[Roger Williams] was saying that mixing church and state corrupted the church, that when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics. — John M. Barry, “God, Government and Roger Williams’ Big Idea,”Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 2012.
In his deceptively pious, mild-mannered way, U.S. House Speaker Mike Thompson, R-La., just got in a political catfight with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. And to all but the truest of true believers, he came out second best. It’s not his only recent tiff with Buttigieg, and we’ll get back to it in a minute.
In the meantime, Johnson came under fire from CNN for writing the foreword for an extreme right-wing, homophobic book that says, among other things, Buttegieg is “openly, and obnoxiously, gay.” Perhaps the self-proclaimed “Bible-believing Christian” shouldn’t mix his homiletics with political invective.
(Johnson’s press secretary says he “never read the passages highlighted by CNN,” and he disagrees with them. But in 2022, he touted the book on his podcast: “I obviously believe in the product, or I wouldn’t have written the foreword.”)
The book, by far-right Louisiana blogger Scott McKay, also featured what the moderately left-wing New Republic describes as a “cavalcade of homophobia, classism, widely debunked conspiracy theories, and weird falsehoods.” Added staff writer Tori Otten, “The day may come when someone doesn’t uncover some weird, antisocial thing the Republican speaker once wrote or said, but today is not that day.”
It also made comedian Bill Mahar’s show, where veteran Democratic political operative James Carville of New Orleans got the opportunity to say, “I know these people [white Christian nationalists]. This is a bigger threat than Al-Qaida. […] People in the press have no idea who this guy is, how he was formed and what the threat is.”
Buttigieg, for his part, told Erin Burnett of CNN he doesn’t understand the right’s “obsession with identity, with either who you’re married to or what your race is, and very little of use about how to make this country a better place.” The score so far: Buttigieg 1, Johnson 0.
Johnson also tangled with Buttigieg on one other recent occasion, when he took the occasion of an airport tour in Florida to get in a political dig. His remarks were reported in The Hill like this:
“I’m not delighted in the way that Secretary Buttigieg has run the Transportation Department. I think there’s been … let’s say, to be charitable, it’s left much to be desired,” he said. [Ellipsis in the original.]
Buttigieg replied by noting that Johnson voted against the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill that funds a planned expansion of the airport:
“Spoken while touring an airport project that we selected… for funding from President Biden’s infrastructure bill… that Speaker Johnson voted against,” the secretary said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “And after voting, twice this year alone, to slash air traffic control budgets. This is, to put it charitably, unserious.” [Link and ellipses in the original.]
The winner, or loser, of a partisan political exchange like this is one of those matters that remain in the eye of the beholder, of course. But as I see it, the score stands at Buttigieg 2, Johnson 0.
More to the point, it strikes me as a fine of example of amiable, polite, decorous political invective. Something about it also strikes me, as it did James Carville, as quintessentially Southern. Veteran newspaper columnist Gene Lyons, who writes now for The Arkansas Times, an alternative paper in Little Rock, has noticed the same thing. In a column picked up by the Chicago Sun-Times, he describes the speaker’s shtick like this:
Everybody in the South has known somebody like Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson: an amiable, polite, well-dressed religious crackpot who’s either completely out of his mind or pretends to be for career purposes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
If you’re an ambitious politician in someplace like Shreveport, Louisiana, there’s no penalty for professing belief in all manner of absurdities calculated to reassure God-intoxicated true believers in backwoods churches that you’re one of them. Everybody understands, especially the people who put up the money.
I’m inclined to give Johnson the benefit of the doubt — maybe he really and truly believes everything he says — but as a Southern expat myself, I’m inclined to believe Carville and Lyons know exactly what (or who) they’re talking about.
In fact, tub-thumping prachers-turned-politician or politicians-turned-preacher aren’t only a staple of Southern politics. I think they’re a type as old as humankind, at least as old as the Prophet Samuel in the Hebrew Bible (ca. 1050 BCE), who solemnly forewarns the Israelites their new king:
[…] will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants. And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.
For those who have ears to hear, there’s a lesson here: From the time of Samuel and King Saul (roughly 1000 BCE), politics and religion haven’t mixed well.
And, of course, the separation of church and state is baked into the American political system. Speaker Johnson is fond of saying, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” most recently last month on “Squawk Box,” a CNBC talk show. He attributes the idea, accurately enough, to Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 letter to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Conn., in which he states his belief in a “a wall of separation between Church & State.” Johnson adds that the founders “wanted a vibrant expression of faith in the public square.”
True enough. But that’s only half the story.
And Jefferson isn’t the first icon of American democracy to call for a “wall of separation” between church and state. Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island colony who is credited with first advancing the idea of freedom of religion, beat him to it by 157 years. Willams is also credited with founding the first Baptist church in North America, and I’m a little surprised Speaker Johnson, who proudly wears his Southern Baptist religion on his sleeve, doesn’t seem to be familiar with him.
Anyway, Roger Willams thought of the church as an Eden-like garden and the secular world as “the Wildernesse.” In an 1644 pamphlet directed at another New England divine with whom he was squabbling, he wrote:
[W]hen they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world, God hathe ever broke down the wall it selfe, removed the Candlestick, &c. and made his Garden a Wildernesse.
John M. Berry, his biographer, notes that “although not commonly attributed to him,” Williams’ phrase “has echoed through American history.” Berry also observes, I think quite accurately: “He was saying that mixing church and state corrupted the church, that when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics.”
Johnson (or his press secretary) has acknowledged he didn’t read his friend’s homophobic rant. Perhaps he should add 1 Samuel and Roger Williams to his reading list.
Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists: The Final Letter, as Sent,” Library of Congress, Information Bulletin, June 1998 https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.
Ordinary Time 