If you're a regular reader of this site you know I commonly refer to the House speaker, Mike Johnson, as God's vicar. I do this not out of sarcasm; none is intended. I do it not even to mock him. I do it because Johnson himself believes he is God's vicar on earth, hustling Christian nationalism as though his bizarre religious beliefs should be integral to the operation of the federal government.
What's truly bone-chilling is that the man second in line to the U.S. presidency appears to have no — as in none whatsoever — grasp of the U.S. Constitution, American history, or American political traditions. In that respect Johnson is Trump's doppelgänger.
Furthermore, Christian nationalism, or any religion, is to U.S. governance what Donald Trump is to humility. The founders made no specific reference to church-state separation, perhaps only because they firmly plastered its essence onto the founding document.
Yet, some just don't "get it." Easily predictable was that the melding of religion and government would create insurmountable problems in what otherwise could be the smooth operation of that government. For Johnson is not alone in his historical and constitutional vacuum.
Accompanying him in the House are many others who also see themselves as sort of vicars for God, confusing and conflating their secular duties with their vastly benighted belief that their religious convictions should be intrinsic to governing.
"The problem" goes yet deeper, and it's here we encounter what converts mere problems into insurmountable problems. In its strictest definition — and Johnson & Co. is nothing if not strict — religion has no truck with compromise, for God's Word is eternal, universal and above all absolute. Unless you're Donald Trump you cannot say, or rather you cannot sincerely believe, that "Thou shall not commit adultery, usually."
Legislative bodies, however, are full of Thou shall and shall nots — with conditions attached. They're called compromises, and without them operating a government becomes an impossibility, since governing is pluralism. Yet the deeply religious mind of folks like Johnson is committed to absolutes, both those of God's Word and in the running of government.
Indeed it was this fundamental conflict between the sacred and secular that ultimately led the modern conservative movement's founder, Barry Goldwater, to turn his back on the monster he had created.
Reluctantly but in desperation he peddled "social morality" during his 1964 presidential campaign. That knowing misstep then led to the creation of the 1970s New Right, which marinated itself in religion and religion's refusal to compromise. And by the 1980s, that led to Goldwater railing against the New Right, noting that government cannot work if compromise is forbidden.
This of course is Government 101 stuff. But God's vicar isn't interested in government. He is interested in infusing his religious beliefs into government, even if that means breaking it. And God's vicar has just enough little God's vicars in his caucus to force just that.
So once again we face a government shutdown. And as Vanity Fair's Molly Jong-Fast observes, "the blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of Mike Johnson, the election-denying Louisiana backbencher whom Donald Trump wanted to become Speaker of the House" — because neither does Trump believe in the traditional workings of legislative bodies. He and the speaker are "more focused on impeachment stunts" — and in Johnson's case, "further restricting abortion access" — "than keeping the government open."
Thanks to uncompromising Republicans, government shutdowns and threats of shutdowns have become, as you know, a regular feature of this "superpower." By now they're a bit blasé, though. In fairly short order congressional GOPers realize they're holding a really crappy hand, and so they fold. But first they must bellow and bluster. It's all part of the game.
What decidedly is not a game is what they're doing to Ukraine. On that they're holding firm. Why? Enter religion of the hardest-core kind — the very kind promulgated by Johnson and most of his caucus.
House Republicans are intransigent on assuring Ukrainians' slaughter solely in obeisance to a Christian fraud who opposes Ukrainian aid, but more than that a fraud who vows to end the nonexistent persecution of evangelical Christians, as well as staff his second White House with Christian nationalists, and promote their unAmerican vision of government.
Death and oppression for Ukrainians is the one Faustian bargain they're willing to make (Johnson originally supported Ukrainian aid) with a profoundly unChristian soldier.
Historians of American politics and American religion will look on this era as the most offensive to both.
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