this perfect shitstorm: MAGA Mike Johnson, Young Earth Creationism, the siege on public institutions, and the far right narrative's deep bleed into mainstream media
(prepare to believe, part 6)
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Some of this will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative.
Though I’ll write about some current events related to my subject here, this is mainly where I’ll collect some thoughts and images from my own exploration of places with emotional significance for many Americans. So far, stops include Civil War and Revolutionary War sites and museums; Underground Railroad sites; state parks and historic homes; historical associations; and memorabilia and gun shops. To get a better sense of the narratives attached to historic places and the events and people they might commemorate, I look at the signage, collect the literature, and talk to visitors, staff, guides, and rangers. And of course, I mine the gift shops! Other places such as a Christian theme park, a convenience store, and a gun and knife show help me consider how ideas about history influence current American fascinations, conspiracy theories, and cultural conflicts.
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Over the last couple of months, I’ve written a series on Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky after visiting for a day this summer. I was writing not only to understand the story of the world conveyed by the displays and merchandise, but to begin establishing the place of this wealthy conservative Christian fringe group in the current iteration of the American culture wars. Aside from the obvious push against scientific consensus and public science literacy required to maintain even a small part of the YEC narrative, the museum engages more openly on some of the most salient culture wars fronts than I anticipated before visiting.
The attack on public education and their positions against LGBTQ identity and reproductive freedom gradually emerge as one takes in the Garden of Eden displays, examines the materials in the homeschool section, and walks through a disturbing pink-lit hallway of anti-abortion shame. There was a lot more than I expected to find, and I eventually wrapped up my series, or at least put a pin in it with a lot of notes left over, to begin writing about the next stop on my research trip through the American narrative landscape.
But then they hauled “MAGA Mike” Johnson out from the GOP’s wax mannequin storage closet, and now Young Earth Creationism seems, unfortunately, even more relevant than I was already contending. Here I want to highlight some of the coverage on Johnson—a guy many of us had not heard about until he was put up as the whatever-number candidate for Speaker of the House on October 25th—and add to all of this the concerns I’ve already articulated about the Creation Museum/Answers in Genesis.
As it turns out, Johnson has considerable links to YEC, so this is now one more thing more people might want to be aware of as we prepare for the next wave of political insanity. Not only does Johnson believe in and publicly sanction the absurdities I have detailed in my previous five stories, but he has used his position as a lawyer to secure benefits for this fringe Christian organization and help them push their discriminatory agenda with Kentucky tax dollars.
Aside from such improprieties, I maintain that it does matter whenever a powerful elected official personally subscribes to an irrational and impossibly unscientific vision of the world. We are tasked with electing people who are reasonable. Not everyone is suitable for positions of great authority. We are not compelled to agree on “two sides” in all matters, or “two competing worldviews” as the Creation Museum would have it. We should not ignore harmful culture wars rhetoric under the auspices of religious tolerance. It’s okay to look closely at—and reject in the name of the public good—someone else’s belief system.
Marci A. Hamilton’s November 4th profile of Johnson for The Guardian describes his election “as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy”:
When rulers insist the law should be driven by a particular religious viewpoint, they are systematizing their beliefs and imposing a theocracy. We have thousands of religious sects in the US and there is no religious majority, but we now have a politically fervent conservative religious movement of Christian nationalists intent on shaping policy to match their understanding of God and theirs alone. The Republicans who elected Johnson speaker, by a unanimous vote, have aligned themselves with total political rule by an intolerant religious sect.
Aaron Rupar reminds us that Johnson “was once the spokesperson for an anti-LGBT hate group, supports . . . a nationwide abortion ban, and wants to cut social security and Medicare.” Rolling Stone’s Nikki Ramirez noted, “[t]he defining feature of Johnson’s career in the House to date has been his loyalty to former President Donald Trump” and that he played a pivotal role in the election coup of 2020.
And, as we are beginning to see, these intolerant positions that threaten individual freedoms and the social safety net and the processes of democracy are often bedfellows with creationism. It’s still hard to understand why it has to be this way, but the confluence is there.
During his first speech, Johnson dog-whistled his creationist agenda by stopping to note that the Declaration of Independence says all men are “created equal—not born equal—created equal” (about 9:30 in the video linked here). Of course, this an accurate quotation from the founding document. However, the creationism pseudoscience and Christian nationalism Johnson intends to push on the rest of us are more recent introductions that are not inherently tethered to the founding documents.
In their October 26th response to Johnson’s election, the Huffington Post’s Liz Skalka and Paul Blumenthal emphasized his intention to lead the government according to the Bible and inventoried his connections to Answers in Genesis and its founder Ken Ham. Johnson spoke at an Answers in Genesis conference in 2022, he’s scheduled for the 2024 conference, and he blogged on their website.
For years, he has publicly supported the Creation Museum’s sister attraction, the Ark Encounter.
“The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Johnson said in a 2021 interview with Ark Encounter founder Ken Ham while guest-hosting the radio show of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an evangelical activist group.
Johnson has close personal and professional ties to Ham, the founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis, the Christian group that’s behind Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, both based in Kentucky. As an attorney, Johnson helped the gigantic ark attraction, which opened in 2016, secure millions in state tourism subsidies while also defending its right to make religious-based hiring decisions.
Anecdotally, while I was in Kentucky researching this series this summer, a friend I visited who happens to be a contractor told me he considered working on the enormous and lucrative Ark project but was not eligible because of their religion requirement.
Skalka and Blumenthal also resurfaced a 2014 op-ed Johnson wrote for Kentucky’s largest newspaper about the value of the huge new tourist attraction:
“Answers in Genesis aims to encourage critical thought and respectful public debate about the various attractions and ideas that will be presented at its park, and that is the beauty and essence of free speech.”
In light of what I’ve uncovered in my previous Creation Museum stories, the phrase “encouraging critical thought” is hard to swallow. Again and again, Ken Ham plugs his ears against critical thought by reminding us that anything counter to the words of Genesis is impossible. He states that we can’t know about things we did not witness firsthand or read in the Bible, as I wrote about in “Think about it: were you there when God created the Earth?”
One of the methodologies of the Young Earth Creationist’s homemade pseudoscience, which they call baraminology, is “discontinuity systematics” — a process of looking not for connections within the growing fossil record, but for disconnections that serve their agenda, which is of course to reject the findings of 150+ years of evolution science.
Our nation’s new Speaker of the House—a man who, chillingly, is second in line to the position of president—has been working with Answers in Genesis for at least ten years. It’s more than coincidence that AIG’s method is to tear down information and discredit tested ways of creating knowledge. Generating chaos by instilling distrust in public institutions is the new GOP strategy in a nutshell.
the accommodation compulsion
Who knows how long Johnson will survive the spotlight and scrutiny. We can only hope that media coverage does not turn away from an honest examination of the man, of his ideas, and of their consequences.
In his November 1st article about mainstream media’s disingenuous compulsion to present conservative rural Christians as the “real America” (in opposition to “East Coast elites,” don’t you know), Thomas Zimmer examines the Washington Post’s jarringly uncritical coverage of Mike Johnson as seen by a select set of hometown community members. Mainstream media—including many outlets largely and historically considered on “the left”—are disturbingly complicit in the dissemination of uncritical stories that, in Zimmer’s words, “perpetuate ideas that form the bedrock of the ethno-religious nationalism that has galvanized behind Trump.”
Zimmer compares the real profile of the new GOP speaker with Molly Hennessy-Fiske’s feel-good, heart-of-America portrait of Johnson:
“Normalization” might be an overused trope—but here it applies. Religious zealotry is presented as the outgrowth of a worldview shaped by “faith and family,” those widely accepted pillars of American culture; a professional life spent in rightwing activist circles and among partisan extremists is reinterpreted as a career of service and leadership; a radical political agenda is sanitized as the manifestation of the worries and desires of “regular folks.”
Normalizing, reinterpreting, and sanitizing—these are favorite far-right techniques to effect a shift in the public’s collective vision of the American story, past and present. “Ultimately,” Zimmer warns, the October 29thWashington Post story “is indicative of a much broader tendency in American mainstream politics of accommodating extremism as it ascends to authority.”
This wave of extremists collecting power in so many arenas brings me back around to the dangers of belief systems even as patently absurd as Young Earth Creationism.
Yes, I know we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion and a free-market system that lets suckers pay $15 to park in the middle of nowhere before walking ten steps to shell out another $49.95 at a “museum” dedicated to undermining every kind of science as well as the most fundamental understandings of the ways texts can, and cannot, be used to construct an understanding of human history.
But when we see that the Speaker of the House has a significant and longstanding personal connection to this irrational and politically charged conservative Christian fringe group, we need to feel comfortable critiquing the man, the fringe group, and the venerable institutions—from the GOP to the mainstream media—that enable the problem. This is not about policing thoughtcrime. This is about assessing and broadcasting legitimate risks.
catching up
If you’re new to Narrative Nation, you can go to the beginning of my CM series, or—for the most direct connections to this story—you might read the two installments described below to see some of the links I’ve articulated between this belief system and the far right attack on a progressive, democratic society.
In “Culture Wars Ken,” I looked at Ken Ham’s argument that children are being “indoctrinated” by public figures who perpetuate false readings of the Bible and teach about man’s evolution. As I noted, one of the many booklets sold inside the Creation Museum provides an overview of mainstream science’s false teachings explicitly as a means to prepare adherents for the culture wars.
In “History Book of the Universe,” I looked more seriously at how the very existence of this anti-evidence, anti-science, and anti-truth sect contributes to the attack on American public education. While the far right’s Chief Institutions Underminer, Christopher Rufo, has more recently called for efforts to sow “universal distrust” in public schools, Ken Ham’s entire Answers in Genesis project depends on the same thing. Spending even a few weeks in school would present a child with so much information contradicting Young Earth Creationism that their only defense is to undermine the credibility of the teachers, the textbooks, and the mainstream scientists informing them.
He is dead behind his eyes. A Stepford Husband and Politician. A creepy mf’er.
This is exactly what my daughter, 23 is being fed at Trinity Baptist in Jacksonville, Fl! I am from Harlan and know how wild the snakes the feet washing tongue speaking ways are normalized all throughout the hollers