What if The Atlantic owned a train car? I wondered. Amtrak, I had just learned on the internet, allows owners of private railcars to lash onto runs along the Northeast Corridor, among other routes. “We should have a train car,” I slacked an editor. Moments later, it appeared on my screen, bright red with our magazine’s logo emblazoned in white, just like I’d ordered. It’s an old logo, and misspelled, but the effect was the same: A momentary notion—one unworthy of relating to someone in private, let alone executing—had been realized, thanks to DALL-E 3, an artificial-intelligence image generator now built into Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator website.

This is now a habit. My colleagues and I have been asking Bing to produce Atlantic magazine covers on ridiculous topics, such as “The Burger Doctrine” and “What Cheeseburgers Want,” absurdist riffs on our political reporting. The AI has obliged (but couldn’t spell doctrine). Another of our generated cover stories, “The Case for the Cincinnati Bengals,” earned a luxurious teal cover with a rendition of the White House flanked by patterns of orange tigers in Art Deco symmetry.

In recent days, I’ve ushered any and every notion my brain produces through AI. Hearing a brief mention of the strange animal-rotation CAPTCHA used by LinkedIn and other sites led me to produce a picture of a hypothetical card game based on it. A social-media flare-up over New Yorkers’ disgust at the prospect of scooped-out bagels inspired a black-and-white photograph of a 1930s Manhattan worksite bagel excavation. My daughter texted, asking what her “goth name” should be; moments later, I sent back an Edward Gorey–style illustration of her possible Victorian-dead-girl alter ego. One colleague began texting me various items enclosed inside of chocolates—the Eye of Sauron, more train cars, Atlantic magazines, cheeseburgers. Other friends send new findings: instruments made of baby back ribs, an oil painting of Jesus Christ eating nachos.

It’s been possible to generate images from textual prompts with machine-learning-trained tools for some time now. When I first began reporting on this strange new technology, back in 2019, I described its early output as “just another style, bound by trends and accidents to a moment that will pass like any other.” Earlier this year, I said that more recent iterations were stupid—in a good way. But improvements to the tools have radically improved the quality of their output, and they have become easier to access too. The results have completely changed my view on what AI image creation means. It’s not for making pictures to use, even if that might happen from time to time. Instead, AI images allow people to visualize a concept or an idea—any concept or idea—in a way previously unimaginable.

[Read: The AI-art gold rush is here]

Since the generative-AI tide rose last year, worries about its uses and abuses have surfed its waves. A popular matter for debate: Could AI put artists out of work? Just wait. You won’t need photographers or illustrators anymore, some surmised. Art is a human practice that will always demand a person’s agency, retorted others. And in the murk between, a moderate position emerged: AI will change—not end—art practice, just as pigment, photography, and software had done before.

Each of these arguments relies on an assumption that now seems shaky: that the images AI generates would be used in contexts where images already find use. At the top of articles or printed inside magazines like this one, perhaps. As advertisements on billboards or on Instagram. Maybe inside mailers or on corporate websites. Perhaps even as fine art in galleries, or as prints on Etsy. All of that is already happening to some extent; AI pictures are finding their way into stock photography, glossy magazine spreads, and state-fair art shows. But to imagine AI as a mere outsourcing tool for picture work understates the weirdness of the technology.

For a time, auto-generated images were too broken to take seriously: people with seven fingers and ghoulish faces, the gestures of inscription in place of real, legible text. Many of those defects have already been overcome—the finger problem is more or less solved, and text is now possible, even if not reliable (“Rotote the Animal,” reads the box for my generated tabletop CAPTCHA game). Further improvements in accuracy seem inevitable, and still, the utility of generated images feels low—especially for those of us who don’t often require pictures for our vocations, or even our avocations. My colleague asked Bing for a Sanrio-style caricature of Ian Bogost, and the result looks just like me—I turned it into my iPhone contact photo and Slack profile pic. But that’s a pretty modest use case; it’s not as if I’d have commissioned such an image under different circumstances.

[Read: Generative art is stupid]

Mostly, I’ve been using Bing Image Creator just to see what any idea my brain conjures might look like were it given material form. I ask for these results to see what they would look like if they were real: an album cover for Burger King (Taylor’s Version). A professional awaiting the subway in 1960, wearing an Art Nouveau–ironwork men’s suit.

In previous eras, I might have turned concepts such as these into images via Photoshop. Ten years ago, I’d spend an hour ginning up a record cover for an album called Foucault Me Maybe, in which the French philosopher Michel Foucault replaced Carly Rae Jepsen, or designing a fake photo from Skeletor’s presentation at TED Eternia, superimposed with an inspirational quote from his talk (“The universe is power, pure unstoppable power—and I am that force; I am that power”). These are jokes, of course, but jokes are also serious. They invite people to see their world differently, at least for a moment. In so doing, the structures we take for granted are revealed to be accidental.

[Read: AI has a hotness problem]

Perhaps it isn’t right to paint my use of AI image generators, mostly to put cheeseburgers in or on things, as a serious intellectual pursuit. But I’ve certainly noticed that the technology works best when I use it to extend my imagination rather than my image generation. Seeing an Atlantic cover about cheeseburgers helps construct an idea of what such a topic might look like if taken seriously enough to be granted that pride of place. In so doing, it orients me to our publication’s purpose, even if I have no intention of producing a feature about the politics of burgercraft. To construct a goth rendition of my daughter demands pondering the nature of her personality and how it might be expressed in dark-horror form. Seeing the results teaches me something about myself and my experience, even if I’m the only person who ever sees the results.

Using AI to create real outputs—copies or amplifications of actual objects, scenes, or events—feels harder than allowing it to amplify my imagination. Here’s an example: A local bar near work recently started putting out bowls of some unholy snack mix. Seasoned nuts are in there, sure, but also yogurt raisins, dried banana chips, loose Mike and Ike candy, the occasional solitary whole corn chip, fully wrapped Jolly Ranchers. Imagine if a jovial giant ran through a snack-foods factory and then emptied his cuffs onto your happy hour. If you said an AI generated this snack bowl, nobody would bat an eyelash, my friends and I quipped over beers.

But when I tried to make good on the joke, generating such an image with Bing, I couldn’t provoke the AI to success. Its results were competent, but they were too organized to match the chaos of the original—the yogurt raisins were grouped together on one side, the whole bowl seemingly produced by choreography rather than bedlam.

I won’t presume to opine on the best use of generative-AI images, nor would I be so foolish as to try to predict their future. But the bowl of snack mix made me realize that approaching generative image creators in order to produce a desired result might get their potential exactly backwards. Instead, try spilling your unfiltered thoughts into its engine. AI can give them shape outside your mind, quickly and at little cost: any notion whatsoever, output visually in seconds.

The results are not images to be used as media, but ideas recorded in a picture. For myself, not for others—like the contents of a notebook or a dream journal. Thinking back, AI images have always served this purpose. Back in the early days of Midjourney and DALL-E, I remember seeing lurid pictures of (fictional) Art Deco automobiles, Streamline Moderne domestic kitchens, furnishings shaped like fruits. Beautiful, I thought, but what were they for? But that wasn’t the point, even then—and it certainly isn’t now. These aren’t images; they’re imagination. Imagine a leather-and-chrome espresso machine. Imagine a watermelon armchair. An impossibility, sure, but once thought—once visualized—an object for consideration and whatever that entails.

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.