The Polite Zealotry of Mike Johnson

In an interview last week on Fox News, the newly elected speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, told host Sean Hannity, “Someone asked me today in the media, ‘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.’”

For many politicians, that would be a throwaway line. But not for Mike Johnson. When he told a Baptist newspaper in 2016, “My faith informs everything I do,” he meant it. His faith is his lodestar.

But faith, including the Christian faith, manifests itself in many different ways, with a wide range of presuppositions and perspectives. There is no single worldview among Christians—nor in the Bible itself, which is multivocal, written over thousands of years by dozens of different writers. Christians today disagree profoundly on countless doctrinal issues. And does any serious student of Scripture not see differences between the worldview of the Pentateuch and the prophets, between the slaughter of the Canaanites and the Sermon on the Mount?

So what do we know about the