House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Christian fundamentalism is even too much for his own family, who say that the leader of the House’s religiosity has stood between them and environmental aid, citing an instance nine years ago when Johnson outright rejected their cry for help regarding a toxic burn site just miles away from their family home.
In 2014, the future speaker’s father Patrick Johnson and his wife Janis Gabriel, both turned staunch environmental activists after the elder Johnson survived a near fatal industrial explosion, visited his son’s legal office with a plea: stop a government-backed burn of 15 million pounds worth of toxic munitions at Camp Minden.
But Johnson wouldn’t hear them out, according to Gabriel.
“His father and I went to him and said: ‘Mike you need to get involved in this, this is really important. Your family really lives at ground zero,’” Gabriel told The Guardian. “We basically begged him to say something, to someone, somewhere.”
Johnson, who was a prominent right-wing lawyer at the time, wouldn’t budge.
“It just blew my mind that he wouldn’t give five minutes of his time to the effort,” she said. “He basically shut us down.”
According to Gabriel, Johnson has never been interested in environmental causes—a political preference due to his creationist beliefs, which lead him to think that climate change is a function of the planet’s shifting cycles rather than a man-made crisis.
“The climate is changing, but the question is: is the climate changing because of the natural cycles of the atmosphere over the span of history, or is it changing because we drive SUVs?,” Johnson said to the sound of boos during a town hall in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2017. “I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”
The elder Johnson, who passed away in 2016, “certainly didn’t agree” with Mike Johnson’s “extremist stance” on Christianity, Gabriel said. The father and son also disagreed on Donald Trump.
Gabriel explained that her impetus for speaking with the outlet was to elucidate “what and who he is and how that will affect the job he’s doing for us,” and noted that she believed it was Johnson’s extreme faith that led him to spurn his father’s cry for help over the air pollution crisis in the representative’s congressional district.
“It speaks to those religious beliefs,” Gabriel told The Guardian. “‘Don’t take care of the environment because we have a finite amount of time here and God will take care of you.’ It’s crazy.”