he wants to go right in the bedroom and make sure that we're legislating.
So, it goes to the point we make all the time that this is not about, you know, small government or some such thing.
The other thing I'll just say is this, is any theory of God-given rights or natural law or whatever will say that one of the fundamental rights is the right to life.
We have that down there.
That's what they, in our founding documents, will talk about this.
That's the argument that's made about abortion.
But when it comes to, to your point Brad, legislating or doing anything concrete to protect people from gun violence, Nope.
Nope.
So where's the God-given right there that is supposed to be backed up by state-sanctioned legal authority?
It's nowhere to be found.
But think about it.
Think about God is the one that gives you your rights.
So someone like Mike Johnson is going to say, you do not have the right to go in your bedroom and put your body in conjunction with another person's body in a way you want.
That's not allowed.
And we might put you in jail because that's not a God-given right.
Right.
But it is your God-given right to have as many handheld killing machines as you want.
And for us not to regulate that.
Think about the kind of God that this guy must worship.
It's a really scary kind of God, isn't it?
A violent, vengeful God, right?
Who's watching you in the bedroom, but wants other people to have as many handheld killing machines as they can to regulate the social order.
That's really scary.
Alright, last one.
You ready?
Here's a quote.
Someone asked me today in the media, people are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?
He said this to Fox.
I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.
That's my worldview.
This is this is gold, Dan.
It's gold.
This is why people think he's a Reconstructionist, because a lot of Reformed Reconstructionist types talk about worldviews all the time, right?
You get a lot of Reformed theologians talking about worldviews and the Theo Bro types.
And if you know about that and Insider Baseball, we can talk about it later.
Here's my comment for now, and it's an easy comment that is obvious to most of you listening.
What's the worldview of the Bible?
Come on!
Is it when, like, bears came out of the woods and mauled teenagers?
Is it when God killed all the firstborn in Egypt?
What's the worldview of the Bible?
Like, I'd love to know.
Is it when the smartest, most wise man in the world, Solomon, Had, like, hundreds of concubines who were essentially his sex slaves?
Like, I just want to know the worldview of the Bible, homie.
Like, my guy, give it to me.
When Abraham, like, slept with a woman he enslaved so he could have a child out of wedlock?
Is that the one?
King David killed a man so he could have his wife as his own?
I'm looking for the worldview of the Bible.
Song of Solomon?
Erotic love poem?
Is that it?
I just, I'm looking for the worldview, Mike.
And guess what?
When you refer to the worldview of the Bible, we all know it's your Bible and your worldview and your God.
You don't want any complexity, any nuance.
You don't want to talk about the thorny issues that I just mentioned.
You don't want to talk about the fact that in the book of Job, God just decides to have a bet with Satan and Job's kids die as a result.
They didn't do anything.
They just died because You know, God and Satan had a little bet.
You know, see who Job's really made of.
Well, his kids had to die.
Well, too bad.
Right to life.
Am I right, Mike?
What's the worldview you're telling me about?
All right, Dan.
Stop me, because I got a lot more biblical—I read my Bible, you know?
I got a lot more examples, if you want them.
So stop me.
Just briefly, I'll pick up on the Job one, just to add to it.
God starts the whole thing, right?
If you read it, God starts it.
He initiates it.
It says Satan running around from watching the world and whatever, and God's like, have you thought about Job?
Just throws him under the bus right from the start.
So yeah, flip it around a little bit and say this.
Okay, so we're going to say that we believe the Bible.
Let's just do like a word count of how much more the Bible has to say about poverty, and alleviating poverty, and helping the poor, and helping the dispossessed, and the marginalized, and the poor, and the orphan, and the widow, than it has to say anything about abortion, or same-sex attraction, or sexual activity, or whatever.
So just to, no matter which direction somebody wants to come at it, I think it goes to the point that I was trying to make earlier, that we talk about the Bible, quote-unquote, all we want.
We're talking about Mike Johnson reading the Bible.
We're talking about the Mike Johnsons of the world reading the Bible and trying to convince all of us that's just the Bible and not Mike Johnson reading the Bible, or the evangelical church down the street reading the Bible, or the Catholic church or the mainline church or whatever church it is reading the Bible.
It's always mediated by somebody, and that's what makes it such a convenient, malleable tool for Christian nationalists to claim the quote-unquote biblical worldview That they already hold and that they're going to hold regardless of what book they're getting it from.
All right.
We should we should stop.
There's way more to say.
And there's just there's so much we haven't covered.
We haven't talked at all this week about what's happening in Gaza.
And I just want to say clearly, and I think we've been clear on the show that we attend to the nuances and we condemn Terrorist attacks and hostage taking by Hamas, but the violence we're seeing unfold in Gaza is unconscionable and when kids are dying, when hundreds of children are dying, when people have absolutely no water or food, that does not seem like it can be justified.
That's, as we've said over the last two weeks, there's nothing there that disregards anti-Semitism in this country, disregards the plight that Jewish people have been subjected to for millennia, that the families of those who were affected by Hamas's attacks are feeling right now.
We are holding both of those in our hands, but also saying, at least for me, Dan, it's hard to think of a way That what's happening in Gaza is justified and it is heartbreaking, as well as what happened in Maine.
When it comes to good news, I'll share mine first.
Reason for hope.
My reason for hope is that our Axis Mundi series, On God's Campus, produced by the folks at REAP, Uh, is, uh, this week, the number nine show in sexuality on the Apple sexuality, uh, podcast charts.
And it was number nine in this country.
It was number nine in Denmark, in, uh, Sweden, and it was number one in Paraguay.
So Paraguay, I don't know what's happening down there, but thank you very much for listening to On God's Campus.
If y'all haven't listened on campus yet, you will want to do that.
It includes great stuff on Bob Jones, tax exemptions, history of racial segregation, and queer persecution, straight from the mouths of those who've experienced it.
So check it out.
You can find that at accessmooney.us.
All right, Dan, what's your good news?
Or reason for hope, I should say.
Yes, I want to just, you know, briefly echo that.
A couple weeks ago, when the Israel-Gaza things happened, I said that, you know, the right side is the side of the non-combatants, whoever they are.
And I think that that's what we're seeing now, right?
With the condemnation of terrorist attacks by Hamas, but also All the concerns and issues that are arising with the way that the response is impacting who?
The non-combatants.
The little kids didn't do this.
Families didn't do this.
Regular people trying to live their lives didn't do this.
I think we have to keep that in front of us, no matter how morally complex that makes responses.
I think I tell students when I teach ethics that if a question is ethically easy, it either means that it's not really worth thinking about ethically or it means that there's something wrong with our ethics because there are real things that should be difficult to deal with.
And I think, you know, this is one of those that becomes really difficult.
My reason for hope is that Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, impacted by these horrific events.
He was one of five House Democrats who voted against legislation last year that would have banned assault weapons, and he has reversed course.
He has come out, I think, in very heartfelt and candid statements.
They look very heartfelt and candid.
He now supports the ban.
He said that it was time for him to, quote, Take responsibility for his failure to stand up for that.
So I took a lot of hope from that.
I don't know what it's going to take.
I can't imagine literally what it would take to move the needle for the GOP on gun rights, but I took hope seeing somebody I think really stand up and take some responsibility for a bad political view and reverse course.
Thinking of y'all in Maine, thinking of all of you affected by what's happening worldwide and trying to keep all those things just, yeah, just to reckon with the grief I think we all feel regularly.
I want to ask you to check out www.axismooney.us to see everything, and especially if you have a friend who's just learning about Mike Johnson and they need to know about Christian nationalism, send them American Idols by Andrew Whitehead.
That's our show we published last month.
In my view, at least, I'm biased, but it's the best primer on Christian nationalism you can give somebody.
There's four 40-minute episodes that will just clearly lay out what Christian nationalism is and why it's a threat.
So check that out.
Check out our book list.
Our October book list is in the show notes.
We got great books on there that don't get really much mention in the mainstream media.
And we, if you buy one of those books, we get support from that.
So that helps us.
New patrons, thank you for being supportive.
Thank you for all your help.
Grateful for all of you.
We have some great interviews coming up.
Dan, I'm going to interview Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who's one of the most amazing commentators we have on On fascism and authoritarianism.
Going to be interviewing Diane Winston on Reagan's America.
Going to be interviewing Jill Hicks Keaton on The Good Book and the way evangelicals rewrite it, a la Mike Johnson.
