By Chris Satullo
Dear Mike Johnson,
Congrats on getting yourself third in line to the presidency of the United States. It was quite a stunner. Your head must be spinning.
Mine is, for sure. Since (no offense) I had never heard of you until just before that vote in the House went your way, I’ve been reading up on you and your ideas about how things should go. And I’d like to have a little chat, if that’s OK.
It’s pretty clear there are two documents you revere: the Bible and the U.S. Constitution.You know what? Me, too.
But I have to tell you, Mike, as much as you cite those two bits of scripture, one sacred, one civic, as much as you claim to hew to them, you don’t seem to have understood them.
You like to call the United States a “Christian nation,” in a way that isn’t just loosely descriptive, but intensely prescriptive. You call for “Biblically sanctioned government.” You told Fox News recently: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”
You know who didn’t think the United States should be a “Christian nation,” in the way you mean it? Some guy named Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence. And a buddy of his, James Madison, who stubbornly dragged the Constitution into being in my hometown of Philadelphia in 1787.
You snort contemptuously about “the so-called separation of church and state.” I’ll grant you this: The phrase is nowhere in the Constitution. But you know who used it and thought it was really important? Thomas Jefferson.
Meanwhile, Madison – who, like most of our Founders, knew well the wrenching, bloody, endless traumas that European states warring over religion had visited upon their forebears – once wrote some striking words in a letter. The friend to whom Madison wrote lived in Pennsylvania, where William Penn’s principles of religious tolerance held sway:
“That diabolical, Hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among us. You are happy in dwelling in a Land where…[the] public has long felt the good effects of their religious as well as civil liberty. Foreigners have been encouraged to settle among you. Industry and virtue have been promoted…commerce and the arts have flourished…[In Virginia], religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect. So, I leave you to pity me, and pray for liberty of conscience to revive among us.”
Mike,I should make something clear here. A lot of people who are going to fulminate and tear their hair about your Christian nationalism are, I admit, secularists who have contempt for religious faith and a particular grudge against your brand of Christianity.
But that’s not me. I’m a Christian or, more honestly, I try to be. (Walking humbly after Jesus is a hard road that I don’t always stay on.) I believe in God, though I don’t presume to understand fully what God is. I believe that Jesus is the key to me figuring out why the heck I’m here on Earth and what I should do while I’m here, for the sake of this world and to prepare for whatever comes next – even though I haven’t a clue what that might be. (And neither do you, Mike, if you’re honest.)
The theologian Paul Tillich (I’d highly recommend you dig into his work) said it best: Faith is always in spite of doubt. Doubt is not a bug; it’s a feature. As long as we’re on this humble Earth, we’re not really going to know what’s what with the universe. So, it doesn’t do for any of us to act as though we alone hold the secrets, and to use that erroneous, conceited belief to lord it over others, to claim the right to dictate to their consciences.
Mike, you know who else thought it was a terrible idea for a faith community to seize temporal power and wield it as a sword against those who believe differently? A dusty, defiant radical who long ago rose up from the farthest hinterlands of the mighty Roman Empire – some fellow they called Jesus of Nazareth.
Mike, I know you’ve been too busy lately leap-frogging into power to have had time to watch the baseball playoffs. If you had, though, you’d have seen a bunch of those “He Gets Us” ads about Jesus, which are really quite good. Particularly the one called “The Rebel”:
“A rebel took to the streets. He recruited others to join him. They roamed the hood and challenged authority.Community leaders feared them. Religious leaders abhorred them. We have to get them off the streets, they said. But they weren’t part of a gang spreading hate and terror. They were spreading love.“
Mike, last night I took your advice. I took my Bible off the shelf and read the four Gospels straight through. What an inspiring, challenging, confounding set of words. Two thoughts:
1) Your idea that the Bible lays out a comprehensive, clearcut judicial code or policy program for a 21st century civil government does not survive five minutes sitting with the book open on your lap and your mind switched on. Just talking about the Gospels here, without even getting into that vast collection of ancient myths, poems and shibboleths that we Christians call the Old Testament. (You know, the texts some people love to cherry-pick lines from to justify their prejudices.)
But back to the Gospels. Those four narratives offer four distinct pictures of who Jesus was, what he was up to, what he was trying to tell us. Yes, there are some shared through-lines – one of which is that his teaching was cryptic. Besides the central commandment to love, Jesus tended not to spell things out. He didn’t issue manuals; he spoke in parables. Dunno, Mike, seems to me he did it that way because he actually wanted us to think, to figure things out the hard and fruitful way, to fill in the blanks on how to apply his searing wisdom to our own particular lives in our own particular times. (Kind of like, come to think of it, how James Madison thought about the Constitution he bequeathed to us.)
2) One thing that is clear as day is that Jesus was suspicious (even contemptuous) of both the temporal and the institutional religious powers of his day, of Rome and the Pharisees. Mike, don’t you derive any lessons from the fact that it was Rome – the superpower of its day, just as the United States is in these times – that chose to get rid of this divine rabble-rouser, to crush him like a bug, to submit him to its cruelest, most public, most humiliating form of execution, then to persecute his followers? Do you not notice that this Jesus, who had the power to make the blind see and the dead rise, whom some thought intended to become their new king, consistently showed no interest in holding temporal power, that he chose to die in “shame” rather than lead a rebellion to seize such power?
Do you not get, Mike, that it’s a terrible idea, both for faith and for civil order, for the adherents of any one faith to arrogate to themselves the sole power to dictate to others? I do not blame faith for all the violence and atrocities supposedly committed in its name; humans often draft God to justify evil they were planning to do anyway. But it’s clear that the mistake you’re hankering for America to make is one that, throughout history and to this day, has invited injustice, persecution, chaos and the shedding of blood.
Mike, you and I do agree on something. The critical question to ask yourself before you embark on any path is: What would Jesus do?
I implore you: Go back and read the Gospels – and, while you’re at it, the Constitution – straight through. Do so with ears to truly hear. Clear your mind of the visions of power and glory that the Tempter is showing you, and listen to what Jesus, and our secular saints, Thomas and James, are trying to tell you:
Not this, Mike. This is not what we wanted. At all.
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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