New Home Speaker Thinks Creationist Museum Is ‘Pointing Folks To The Reality’

Earlier than arriving in Washington lower than a decade in the past, Home Speaker Mike Johnson, a deeply non secular Christian, was a authorized crusader related to a fringe evangelical motion known as “younger Earth creationism,” based mostly on a literal studying of the Bible’s E book of Genesis that posits the Earth is barely a number of thousand years previous.

Within the mere hours since Johnson was elected speaker Wednesday, he hadn’t needed to tackle his views on creationism and evolution. However his shut ties to a frontrunner of the creationist motion and his previous authorized work — on behalf of the Ark Encounter creationist theme park, the place kids can be taught that dinosaurs have been passengers on Noah’s Ark — appear to recommend that he’s additionally personally aligned with these beliefs.

“The Ark Encounter is one approach to carry folks to this recognition of the reality, that what we learn within the Bible are precise historic occasions,” Johnson stated in a 2021 interview with Ark Encounter founder Ken Ham whereas guest-hosting the radio present of Tony Perkins, president of the Household Analysis Council, an evangelical activist group.

Johnson has shut private {and professional} ties to Ham, the founder and CEO of Solutions in Genesis, the Christian group that’s behind Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, each based mostly in Kentucky. As an legal professional, Johnson helped the big ark attraction, which opened in 2016, safe hundreds of thousands in state tourism subsidies whereas additionally defending its proper to make religious-based hiring choices.

“Kentucky officers are good to enthusiastically embrace the Ark Encounter, and the hundreds of thousands of vacationers the park will welcome to the realm from each viewpoint, race, shade, faith and creed,” Johnson wrote in an op-ed that appeared within the Louisville Courier Journal in 2014. “Solutions in Genesis goals to encourage essential thought and respectful public debate concerning the varied points of interest and concepts that can be introduced at its park, and that’s the magnificence and essence of free speech.”

Johnson wasn’t simply the authorized muscle for Solutions in Genesis, which embraces the assumption that the “account of origins introduced in Genesis 1-11 is an easy however factual presentation of precise occasions.” He blogged on the group’s web site and spoke at a convention it hosted in 2022. Johnson and his spouse, Kelly, a counselor who can be his podcast collaborator, are slated to look at one other Solutions in Genesis convention in April 2024: “Overcoming the Conflict on Ladies for the Glory of God.”

Johnson has known as Ham a “expensive pal,” and, when internet hosting him on his podcast, “Reality Be Informed,” Johnson thanked him for his friendship and ministry over time. Ham returned the sort phrases at an Solutions in Genesis convention in 2021, when he known as Johnson one of many few “godly males” in Congress.

Ham’s views are what you’ll count on for an individual who operates a “life-size” Noah’s Ark museum that options dinosaurs catching a trip on a biblically correct 300-cubits-long ark.

“We are able to say, 100% completely for certain, that folks lived with dinosaurs!” Ham writes in his 2000 e book, “Dinosaurs in Eden.” As a believer in biblical inerrancy, he believes the story of Genesis is each actually true and that its first 11 chapters maintain all the solutions about the best way to dwell an ethical life. He has cited the educating of evolution as the explanation for contemporary society’s ills and helps waging a tradition warfare to combat again towards atheists and materialists.

Johnson’s congressional workplace didn’t reply to a request for remark about his views on younger Earth idea, whose adherents imagine the planet is 6,000 years previous and that people walked the Earth similtaneously dinosaurs. The scientific neighborhood regards creationism as pseudoscience and is usually in settlement the Earth is an estimated 4.5 billion years previous.

Within the restricted time that reporters and researchers have needed to dig deeply into Johnson’s life — he grew to become a nationwide GOP determine solely within the final week and hails from a noncompetitive district in Louisiana — it doesn’t seem Johnson has publicly stated something to recommend he doesn’t settle for the idea of evolution. Reporters have, nevertheless, uncovered a litany of anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion sentiments in Johnson’s not-so-recent previous.

However he has appeared sympathetic to the creationist trigger and has fiercely defended its followers on First Modification grounds.

In a sermon delivered in 2016 at Christian Heart Shreveport in Louisiana, Johnson additionally blamed college shootings on an absence of godliness that he steered was rooted in educating kids they “evolve from the primordial slime,” based on meidastouch.com.

Along with his work with Solutions in Genesis, Johnson has been related to the Nationwide Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Colleges, which critics say espouses creationist teachings over schooling about evolution.

The educating of evolution in public faculties has been controversial for greater than a century. States started passing legal guidelines banning the educating of evolution within the early twentieth century, which led to the notorious 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. However it wasn’t till 1968 that the U.S. Supreme Courtroom dominated in Epperson v. Arkansas that bans on educating evolution have been unconstitutional. Later court docket choices prohibited the educating of creation science (in 1987) and clever design (in 2005) in public faculties.

Johnson’s critics worry he would attempt to inject Christian ideology into how he governs the U.S. Home as second-in-line for the presidency. Additionally they see younger Earth creationism as a tentacle of the Christian nationalist motion, whose objective is to create a Christian theocracy within the U.S.

“His coverage agenda seems to be in lockstep with that of a shadow community of Christian nationalist teams in our nation or working to protect conventional energy constructions and win privilege for conservative Christianity,” stated Rachel Laser, the president of Individuals United for Separation of Church and State.

As a state consultant in 2015, Johnson got here to the protection of a Louisiana public college district beneath hearth for making creationism and Bible examine a part of its curriculum — and provided to defend the district without spending a dime by means of his “Christian” regulation agency, Freedom Guard, Slate reported. Johnson has described Freedom Guard as a “public curiosity regulation agency.”

“The priority that you just’re articulating must be of concern to extra than simply creationists,” Johnson stated in an interview that very same 12 months with a creationist activist who described being compelled to be taught what he known as false evolutionary theories in class. “All freedom-loving Individuals should have grave considerations about these authorities abuses, no matter their views on Genesis and even the Christian religion, for that matter.”

William Trollinger, the writer of “Righting America on the Creation Museum,” stated the Solutions in Genesis reveals, as a substitute of being insulated from politics, are deeply reflective of the nation’s divides. “These are tradition warfare websites,” Trollinger instructed HuffPost. “Younger Earth creationism may be very a lot part of MAGA tradition. There are only a few politically reasonable younger Earth creationists in the US.”

In September 2022, Johnson and his spouse hosted Ham on their “Reality Be Informed” podcast, which has been round since March of that 12 months. Of their dialog, the Johnsons closely promoted Ham’s Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

“For all of our mates who haven’t made a go to, it’s onerous to explain,” Mike Johnson stated. “It’s actually an superior expertise.”

Throughout their dialogue, Ham blamed the educating of “atheistic evolution” for corrupting the youth and main them to show away from the church. He argued that as a substitute church leaders and fogeys want to show kids the best way to defend church doctrine by means of biblical examine and argument in order that they’ll know and be capable to correctly argue that “the fossil report wasn’t laid down over hundreds of thousands of years, that’s the graveyard of the flood.”

“To show all of them this stuff — that’s what’s been lacking from the church,” Ham stated.

“I believe that’s proper,” Johnson replied.

On the finish of their dialog, Johnson once more praised Ham’s Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter for “doing perhaps the most effective work proper now in our era of pointing folks to the reality.”