Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, knows the culture wars. In Congress, he has gone after gender-affirming health care, abortion, and gun regulation. But for a close ally of Donald Trump and a crowd-pleaser within the GOP, there’s also something a little more old-school about Johnson: He appears to be a true believer in the crusades of the religious right.

The evidence for his religious conviction is plentiful. Johnson, a Southern Baptist, hosts a podcast with his wife that provides “analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective,” often dismissing the concept of separating church and state. (The point of the establishment clause, he insists, is to protect religion, not to create a firewall.) He often gives sermons of a political nature at churches. He was once tapped to be the dean of an ill-fated Baptist law school aiming to produce religiously motivated conservative lawyers. And he served on the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission board from 2004 to 2012.

Johnson’s whole career has been steeped in the religious right’s priorities. After law school, he worked as senior legal counsel and spokesman for the powerful conservative Christian legal organization now named the Alliance Defending Freedom. While there, he took on “religious liberty” cases, writing an amicus brief opposing the decriminalization of gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas and repeatedly defended same-sex marriage bans. From there, he defended Louisiana’s strict abortion law, took on opponents of Louisiana State University’s sports chaplaincy program, and represented the organization that built Kentucky’s Ark Encounter theme park. And in his brief stint as a Louisiana state legislator, he pushed legislation that would protect residents who discriminate against gay people.

But perhaps the clearest representation of Johnson’s old-fashioned religious conservatism is in how he first earned national attention: through his marriage.

In May of 1999, Johnson, who was then a couple of weeks away from graduating law school, married his wife, Kelly, a schoolteacher whom he met at a wedding. Almost two years later, a photo of the smiling couple ran with an Associated Press story, under the headline “Can states successfully legislate marital bliss?”

The story explained that Mike and Kelly had entered a “covenant marriage.” This meant that, prior to marrying, they had to undergo premarital counseling and sign a binding contract agreeing that they would divorce only in the case of abuse, abandonment, imprisonment of a spouse, or lengthy separation. A covenant couple, no matter how miserable, cannot simply decide to divorce.

“In my generation, all we’ve ever known is the no-fault scheme, and any deviation from that seems like a radical move,” the then-28-year-old Johnson said of divorce. “Because so few people have chosen covenant marriage in Louisiana, it seems like an unpopular choice. It’s not unpopular. It’s just unknown. Once the message is out there, a whole lot more people will choose it.”

But Johnson’s prediction proved incorrect. In 1997, when Louisiana adopted the option of covenant marriage, it was heralded as the start of a movement: It was the first time that divorce laws in America were moving to become more stringent, not less. A number of Southern states debated their own versions of the law. But it received pushback from domestic violence survivors (even if........

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