Mike Johnson Summits the Mt. Olympus of Ego: Sees Himself as the "New Moses"

Christian religious delusions of grandeur appear in 41% of cases of schizophrenia in Western countries.

You can’t beat this for hubris—and you can’t match it for openness of intent—though Mike Johnson certainly meant to keep this hidden from people dedicated to the separation of Church and State. For these are comments Mike Johnson made at the gala of The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which awarded Johnson the American Patriot Award for Christian Honor and Courage. This is arguably the best funded and most assertive Christian Nationalist group in America. Founded in 2020 by Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator, the organization’s leadership includes former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The group’s stated passion is churning out model legislation and connecting legislators at all levels of government to pass bills based on “biblical principles” in order to “save the nation.”

After first noting that there were no journalists present—apparently he was not aware he was being recorded—he “confided” to a roomful of people that he had been speaking with the Lord, and that God had appointed him as His “new Moses,” giving him the speakership of the House of Representatives by divine providence.

The Lord impressed upon my heart a few weeks before this happened that something was going to occur. And the Lord very specifically told me in my prayers to prepare but to wait. I had this sense that we were going to come to a Red Sea moment in our Republican conference and the country at large.

Look, I’m a Southern Baptist. I don’t want to get too spooky on you, OK? But the Lord speaks to your heart. And he had been speaking to me about this. 

And the Lord told me very clearly to prepare. OK, prepare for what? I don’t know. “We’re coming to a Red Sea moment.” “What does that mean, Lord?”

Slate gave us the one-paragraph backgrounder: “Well, what that meant, it seemed, was the stepping up of a great new leader. In the story of Exodus, Moses parts a body of water, traditionally thought of as the Red Sea, to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. In his remarks, Johnson said he realized, once Kevin McCarthy was booted, that the event God had been preparing him for was the speaker election chaos.”

I started praying more about that. And the Lord began to wake me up through this three-week process we were in, in the middle of the night, and to speak to me. And [I began] to write things down, plans and procedures and ideas on how we could pull the conference together. I assumed the Lord was going to choose a new Moses. And “Oh, thank you, Lord: You’re going to allow me to be Aaron to Moses.” [In the Hebrew Bible, Aaron is Moses’ brother and a priest who aids him.]

I worked to get Steve Scalise elected. And then Jim Jordan. And Tom Emmer. Thirteen people ran for the post. The Lord kept telling me to wait. And I waited and waited. And it came to the end, and the Lord said, “Now, step forward.”

Oh, my.

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To be honest, I felt Jesus was my best friend by the time I was four. I had my pretty Catechism with the sparkle dust on the cover and the picture of Jesus on the back. He was lifting a tiny little lost lamb out of a dangerous gully with a staff in one hand. He had a golden halo around his head, and light was streaming down onto his head from a break in the white clouds over head. I also had a child-sized fan that looked like a large lollipop on fat ice cream stick—requisite in the Southern summers when the air stands up by itself.

I know I got this rosy picture of religion from my beautiful grandmother. Lena Alicia Cole Fuller was the best press Christianity could ever have had. She had the warmest face and the kindest touch and she modeled the love I then thought Christianity meant. The biscuits didn’t hurt her case, either. She made kid-sized biscuits that she soaked in butter and jam.

SIDEBAR:

Both the Fall and the Resurrection were prefigured by Sumerian mythologies. Particularly the Garden of Eden story may have been picked up during the Hebrews’ years in slavery, and *modified* to fit Hebrew monotheism. Monotheism, which emerged following the development of empire, is characterized in almost every case by the elevation of a male to a position of singular authority. Eve, therefore, had to take a fall.

‘NUTHER SIDEBAR:

On that Virgin Birth thing, “in the second century, the Greek writer Celsus wrote a book about how Jesus was the illegitimate low-birth offspring of a spinner called Mary and a Roman soldier called Panthera. The implication may also have been that she was raped. Various later rabbinic texts refer to him as Jesus ben Pandera.” [Giles Fraser for The Guardian] … If Eve had to take a fall, Mary’s situation had to be seriously cleaned up. So, they took out the rape and/or impure sexual conduct thing and put in an encounter with a non-corporeal Holy Spirit. But this is a story for another day.

Anyhow, Lena Alicia Cole Fuller fed hobos through the Depression—they crayoned a sketch of a cat in a rectangle on the sidewalk in front of her house—visited every sick person with a flower basket of pears and pickled peaches, and never raised her voice to a child because she never needed to. We loved this woman. And because she loved us, and also sang God’s praises morning, noon, and night, we believed God was good. God loved Jesus, and Jesus would come get us if we got lost, and Lena C. would keep making biscuits. All was right with the cosmos. What could possibly go wrong?

It was only later that I realized that Lena C. (as we called my grandma) hadn’t read us any of the … ahem … really scary stuff. You’ll find some really sobering Bible verses citing vicious abuse of women and horrific punishment of vanquished enemies, including an episode featuring the involuntary loss of 200 foreskins (as punishment). There’s much more here: https://rudyruddell.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/i-posted-all-of-the-ugliest-verses-of-the-bible/

The downside of the Religion of Love, Light and Forgiveness is incredibly dark. As early as the second century, Christian texts began to feature accounts of the afterlife, including, in great detail, the torments of hell. The agony of those tortured was comprehensively illustrated, as New Testament historian Bart Ehrman puts it, with “barely concealed voyeuristic glee.” The Roman historian Ramsay MacMullen has called these Christian accounts “the only sadistic literature I am aware of in the ancient world.”

It’s good to point out that there are terrible hells in the religions of other cultures, too. The concept of the Ten Courts of Yanluo began after Chinese folk religion was influenced by Buddhism. In this variation of Chinese mythology, there are 12,800 hells located under the earth—eight of them dark and eight of them cold. Additionally, there are 84,000 miscellaneous hells located at the edge of the universe. But you’re not there forever. After receiving due punishment, one will eventually be sent for reincarnation. The Chinese system is so complex that it provides an “anteroom” where the wrongly doomed—who have been sent to hell through bureaucratic errors—await release after their lawyers untangle the knots.

But back to Christianity. Obviously, where we can get an Albert Schweitzer or a Mother Teresa, we can get a Tomas de Torquemada or a couple of misogynistic priests penning The Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), the complete and unexpurgated instructional manual on how to torture a woman. Not the Roman Catholic Church’s finest hour, except perhaps that a pope tried to get the book stopped (but couldn’t).

Meanwhile, history rolls along, and along comes Freud and, in rapid succession, Jung, Edinger, Von Franz, Jaffé, Jacobi, Bleuler, Lifton, Semrad, Hillman et al. And suddenly, we start learning much, much more about everything from psychic experiences to religious ecstasies to the very certain cognitive science that says that …

We are wired for religion.

Any mythologist will tell you the same. There are, Joseph Campbell pointed out, Four Functions of Mythology that are revealed by stories from humankind from all over the world:

• the Metaphysical … the fateful, beautiful, terrifying human relationship with the divine … the qualities of the divine … the powers of the gods and goddesses and what happens when they get miffed

• the Psychological … the various stages of life, or when to stop trying to get your mother’s approval

• the Social … how to keep all hell from breaking loose in human relations and who has to feed the kids

• the Cosmological … meaning that some myths explain the “science” of how the world works within the belief constraints and knowledge of any particular time. In one century, the Greek god Neptune rules the waves and in another, it’s the moon’s gravitation complicated by the transport of heat from the equator to the poles with respect paid to hurricane spin, in turn ruled by the Coriolus Effect.

Tricky thing is, though, that the metaphysical comes first in all instances. This down, in the terms Rudolf Otto would use, to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a “religious experience” so overpowering it scares you to death or so beautiful it slays you with the sublime. And from the earliest times of which we know, our ancestors lived in awe of the divine, cowering before its power to destroy us yet revering and loving this very same energy because loves streams from it, showers us with transcendence, hope, joy, and so much vision we feel we can see forever.

Religions don’t stay pure …

… and revelations are rewritten by the power hungry, who then enforce lie after lie.

Conversely, they may invent new texts to pad primary revelations with interpretations or doctrines that skew the religion’s original intent.

This has happened to Islam (which added the ahaditha and invented shari’a law—a system that is 90% ahaditha and only 10% Qur’an. What this did to Islam is almost unimaginable.

Similarly, the exquisitely gender-balanced pure Hinduism became the only one of the world’s major religions never to lose its goddesses. But now India, in the sharp-taloned grip of Hindutvu male supremacism, is the world capital of gang rape. Crafted of upper-class, rich, overwhelmingly male Indian supremacist thinking, modern Hinduism is so self-validating for males that they can go to the temple and pray to the goddess Lakshmi for greater wealth and promptly go home, douse an unwanted wife with kerosene, and set her aflame purely so he can be rid of her and keep the dowry rather than having to return it if he divorces her.

But close behind in viciousness is Radical Right Christian Religio-Fascist Nationalism. But then, Christianity has had a lot of problems from the beginning.

First, in the tale of the war between God and Lucifer, the Angel of Light, God wins. Lucifer falls and becomes Satan. In the story of the Garden of Eden, absolutely obviously Sumerian in origin and now revisioned by a monotheistic (and male supremacist) Hebrew culture, Satan becomes the tempter of Adam and Eve, whose Fall he engineers.

As these borrowed and altered mythemes drift down through the Old Testament and into the New, human responsibility is exported to Satan. The Devil, the tenets of this philosophy state, is after everyone—and will tempt everyone. And though the Devil will have done these evil deeds through the hapless human, if hapless human allows these evil deeds to occur, hapless human will go to help even if, as Flip Wilson used to say, “The Devil made me do it!”

If we’re going to understand how all this works in the human mind, and why it’s so dangerous, we’re going to have to start by understanding how we’re built and what forces—some of them firecracker hot and powerful—are at work in us. So now we have to talk about …

The Psyche’s Source and Goal

The Collected Works of C. G. (Carl) Jung spans more than 20,000 pages, and understanding everything he’s saying would take a lifetime of study, and then you s till wouldn’t be done. To help clarify what’s actually going on with Mike Johnson, I’m going put here as mere thumbnail of Jung’s diagram of the psyche—but before I do, I want to show you something.

This is an image of an electromagnetic pulse. Lovely, isn’t she? Notice that most of the light (energy) is in its brilliant, glowing center and in the sphere’s sizzling shell.

The energy distribution in this electromagnetic pulse is an almost perfect image of the human psyche as Jung lays it out—and the luminous center and shining outer edge represent the Self. That’s not the little self we’re talking about when we refer to myself, yourself, itself, themselves, herself, or himself. That’s the personal self, the singular self.

In Jungian terms, when we talk about the Self, with a capital “S” we’re talking about what we could call supra-personal Soul, the Spark of God within and the immeasurable, eternal God that encompasses all matter, all energy, and all consciousness.

And the difficulty in mapping Jung’s idea of the psyche at all is that this Self is, paradoxically, the spark of light that is in the center of us and yet completely surrounding us simultaneously.

The Self, Jung says, is both the source and the goal of the individual psyche, the individual person and personality. The quest for wholeness of psyche and union with the divine spark within us and the divine consciousness that extends far, far beyond us—the quest of self-realization and Self-realization—is, Jung says, “a law of nature and thus of invincible power.”

To echo what cognitive science now says, we are wired for spiritual quest. That’s why human life is shot through with religious fervor all the time.

So how does this religion stuff go so wrong? How do we get these people who want to control every damned thing we think and do and punish us if we don’t comply? How do we get someone like Mike Johnson, who’s now telling people he’s the Moses who will get Christians to the Promised Land and pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ—and who, therefore, in a leap of false logic for the ages, gets to tell you what to do?

Stay tuned because that’s coming in Mike Johnson, Part II: Anatomy of a Delusion later this week. It’s full of that grad school stuff the MAGAns appear to hate.

You’re gonna love it.

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