Congressional Members Warn About Speaker Johnson’s ‘Troubling’ Christian Nationalism
Last week, a group of congressional representatives released a white paper and held a briefing on Capitol Hill to document the Christian Nationalism of Speaker Mike Johnson. The report from the Congressional Freethought Caucus documents several areas where they are concerned about Johnson’s record on religious freedom — and the report cites two articles from A Public Witness.
“Although new information continues to surface virtually every day about Speaker Johnson’s record on religious freedom and church-state separation, what we already know is troubling and alarming,” the CFC report offers. “Speaker Johnson is deeply connected in political practice and philosophy to Christian Nationalism, more so than any other speaker in American history. He has spent decades working to deny, reject, and undermine the constitutional separation of church and state, including trafficking in fake histories about our nation’s founding and distorting the meaning of the Establishment Clause. He has spent much of his career trying to impose sectarian-based moral codes on others.”
The CFC was founded in 2018 and has been led by Rep. Jared Huffman of California and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Huffman is the only member of Congress who describes himself as a humanist and openly admits to not believing in God. Raskin is Jewish, and the CFC includes members who identify as Christian, Muslim, and other faith traditions. The other two founding members — Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan and then-Rep. Gerald McNerney of California — are both Catholic.