The secular Left (and some on the center-right) thought it had won the culture war some time ago. And it is mostly correct. But every now and then, an apostate slips by and occupies a position of governmental power. Mike Johnson, the recently elected speaker of the House, represents what the guardians of our secular age fear most: a Bible-believing Christian who thinks it is okay to bring his beliefs into the public square. 

Most guardians of public secularism, of course, will tolerate mentions of “God” in public speeches, a prayer to open sessions of Congress, and the words “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency, but when a public official dares to intrude his or her faith into public policy issues, they endanger what the late, great theologian Father Richard John Neuhaus called the “naked public square.” 

Neuhaus wrote The Naked Public Square in the early 1980s, when religious fundamentalists of the so-called “new Right” reentered the political arena — to howls of protests and warnings from secular liberals, who accused the “religious Right” of violating the First Amendment’s “separation of church and state.” Never mind that the First Amendment says nothing about a separation of church and state (those words appeared in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson). Never mind that, for many years after the adoption of the First Amendment, several states had official religions. Never mind that it wasn’t until 1961 that a liberal-dominated Supreme Court ruled that prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. Liberals in the 1980s voiced their concern that the “religious right” wanted to transform the United States into a “theocracy.” Now that same concern is being voiced by the rise of Mike Johnson to the speakership.

Johnson had the gall to say, “I’m a committed Christian and my faith informs everything I do,” adding that you can discern his worldview by reading the Bible. The guardians of the naked public square were quick to pounce. In the Daily Beast, David Rothkopf warns that the new speaker “wants to make America a Christian theocracy.” Time magazine labels Johnson a “Christian Nationalist” who wants to assert “authoritarian social control” over Americans. Leftist Rep. Jamie Raskin says that Johnson is “for theocracy.” Slate accuses Johnson of “theocratic zealotry.” In Esquire, Charles Pierce calls Johnson an “anti-choice fanatic” with a “patina of religious extremism.” Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer has called Johnson “the most dangerous person ever to lead one of the three branches of American government, due to the extremism of his Christian nationalism.” Apparently, the Bible, on which American presidents place their left hand when taking the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, is the next book to be canceled by the Left — canceled, that is, from the public square. 

Neuhaus noted that the secularists want to relegate religion — especially Christianity — to the private sphere. “The naked public square,” Neuhaus wrote, “is the result of political doctrine and practice that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business. The doctrine is that America is a secular society. It finds dogmatic expression in the ideology of secularism.” Christians are free to worship privately in their churches, the secularists acknowledge, but their religious beliefs have no place in the formation of public policy. 

What is happening to Mike Johnson is not new. You may recall that it was not that long ago when Sen. Diane Feinstein told then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett that she may not be qualified to sit on the Supreme Court because the Catholic “dogma lives loudly within you.” Judicial nominee Brian Buescher of Nebraska was “grilled” by Democrats for his membership in the Catholic Knights of Columbus. Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times expressed fear that with five Catholic Justices on the Supreme Court, there was danger that religion would be placed over the rest of civil society. More recently, the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia, labeled Catholics who attend the Latin Mass dangerous extremists.

American society and its laws have a rich history and tradition that is based, in part, on our Judeo-Christian heritage. The secularists strive to delete that heritage from the nation’s public business. Neuhaus concluded The Naked Public Square by lamenting the “cultural crisis … of our society: the popularly accessible and vibrant belief systems and world views of our society are largely excluded from the public arena in which decisions are made about how society should be ordered.” There will be, he wrote, a “crisis of legitimacy” if secular elites “persist in systematically ruling out of order the moral traditions in which Western law has developed and which bear, for the overwhelming majority of the American people, a living sense of right and wrong.” He worried that the “naked public square may be the last phase of a failed experiment, a mistaken proposition.”

“We have no divine promise,” he wrote, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, “that a nation so conceived and so dedicated will endure any longer than it has.” It is the guardians of the naked public square, not Mike Johnson, who endanger the American experiment.