Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, knows the culture wars. In Congress, he has gone after gender-affirming health care, abortion, and gun regulation. But for a close ally of Donald Trump and a crowd-pleaser within the GOP, there’s also something a little more old-school about Johnson: He appears to be a true believer in the crusades of the religious right.
The evidence for his religious conviction is plentiful. Johnson, a Southern Baptist, hosts a podcast with his wife that provides “analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective,” often dismissing the concept of separating church and state. (The point of the establishment clause, he insists, is to protect religion, not to create a firewall.) He often gives sermons of a political nature at churches. He was once tapped to be the dean of an ill-fated Baptist law school aiming to produce religiously motivated conservative lawyers. And he served on the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission board from 2004 to 2012.
Johnson’s whole career has been steeped in the religious right’s priorities. After law school, he worked as senior legal counsel and spokesman for the powerful conservative Christian legal organization now named the Alliance Defending Freedom. While there, he took on “religious liberty” cases, writing an amicus brief opposing the decriminalization of gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas and repeatedly defended same-sex marriage bans. From there, he defended Louisiana’s strict abortion law, took on opponents of Louisiana State University’s sports chaplaincy program, and represented the organization that built Kentucky’s Ark Encounter theme park. And in his brief stint as a Louisiana state legislator, he pushed legislation that would protect residents who discriminate against gay people.
But perhaps the clearest representation of Johnson’s old-fashioned religious conservatism is in how he first earned national attention: through his marriage.
In May of 1999, Johnson, who was then a couple of weeks away from graduating law school, married his wife, Kelly, a schoolteacher whom he met at a wedding. Almost two years later, a photo of the smiling couple ran with an Associated Press story, under the headline “Can states successfully legislate marital bliss?”
The story explained that Mike and Kelly had entered a “covenant marriage.” This meant that, prior to marrying, they had to undergo premarital counseling and sign a binding contract agreeing that they would divorce only in the case of abuse, abandonment, imprisonment of a spouse, or lengthy separation. A covenant couple, no matter how miserable, cannot simply decide to divorce.
“In my generation, all we’ve ever known is the no-fault scheme, and any deviation from that seems like a radical move,” the then-28-year-old Johnson said of divorce. “Because so few people have chosen covenant marriage in Louisiana, it seems like an unpopular choice. It’s not unpopular. It’s just unknown. Once the message is out there, a whole lot more people will choose it.”
But Johnson’s prediction proved incorrect. In 1997, when Louisiana adopted the option of covenant marriage, it was heralded as the start of a movement: It was the first time that divorce laws in America were moving to become more stringent, not less. A number of Southern states debated their own versions of the law. But it received pushback from domestic violence survivors (even if you filed on the basis of abuse, you still had to go through court-mandated counseling beforehand), Catholics (counseling mentioned the possibility of divorce, which the church opposes), and even faithful evangelicals (a “more serious” marriage implied that their “regular” marriages weren’t serious or religiously founded).
Ultimately, only two other states—Arizona in 1998 and Arkansas in 2001—followed suit. And very few couples—around 1 or 2 percent—in the three states opted for this type of commitment.
Johnson, though, continued to push his rosy version of it. He told the AP he was trying to persuade all of his friends to convert their marriages. According to NOLA.com, the Johnsons became “the poster couple” for covenant marriage. Just a few months after the AP article, Mike and Kelly were on Good Morning America, talking to Diane Sawyer about being among the few such couples in the country. When Sawyer asked Kelly about her decision, Kelly, charming and smiling, made the idea seem romantic.
“Oh, gosh, I would have to say, from a woman’s perspective, I’ve been in some bad relationships before, and I just knew that when I met the man I was supposed to marry, that I wanted to know it was for a lifetime,” she said. Later, she added: “It’s a big red flag for a woman if you decide you want the option of the covenant marriage, and your mate says, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ ”
At the time, the Johnsons seemed like a nice, media-friendly couple. But Mike Johnson wasn’t just a traditional-minded groom; he was on a political mission. He had been a volunteer with a group called the Louisiana Family Forum, which worked with all three branches of government in the state to push socially conservative laws. The lawmaker to first introduce the idea of covenant marriage was Tony Perkins, who is now known as the president of the influential Family Research Council but who was then a state representative. According to NOLA.com, Johnson helped Perkins craft the covenant marriage bill.
So the happy young couple’s public appearance, however genuine, was also politically useful. And in his handling of Sawyer’s questions, there were hints that Mike Johnson had more than a simple romantic sense of the commitment.
Sawyer: The ACLU has said you’re letting the state legislate what is really a religious or a personal commitment.
Johnson: That’s true, but I’m not sure why they oppose it. Because society has a vested interest in preserving marriages because of all the social ills that come from the root cause of divorce. The law, the state, is going to sanction some kind of marriage. So why not have an option that’s more binding?
His—and his wife’s—talking points clearly reflected the moment’s political language. Covenant marriage emerged from a broader conservative “marriage movement” in the late ’90s and early ’00s, when some Southern lawmakers fixated on the idea of divorce as a cause of society’s ills. (Oddly, divorce rates were on the decline at the time.) Politicians such as Mike Huckabee and groups such as James Dobson’s Family Research Council (Perkins didn’t become its president until 2003) pushed marriage promotion as an urgent political matter. In state legislatures, Christian conservatives rallied around the cause of saving marriages. Some began to propose discussions at the high school level about teaching healthy communication in relationships, for example, while others pushed to provide public funding for marital counseling.
“Basically, covenant marriage was a distillation of a variety of things that people wanted to put together in policy to strengthen marriage,” Laura Sanchez, a Bowling Green State University professor, said. “It was a diverse conversation.”
In the case of Louisiana, an LSU professor named Katherine Spaht felt a calling from God to protect children from fractured homes and brought the general idea of covenant marriage to Perkins, who drew up the law based on his religious understanding of divorce. In 1999 Perkins wrote with excitement of what Louisiana’s law could mean for the future. The family values movement, he asserted, had become too characterized by empty rhetoric and too strongly associated with what it opposed. Instead, the movement needed to identify what it meant to stand for:
This is what covenant marriage law represents. It is not a short-term approach that simply changes divorce law by repealing no-fault divorce. Rather, it is a long-term solution that fosters the development of a culture that embraces traditional family values. Creating such an environment is, in large part, up to the faith community, but government can foster its development by providing optional standards that recognize the value of family and the permanence of marriage.
The covenant marriage, in other words, seemed like a way to present something positive from the religious right. And requiring “counseling” allowed the practice to seem secular. “They’re using counseling to open the door to state-sponsored religious practice,” said Rebecca L. Davis, a University of Delaware professor and author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. “Counseling isn’t intrinsically religious. But these folks are seeing their version of marriage counseling as an extension of church life and faith.”
But the passage of covenant marriages in Louisiana was more than a solitary victory for the marriage movement. According to Davis, during the latter half of the 20th century, many Americans came to believe that divorce could be blamed for maladjusted children, poor educational outcomes, crime, poverty, and more. In particular, conservatives pointed to impoverished Black communities as an example of the damage high divorce rates could wreak. Research showed that children of divorce performed worse in school. Covenant marriage was devised, and its passage was seen, as a counterpunch in that bigger fight. But something was awry.
“All this research has been debunked,” Davis said, noting that conflict, rather than divorce, correlates with poorer outcomes for children. “So much of the research they cite has been done in sectarian contexts: religiously funded organizations giving money to religiously funded researchers.”
Instead, she said, the era’s push against divorce really had more to do with holding up the Christian image of family life. “It’s never about divorce—it’s seen as the end result of a whole host of other social changes these folks don’t like,” she said. “Divorce gets blamed because it’s easy to understand; it appears to be an event. You get divorced, versus a series of vague, inchoate social forces or trends. But when they talk about divorce, it’s always about gender equality, LGBTQ rights, the role of religion in public life.”
Johnson, for his part, continued to speak of the erosion of marriage as an obvious existential threat. In one 2004 editorial, he described marriage as “civilization’s oldest and most important institution,” arguing that “a healthy and prosperous community” was reliant upon that institution’s health.
But by 2005, it was apparent that any remaining appetite for covenant marriage was weak. Huckabee and his wife converted their marriage into a covenant marriage on Valentine’s Day, but the event was seen as more of a publicity stunt to highlight his own faith and a last-ditch effort to popularize the option.
Couples are still having covenant marriages: The 2014 marriage of 19 Kids & Counting’s Jill Duggar was depicted in People as romantic and befitting her lifestyle. (The Duggars, it should be noted, have ties to the Family Research Council.) And remnants of the broader marriage movement live on: Right-wing figures both mainstream and radical have continued to target no-fault divorce as an evil of society. But even one of the movement’s founders acknowledges that covenant marriage never took off. “In public policy, fashions come and go. I think the season for covenant marriage—the novelty has kind of worn off,” Perkins said in 2009.
Johnson, meanwhile, directed more of his focus on the specter of gay marriage. In 2004 he wrote in an editorial in dramatic terms of the threat he saw:
Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.
Simply put, sex of any kind outside of the marriage of one man and one woman is ultimately destructive. Social science is now confirming what the Bible has always said.
Such direct pleas for the wisdom of the Bible would become commonplace for him. “My values follow the model of our Founding Fathers, I believe, and I think this is important,” he said in an interview with a Baptist publication in 2016, the year he was elected to Congress. “We were established as one nation under God. We are perilously close to forgetting that principle now—and we desperately need to return to this fundamental understanding.”
It’s a perspective that smacks of Christian nationalism, the worldview that holds that the U.S. should be reclaimed—to some extremes, through violence—as an explicitly Christian nation. Johnson is no stranger to this perspective: He has previously told churchgoers to “put on the full armor of God” and that they were “at the tip of the spear, at the tip of the front line,” in a “spiritual battle.” It was a worldview that flowed naturally, over the decades, from the ambitions of that 28-year-old groom.
Johnson made his faith a major part of his speech upon becoming speaker, implying that he had been divinely chosen. “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” he said.
He has signaled, repeatedly, that as a leader of his party he will continue to prioritize conservative Christian measures. And he’ll do it with the same playbook he brought to the politics of his marriage: Be charming, in the service of making radical ideals seem wholesome, chaste, and harmless.
