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.

A decade ago, I arrived in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, for my first stint of field research into the island’s volatile politics. While unpacking in my hotel room, I heard sporadic celebrations erupting in the streets below. Confused, I asked a jubilant man what was going on.

“The army captured the militia’s sorcerer,” he told me. “The president just announced that soldiers seized all of the sorcerer’s diabolical objects—and they’ll soon be destroyed.”

Heavily armed criminal militias, known as the dahalo, had been terrorizing civilians in rural Madagascar. Now their sorcerer was in custody, and his talismans were broken and burned. The government and the public believed that the dahalo had suffered a severe blow, and that a more peaceful future was possible. The president, who had been in a precarious state politically, got a much-needed popularity boost.

The lesson was obvious: Whether the sorcerer or the talismans really had powers didn’t matter. What mattered was what people believed. Beliefs, true or false, rational or irrational, shape politics.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: This Halloween, let’s really think about death]

Almost exactly three years ago, I saw a similar spectacle unfold on television as the president faced a tough reelection bid. Early returns suggested that his time was up, but his chief spiritual adviser, known for warning the public about the dangers of “a demon prince in the form of a many-headed dragon,” had one more trick up her sleeve. She marshaled spiritual forces to save the embattled incumbent, calling on “angels of Africa” and denouncing the “demonic confederacies” who were channeling satanic forces in their quest to remove him from power.

Except this time, the spectacle was unfolding not in Madagascar but in the United States—and the speech was from Paula White, the woman whom Donald Trump had handpicked to lead prayers both at his inauguration and at his ill-fated rally on January 6, 2021.

The rationalists among us may scoff at supernatural beliefs and little imagine that politics could be decisively swayed by superstition, mysticism, and theories of demonic forces. But we don’t need to imagine. Forty percent of the global population believes in witchcraft, defined as the “ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” Surveys covering nearly 100 countries and published last year in a top scientific journal show that the prevalence of belief in witchcraft varies widely, from Tunisia (where 90 percent of the population believes it’s real) to Sweden and Denmark (where the figure is below 10 percent).

The phenomenon is not limited to any one region or level of economic development. Roughly two-thirds of Latvians, half of Brazilians, a third of Spaniards, and a fifth of French people self-report a belief in witchcraft. In the United States, the figure is 16.4 percent—one in six Americans. And in the United States, unlike, say, in France, a subset of those who believe in demonic forces and witchcraft have become a potent political force, exerting significant sway on right-wing elected officials. In turn, cynical figures in the MAGA movement have worked to co-opt these true believers for their political goals.

When trying to understand a political culture, you have to examine the society as it exists, irrational warts and all. And yet, most of us prefer to look at the world through a reverse fun-house mirror, in which the complex and sometimes-wacky beliefs of our fellow citizens are reflected back at us with the straight, clear-cut lines of reason and logic. We attribute voter behavior to policy proposals and economic data, rather than to the knock-on effects of widely held conspiracy theories or other nonrational beliefs.

In other words, most of us who professionally study human societies—or try to explain political systems in the press—have a severe case of rationality bias: We think of ourselves as purely rational agents, and we too often wrongly assume that everyone else thinks about the world the same way we do. This assumption distorts our understanding of how people actually make decisions, why they behave the way they do, and, by extension, how and why big social and political changes take place.

Figures vary, but by most estimates, about 85 out of every 100 people in the world believe in God. And yet, an analysis of top political-science-research journals found that only 13 out of every 1,000 articles published were primarily about religion (a rate of just over 1 percent). That figure is absurdly low—professional malpractice for a field that attempts to explain political systems. But the scholarship is even thinner on disorganized but widespread belief systems, such as acceptance of the power of witchcraft. The analysis didn’t provide data on how many research articles focused on other forms of supernatural belief, including shamanism, animism, and the like, which we can safely assume have received even lower billing. The upshot is that we political scientists have an enormous blind spot. Pundits are even worse: When’s the last time you heard a serious cable-news discussion about the political influence of witchcraft and demonic forces? A serious rift divides the way professional analysts explain political systems and the way voters within those systems actually see the world, whether in the United States or in societies where such seemingly strange beliefs are more openly discussed.

“There is little doubt,” writes Ronald Hutton, the author of The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, “that the majority of recorded human societies have believed in, and feared, an ability by some individuals to cause misfortune and injury to others by uncanny (‘magical’) means.” In modern times, such views are ridiculed among educated elites. But, as Hutton told me, “the overwhelming majority of Europeans still feared witchcraft until the early 20th century.” (The black cloak and pointy hat of popular Halloween attire were just what poor women wore in parts of 17th-century Europe.) Political elites mounted a concerted campaign to stamp out those beliefs over centuries, and its success was uneven, leaving some countries with far higher rates of belief in witchcraft and uncanny magic than others.

[From the May 2020 issue: Why is witchcraft on the rise?]

Anthropologists note that nonrational, magical, or superstitious beliefs appear in nearly all human societies, helping to make sense of a world in which individual lives can feel like the playthings of larger, unseen forces or, sometimes, random chance. When, say, cancer strikes, people look for explanations, and some fasten on literal demons. Nonrational beliefs can also allow believers to feel that they are harnessing unseen forces for their own purposes. They use witchcraft, voodoo, or other forms of uncanny magic to assert control in a world that feels uncontrollable. As a result, such worldviews tend to be most prevalent among those who feel powerless and face relentless calamities. Many believers view magic pragmatically, unsure of how an amulet or a talisman might work, but willing to try it nonetheless. As the Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin put it, superstition is a bit like the “modern car-driver, who does not know how his car works, but trusts it all the same, interested only in knowing which button to press.”

Mystical beliefs are not mere outliers to be edited out of our “rational choice” understanding of how and why political actors and voters behave, or how and why societies change over time. Rather, such nonrational beliefs have decisively shaped domestic and global affairs in countless cases.

For example, the United States nearly invaded Haiti in 1994, in “Operation Uphold Democracy,” in order to topple a brutal post-coup military regime. As American gunships anchored off the Haitian coast, voodoo priests drew curses outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince. A few days later, a plane crashed near the White House, and some houngans, or voodoo priests, interpreted this as evidence that the curse had worked. With that fortuitous sign, they prepared for battle, threatening to defeat U.S. forces with their own army of zombies. (A celebrity voodoo priest named Max Beauvoir and known as “houngan to the stars”—he had previously met Bill Clinton—eventually defused this crisis.)

In the first Liberian civil war of the 1990s, a preacher named Joseph Blahyi, who went by the nom de guerre General Butt Naked, led a particularly feared paramilitary unit. Said to be protected by magical amulets, Blahyi’s brigade fought naked to show their confidence that clothes and body armor were unnecessary. The unit committed mass atrocities and played a significant role in the outcome of the conflict.

Similar examples abound: In Myanmar, the former dictator Ne Win wrecked the economy by making banknotes worthless because they weren’t in denominations that were divisible by nine, his lucky number. In response, students organized mass protests on August 8, 1988, because they saw the number eight as powerful. Thousands of civilians were killed in the subsequent 8888 Uprising, as it became known, which still affects Myanmar’s politics today (it launched Aung San Suu Kyi to international prominence and is often compared to today’s anti-coup resistance).

Nonrational belief systems continue to drive geopolitical shifts. Recent research has shown that Chinese firms take significantly fewer financial risks during the company chairman’s zodiac year, which is said to bring bad luck. What’s more, ordinary Chinese citizens take fewer economic risks during their own zodiac years, too, affecting China’s wider economy.

And the United States doesn’t just have Paula White. Millions believe in QAnon, and more and more people are attending formal exorcisms, which often have overt political messages in support of Trump. The popular ReAwaken America tour was founded by a man who claims that COVID-19 vaccines are associated with the “mark of the beast.” A speaker at one such event warned that several diseases afflicting women are caused by “demon sperm.” The tour doesn’t just feature fringe characters with little influence; its speakers have included Michael Flynn, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Eric Trump, and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona. Across the aisle, self-described witches and “magical thinkers” attempted to curse Trump’s presidency with spells. Unlike their Republican counterparts, however, those groups have effectively zero influence on Democratic Party politics.

Beliefs drive politics—and irrational beliefs are widespread. Discussions of demons have become mainstream in Republican political gatherings and echo from the lips of influential MAGA firebrands. Political scientists and commentators shouldn’t dismiss these views because they seem outlandish. We need more research into these communities—and a better understanding of the political extremism they may unleash. We also need polling and survey research that tries to accurately measure these beliefs, so that we can better understand the reality of voter perceptions rather than asking only about more traditional concerns such as taxes and health care. Because, like it or not, those who worry about the potent force embedded in certain diabolical objects are not just to be found in places like Madagascar. They also have the ear of the man who may soon return to the White House.

Happy Halloween!