With just a little over a month until Election Day, the balance of power in Congress is not the only thing at stake.
Addressing the Family Research Council’s (FRC) Pray Vote Stand Summit last week in Leesburg, Va., House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) characterized the midterm elections as a battle of worldviews.
“We’re at a crossroads,” Johnson said during a video interview with FRC President Tony Perkins. “It’s not just a contest right now between Republicans and Democrats. As everybody in that auditorium knows, this is a contrast between two completely different worldviews for America, who we are, and what we’re going to be. And that’s what’s on the ballot.”
While serving as speaker of the House of Representatives for the past three years, the Louisiana congressman says he has tried ardently to remain true to his core Biblical convictions.
“I’m doing the same thing as speaker as I did as a rank-and-file member of Congress, as I did as a state representative, and as a constitutional lawyer, and as a young guy in law school when you met me, this is who we are. We don’t separate our faith from who we are.”
Johnson said he doesn’t view how he does his job as much different than the nation’s founders. “While that seems radical right now, that’s exactly what previous generations of leaders in Congress did. I mean, they were overt about it. And so, while the media tries to portray me as some sort of unusual circus act or something, this is exactly what the Framers of the Constitution and previous generations did and believed and spoke like.”
The choice voters have this election season, Johnson said, could not be more different. “By our count … about 38 or 40 of these openly avowed, radical leftist Marxist ideologues have won their primaries in the Democratic Party, and that’s for Congress and state offices,” he said.
“This is a serious threat,” Johnson continued. “It’s not just isolated to New York City or San Francisco. This is across the country, and we have to be wary of that. And we have to defeat that ideology because it’s anti-American. And frankly, it is anti-God.”
During Johnson’s 19-minute acceptance speech in the House chamber on Oct. 25, 2023, following his election to the speaker’s post, the former religious liberty lawyer acknowledged the nation’s motto, “In God We Trust,” adorned above the rostrum. He reminded his fellow lawmakers then that the U.S. adopted the motto in 1956 largely as a rebuke of the Cold War-era Soviet Union’s atheistic philosophies of Marxism, communism and socialism.
Three years later, Johnson remains convinced that God is not done using America for His purposes. “I’m comforted by the reminder of John Quincy Adams,” Johnson told the summit attendees. “They called him the ‘hellhound of slavery’ because he ran for Congress after serving as president to try to eradicate slavery—and he wasn’t successful during his lifetime, but he planted the seeds so that the next generation could complete the job. But he reminded everyone, ‘duty is ours, results are God’s.’”
