Some 60 Stars of David were daubed on buildings in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

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 faith and the worldview of Mike Johnson?

Johnson, 51, has deep ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. He believes in a literal reading of the Bible, including the Book of Genesis. Johnson is a close friend of Ken Ham, the CEO and founder of Answers in Genesis, and provided legal services to that ministry in 2015.

[Joshua Benton: Where is Mike Johnson’s ironclad oath?]

Answers in Genesis rejects evolution and believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; to believe anything else would be to undermine the authority of the Bible. “We’re not just about creation/evolution, the age of the Earth or fossils,” Ham told Johnson and his wife, Kelly, on their podcast. “We’re really on about the authority of the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and helping equip people to have a true Christian worldview.” Johnson is enthusiastically on board; he has suggested that school shootings are the result of having taught generations of Americans “that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime.”

Johnson wants churches to be more politicized; he favors overturning the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which prevents churches from engaging in any political campaign activity if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. He also believes that churches are unceasingly under assault, and that Christian viewpoints “are censored and silenced.”

In the 2000s, Johnson was an attorney and spokesman for the Alliance Defense Fund, known today as Alliance Defending Freedom. It describes itself as “one of the leading Christian law firms committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” Johnson has written in favor of criminalizing gay sex. He has called abortion a “holocaust.” And he argued that “prevailing judicial philosophy” in the 2005 right-to-die case involving Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman, was “no different than Hitler’s.”

“Some people are called to pastoral ministry and others to music ministry,” he’s said. “I was called to legal ministry, and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war.’”

He has surely been that.

But in order to better understand Johnson’s worldview, it’s important to recognize the influence of David Barton on the new House speaker.

In 2021, Johnson spoke at a gathering where he praised Barton. Barton, while not well known outside of certain evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is significant within them. A graduate of Oral Roberts University with a degree in Christian education, Barton is the former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and has advised figures including Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and former Representative Michele Bachmann. He considers Donald Trump one of the five greatest presidents in American history.

Johnson said he was introduced to Barton’s work a quarter of a century ago; it “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” By all accounts that is true. If you listen to Johnson speak on the “so-called separation of Church and state” and claim that “the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” you will hear echoes of Barton.  

Although not a historian, Barton has for years been engaged in what he calls “historical reclamation,” by which he means showing that the Founders, including Thomas Jefferson, were Christian men determined to create a Christian nation. In 1988 he founded Wallbuilders, an organization that promotes the idea that the separation of Church and state is a myth.

“It’s really hard to overstate the influence that Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces,” the Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Politico. “For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation.”

“What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray,” she continued. “It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.”

“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the past to promote political agendas in the present, to paint a picture of America’s history as evangelicals would like it to be,” John Fea, the chair of the history department at the evangelical Messiah University, told NBC News. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, where Barton’s ideas are highly influential. It’s the air they breathe.”

In 2012, Barton wrote The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. Among other things, he argued that Jefferson was a “conventional Christian” despite the fact that Jefferson questioned many of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of religion, said it would have been better titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a piece of historical scholarship, the book is awful,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The book was so riddled with historical inaccuracies that it was recalled by its Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, because “basic truths just were not there.”

But Barton’s distorted views are hardly confined to history. He has said he doesn’t think medical authorities will ever find a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. This view is “based on a particular Bible verse,” Romans 1:27. He believes that AIDS is God’s punishment for sin; an AIDS vaccine would keep “your body from penalizing you”—which would be contrary to the teaching of the word of God. QED, though with a certain cruel twist.

Mike Johnson’s ascension to the speakership has made Barton and those within that evangelical subculture giddy; they know Johnson is one of them. This is the first time “in our lifetime” that Congress has appointed “a guy of this character, this commitment, this knowledge, this experience and this devout faith” as House speaker, Barton said on a podcast. He also said that he’s spoken with Johnson’s team, “talking with them about staff.”

“They need to be the people with his worldview,” Barton said. He added that Johnson will “make you smile before he hits you in the mouth so he won’t bloody your lips when he breaks your teeth.”

“I am a rule-of-law guy,” Mike Johnson told Sean Hannity last week. Elsewhere, according to The New York Times, he’s complained to student groups, “There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.”

At the same time, Johnson has been a pivotal figure in undermining the rule of law—specifically trying to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. In a carefully reported story on the 139 House Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral College count, three New York Times reporters wrote, “In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

Johnson also collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a groundless Texas lawsuit to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joe Biden.

According to a report in the Times, Johnson “sent an email to his Republican colleagues soliciting signatures for the legal brief in support of it. The initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson wrote, and the president was ‘anxiously awaiting’ to see who in Congress would step up to the plate to defend him.”

Johnson also claimed in a radio interview that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” According to Johnson, “The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion. Look, there’s a lot of merit to that.”

“The fix was in,” according to Johnson.

Actually, it was not. A statement by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process, declared that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.” Not been a single finding has refuted that claim, but many have confirmed it.  

A report by a group of lifelong Republicans took a careful look at the charges by Trump and his supporters. It showed the election was lost by Trump, not stolen from him. In coming to that conclusion, it examined every count of every case brought in six battleground states.

“Even now, twenty months after the election”—the report came out in July 2022—“a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time.”

We now know, too, that time and time again Trump’s own staff refuted his various allegations of voter fraud.

[David A. Graham: The House Republicans’ troubling new litmus test]

So in Speaker Johnson we have a man whose Christian worldview has led him into a hall of mirrors—historically, scientifically, legally, and constitutionally. A “rule-of-law guy” who laments a lack of “absolute standards of right and wrong” was a key participant in undermining the rule of law and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has done so much to shatter absolute standards of right and wrong.

From what I can tell, Mike Johnson—unlike, say, Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, or J. D. Vance and Lindsey Graham—is not cynical; he seems to be a true believer, and a zealot. A polite and mild-mannered zealot, to be sure, especially by MAGA standards, but a zealot nonetheless. And what makes this doubly painful for many of us is that he uses his Christian faith to sacralize his fanaticism and assault on truth. I can’t help thinking this isn’t quite what Jesus had in mind.

More than one in four Americans have been a victim of violent crime in the past decade, but few were able to get the help they deserve. Less than 10 percent of violent-crime victims get assistance from victim-services agencies, and two-thirds of all victims report never receiving mental-health or financial assistance. Many suffer further, losing their jobs due to injury, accumulating insurmountable medical debt, and assuming financial burdens left over from deceased loved ones—all while facing the health effects of the traumas they have suffered, such as chronic and debilitating stress, hypervigilance, depression, and insomnia.

In battles over U.S. crime policy, victims are rarely anyone’s priority. Advocates for a more punitive system focus on strengthening the power and reach of criminal-justice agencies, stressing strict punishments and more arrests. Reformers trying to reduce the system’s punitiveness, for their part, tend to gloss over the devastating consequences of violence as they focus on slashing incarceration. Victims are lost in this shuffle, disregarded both by the institutions meant to protect them and many of the advocates claiming to support them.

[David A. Graham: How criminal-justice reform fell apart]

And the disregard is not felt evenly. Low-income people and people of color, as well as people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ community, are more likely to be repeatedly hurt by violence and less likely to garner victim assistance. Young people from these demographic groups are particularly affected. The most harmed are the least helped.

Ten years ago, I founded the Alliance for Safety and Justice, a national organization that works to advance public safety and criminal-justice reform. We have conducted interviews with representative groups of victims across the country about their experiences and policy preferences. Since our start, we’ve surveyed more than 10,000 victims—that is, people who have either been directly hurt by violent or property crime or whose immediate family members have been murdered. We found that most victims prefer an approach to public safety that addresses the problem at its roots—say, by treating addiction, offering conflict mediation and mentorship for vulnerable youth, or providing crisis assistance for people with mental illness—and prepares people with convictions for reintegration and law-abiding citizenship. Victims are generally no tougher on crime than nonvictims; they prefer rehabilitation over tough justice, even though they’ve had firsthand experience with crime and the criminal-justice system.

That research stands in stark contrast to common wisdom. At first glance, victims’ rights and tough-on-crime politics might seem like natural bedfellows. In the 1970s, victims’ advocates expressed frustration with an unresponsive justice system, and prosecutors and police complained that defendants had more rights in court than victims did. Plenty of real-world examples showed victims being ignored: Many surviving family members whose loved one had been murdered never received return phone calls from detectives, and many victims of sexual assault were turned away when they reported what had happened—or were berated by courtroom lawyers in the few cases police pursued. So, the line of reasoning went, it was urgent to give victims more influence in court proceedings, roll back the rights of the accused, and aggressively pursue punishment. Media coverage of violent crimes (commonly when victims were white and middle-class) fueled these sentiments, as politicians, at times joined by understandably distraught victims’ families, called for maximum punishments. States built more prisons, ratcheted up sentence lengths, and expanded budgets for police, probation, courts, prosecutors, and sheriffs. The bureaucratic agencies that make up the U.S. criminal-justice system went from relative political insignificance to a behemoth set of institutions that had the capacity to influence elections and advocate for sweeping legislation.

During the tough-on-crime era, President Ronald Reagan, who once called victims “forgotten persons,” enacted a range of federal budgetary and legislative reforms that led to a drastic increase in the U.S. incarceration rate. In response to high-profile homicides, President Bill Clinton championed sentencing policies such as “three strikes and you’re out.” Wide-net surveillance, militarized police agencies, pretrial detention, and harsh prison sentences and conditions became standard.

These changes were popular but focused on punishment and retribution with little regard for helping victims or alleviating the deeper common causes of crime and violence. And this is what does set victims apart from nonvictims: They know intimately how poorly our system supports those who have been hurt by crime. Even though the law-and-order agenda birthed new victims’ rights, it also exacerbated a long-standing hierarchy of harm: Victims face discrimination along racial and socioeconomic lines at every stage, affecting which crimes get the most media and political attention, which victim-compensation applications are approved, which cases receive the most thorough investigation, and which victims are treated with dignity by police, prosecutors, and medical personnel. As the power and reach of the justice system grew, so did discrimination and disregard.

Additionally, ignoring victims can perversely result in more crime. I saw this firsthand when, fresh out of law school in 2001, I began working with parents of incarcerated youth, who were virtually all low-income people of color. Almost every young person I encountered had been a victim long before they were ever arrested for committing a crime—a phenomenon is all too common for both youths and adults entering our justice system. One teenager had been jumped so many times on the way to school that he stopped going. Another was placed in foster care after suffering sexual abuse at home, only to be sexually abused again in the foster-care system. Others had lost siblings to homicide or been robbed or assaulted numerous times. Most of these kids hadn’t received any help to cope with PTSD, anxiety, and near-constant fear.

Study after study spanning the course of the past 30-plus years has demonstrated that people in the justice system have among the highest rates of chronic trauma exposure of any group. A 2014 study found that more than half of the men incarcerated in a high-security prison reported being victimized in at least one violent traumatic event, such as being robbed or assaulted, and nearly all had experienced some kind of trauma in their lives. Incarcerated women, too, have extremely high rates of prior victimization. Another 2014 study, for example, found that 53 percent of a sample of women incarcerated in urban and rural jails have had PTSD, compared with 10 percent of the general population. Helping people recover long before they resort to crime would almost certainly do more for public safety than locking them up after they traumatized someone else.

A lot has changed since I was a young lawyer in the 2000s. The perils of mass incarceration have been well documented and hotly debated. Politicians and the public now broadly accept that the United States has a criminal-justice problem. Over the decade of declining crime rates preceding the coronavirus pandemic, policy makers from both sides of the aisle embraced a range of reforms to reduce incarceration. But after COVID hit and gun-related homicides spiked in 2020, candidates began demanding a return to “law and order.” Even as attitudes regarding criminal justice shift, public officials continue to overlook the needs, experiences, and preferences of people being hurt the most by crime. If public safety were truly the goal, and victim voices really mattered, healing trauma would be a more important focus.

[From the October 2020 issue: The new Reconstruction]

A new generation of leaders is emerging. People from communities most affected by crime are building preventative, restorative, and effective solutions. The Cleveland native Brenda Glass was only 13 years old the first time she became a victim of violence. She was raped at gunpoint by a group of men she knew and trusted. Unable to find help for the fear and anger she felt, she sought protection in a group of older teens and adults who also abused her and coerced her to carry out crimes. Being imprisoned led to more hopelessness. After a police officer told her she needed spiritual help, not more jail time, she promised herself that she’d escape the cycle. She became a licensed clinical social worker and a psychotherapist and, in 2017, launched Cleveland’s first trauma-services program of its kind for victims. The need was so great that in 2020 she cashed out her retirement funds and poured all of her savings into creating the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center. Since then, she has helped hundreds of survivors of gun violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault get therapy, find jobs, and obtain permanent housing. All of the services are free. “We help victims heal,” Glass told me, “through the long process of recovering in all aspects of their lives.” She also joined my organization as a volunteer member and has been advocating to expand these kinds of victim services across Ohio.

Glass’s center is one of more than 50 similar trauma-recovery programs across the country offering a one-stop model of services for victims. “People want to recover,” Glass said. “People, whether they are victims or perpetrators, need hope. Rarely do we give people that vision. If you can envision that there is a possibility that your life can be different, you will reach for it. Hope is the key. That’s what we provide—to everyone.” Programs like Glass’s are the most promising development of the past decade when it comes to solving the dual crises of increasing violence and a broken justice system. Politicians need to catch up.

Nazis forced the yellow Star of David on Jews, turning it into a deadly marker singling them out.

Watch the moment Israeli delegates at the UN put on yellow Stars of David, likening the current moment to the Holocaust.