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“We’re coming to a Red Sea moment.” —House Speaker Mike Johnson, Tuesday
In a speech at a gala celebrating right-wing Christian lawmakers on Tuesday night, House Speaker Mike Johnson thanked the event organizers for kicking reporters out. “I’ll tell you a secret since the media’s not here,” he promised them. (It’s unclear if Johnson knew that the event’s organizer would post a video of the gala on his personal Facebook page.)
That secret was a series of conversations he’d had with God in the lead-up to the speaker vote that anointed him:
The Lord impressed upon my heart a few weeks before this happened that something was going to occur. And the Lord very specifically told me in my prayers to prepare but to wait. I had this sense that we were going to come to a Red Sea moment in our Republican conference and the country at large.
Look, I’m a Southern Baptist. I don’t want to get too spooky on you, OK? But the Lord speaks to your heart. And he had been speaking to me about this.
And the Lord told me very clearly to prepare. OK, prepare for what? I don’t know. “We’re coming to a Red Sea moment.” “What does that mean, Lord?”
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Well, what that meant, it seemed, was the stepping up of a great new leader. In the story of Exodus, Moses parts a body of water, traditionally thought of as the Red Sea, to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. In his remarks, Johnson said he realized, once Kevin McCarthy was booted, that the event God had been preparing him for was the speaker election chaos.
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I started praying more about that. And the Lord began to wake me up through this three-week process we were in, in the middle of the night, and to speak to me. And [I began] to write things down, plans and procedures and ideas on how we could pull the conference together. I assumed the Lord was going to choose a new Moses. And “Oh, thank you, Lord: You’re going to allow me to be Aaron to Moses.” [In the Hebrew Bible, Aaron is Moses’ brother and a priest who aids him.]
I worked to get Steve Scalise elected. And then Jim Jordan. And Tom Emmer. Thirteen people ran for the post. The Lord kept telling me to wait. And I waited and waited. And it came to the end, and the Lord said, “Now, step forward.” “Me? I’m supposed to be Aaron.”
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But despite Johnson’s shock at being chosen to lead his people, he concluded that God knew best: “Only God saw the path through the roiling sea,” he concluded.
It’s common for evangelicals to feel personally guided by God, often through conversations during prayer, and sometimes using lessons from Scripture. And there have been hints before that Johnson sees his position as divinely inspired, even if he never previously compared himself with the Hebrew Bible’s most important prophet. In his first speech upon becoming speaker, Johnson said, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority.”
But in Johnson’s case, as one of the most powerful people in the country, the implication of such a belief means more than a grandiose sense of self. (In his speech Tuesday, Johnson was at times also charmingly self-deprecating, waving off applause with “Oh, good grief” and an offer that “the Lord chooses the lowly things to confound the wise—that’s the only explanation for it.”) It means a holy mission, with the entire nation at stake.
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That idea—that conservative Christian lawmakers are on a mission from God to save the country—explicitly animated the entire event. The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which awarded Johnson the American Patriot Award for Christian Honor and Courage, was founded in 2020 by Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator, and counts among its leaders former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The group has the express mission of churning out model legislation and connecting legislators at all levels of government to pass bills based on “biblical principles” in order to “save the nation,” as Rapert said at the gala.
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“How are we going to have a godly nation if we don’t have godly leaders?” Rapert asked the crowd. “So we believe—and this is one of the goals—that soon in this nation, we’ll see Christians, people of faith, running for every single office in this country.”
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Bishop E.W. Jackson, an evangelical pastor with a history in Virginia politics, warned at the event that if conservatives didn’t start “asserting our own set of ideas,” they would cede control of institutions to the kind of people who “talk about gender not being real.” “If we do not, their ideas will rule the day,” he said. “We’re losing in part because we’re playing on their field, using their vocabulary.”
As an example, he said he refused to use the word gay because it can mean “joyful.” “There’s nothing happy, carefree, or joyful about being a homosexual in rebellion against almighty God,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Patriot Mobile, “America’s ONLY Christian conservative wireless provider” and a sponsor of the event, summed things up more neatly:
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This war that we’re fighting is not political. It is spiritual. And we will fight this spiritual war, whether it be at the schoolhouse, with the school boards, or whether it be in the county house, where they’re trying to take over the DAs and all the important county judges.
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Johnson did not distance himself from any of this. He made it clear, in his speech, that he was among his people. (“What a great joy it is to be in a room with fellow believers,” he said. “I do feel the spirit of the Lord here.”) And he made it clear he agreed with their sentiments.
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Read More “We’re facing, you could argue, the greatest collection of challenges since the time of maybe World War II, maybe the Civil War,” he said. “If you look at all the headwinds, all the challenges, they’re collected right now. I’m telling you, we should not be daunted in the face of these challenges. Our hope is in God.”
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He went on to espouse a belief that the U.S. was founded to be a Christian nation—the central tenet of Christian nationalism—and that “our job is to be stewards of the foundations of our great country.”
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In early November, Rolling Stone reported that Johnson flew, outside his district office, an “Appeal to Heaven” flag. That flag, originally flown during the Revolutionary War, has been adopted by a network of radical Christian leaders called the New Apostolic Reformation. The NAR, a “dominionist” movement, aims to “take dominion” over seven public arenas—religion, family, government, education, arts and entertainment, media, and business—for God. And that notion isn’t limited to peaceful get-out-the-vote efforts. The NAR, as the Rolling Stone authors had previously reported, appears to have been a key group behind the Christian nationalist showing at the Jan. 6 insurrection, at which dozens of “Appeal to Heaven” flags were spotted. Johnson himself has associated with NAR acolytes.
Johnson, the primary intellectual driver behind the “Stop the Steal” movement, has shown himself to be a powerful strategist for the religious right. As he made clear on Tuesday, he recognizes a spiritual battle in Congress. And with the confidence of an Old Testament prophet, he sees victory ahead.
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