Reading Darwin causes mass shootings. Mike Johnson says so. I have the transcript

By now you will know that the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (Louisiana 4^th District) was among those who voted against accepting the results of the 2020 Presidential election. You may also know that he is opposed to the concept of same sex marriage, which in some way he regards as undermining individual religious freedom, and wants to pass a law making abortion illegal throughout the US. You probably also know that he has denied that human activity is a cause of global warming, and has accepted more campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry than from any other source. There is a high chance that you have heard him share Marjorie Taylor Greene’s view that the problem in mass shootings isn’t guns, it’s the human heart (Guns don’t kill people. Human hearts kill people.) What you may not know are his views on the causes of the moral decline that, like authoritarian pulpiteers throughout the ages, he sees happening all around him. He has, however, stated those views very plainly, at a presentation he gave in Louisiana in 2016, available [actually, no longer available] here. I have read the transcript of this, suffering so that you don’t have to, by good luck retained it, and despite many decades of following the utterances of people who share his views I was surprised by what I found.

Here he is, speaking at a less than overcrowded Shreveport Christian Center, which describes itself as mandated “to participate with the Lord in establishing His kingdom in all areas of our culture. We desire to use the authority given to us to promote and participate in seeing the Lord’s purposes rule in the church, business, media, arts, education, government and family arenas.” The authority, of course, is given by God. He is standing at the front of a platform, and behind him are musical instruments and two flags. The flag of the United States, and the flag of Israel. The Israeli Right has been wooing the American Religious Right for decades, and the unquestioning support of the American Religious Right has done much to make Israel what it is today.

Here’s part of what he said; the link the YouTube has gone dead, as with so many of his presentations, but I had collected the transcript and will make it available to anyone who asks for it privately. Like all academics, I am easy to find.

My account is rather rambling, although nowhere near as rambling as the original material, so I will place the main points here above the fold.

• He thinks that he became a lawyer in response to divine calling.
• He would rather have been born at the time of the founding fathers, but thinks that he is where he is now because that’s where God wants him to be.
• He thinks that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired.
• He thinks that the United States is a Christian nation.
• He thinks that the only real way to be a proper Christian is naïve biblical literalism, so rigorously that nowadays only 4% make the grade.
• He thinks that the US is in moral decline, and that we must identify the disease that caused that decline.
• He thinks that the disease is teaching about Darwin, imposed in the 1930s by a liberal educational elite with the collusion of progressive Supreme Court judges such as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
• He thinks that darkness is encroaching, Christians are being persecuted, students who profess a belief in God are ridiculed in universities, and he himself has been shot at with flaming arrows for his religious beliefs.
• He thinks that learning about Darwin causes people to stop believing in God, whereupon they become completely amoral.
• He thinks that the results include no-fault divorce (I don’t know why he regards that as a bad thing, but I expect his audience would agree with him), feminism (the same comments apply), the legalisation of abortion which is murder (the Bible says it isn’t, but Bible believing Christians don’t seem to know that), and in due course to mass shootings.