Congressional Moron Doesn’t Understand What 'Misnomer' Means

Mike Johnson has no idea what he's talking about.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a man who who did a shoddy job of covering up his and his wife’s anti-LGBTQ+ bullshit, seems a bit like a moron. I don’t say that to imply he lacks any ability to hurt this country very deeply, but to point out that his reserved air and ability to breathe through his nose and not his mouth does not imply some ferocious intellect. He is not picking a fistfight in the Senate, and hey, that’s great, but that does not make him some mastermind. To wit, Johnson went on CNBC to say the following:

"The separation of church and state is a misnomer. People misunderstand it. Of course, it comes from a phrase that was in a letter that Jefferson wrote. It’s not in the Constitution. And what he was explaining is they did not want the government to encroach upon the church — not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life. It’s exactly the opposite." 

It does not take much Googling to figure out that Johnson is entirely wrong here. Perhaps people mistake his cynicism for intelligence, but this answer is not only incorrect, it’s very easily disproven. I can only imagine he’d say this with the assumption that people wouldn’t check. Sometimes I think we confuse basic guile and the ability to say absurd things with a straight face for depth and wits. Let’s break down what an incredibly stupid thing “the separation of church and state is a misnomer” is to say together. 

The definition of “misnomer” is “a wrong or inaccurate name or designation” or “a wrong or inaccurate use of a name or term.” To refer to “the separation of church and state” as a misnomer would mean either that the term itself is somehow inaccurate in its description of the United States federal government’s stance on the matter or is being used incorrectly to describe it. Johnson mentions that it’s not in the Consitution as if that is an element contributing to the misnomer status, but it’s not, so we won’t waste our time on that. He also mentions “a letter that Jefferson wrote.” I cannot pretend to know Johnson’s seemingly confused mind, but it seems likely that he’s referring to this 1802 letter from Jefferson that read, in part:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof", thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

If “the separation of church and state” is a misnomer, it seems likely Johnson means to imply we have somehow misinterpreted this passage. Sure, reading older dialects of American English can be challenging, but there is not much room for interpretation in Jefferson’s letter. He praises this separation for the religious freedom it provides and how the “wall of separation” allows for people to practice their faith without government intervention while noting that the government’s reach is over action and not thought or “opinions” as Jefferson phrases it. Given that the letter was being written to Baptists, it seems as if Jefferson is showing them how the separation of church and state benefits them. The government will hold no sway over their beliefs but will continue to govern their actions.

This is why Johnson is absolutely wrong to call the separation of church and state a misnomer in any sense: the term is an accurate description of both Jefferson’s sentiment and the principle as observed by the government. While again, I have no sight on the shallow reaches of Johnson’s mind, it seems as if he’s banking on the classic assumption that Republican zealots like him have some sort of innate claim to the Founding Fathers since the Republicans are usually the ones bleating about how far we’ve strayed from the vision set out by white slave-owners who created the Electoral College to muzzle the democratic process. The truth of the matter is that Republicans, by and large, don’t really care about what the founders wanted; it’s their regressive values Republicans are reaching for. They understand that American culture holds the Founding Fathers to be sacrosanct paragons not to be questioned, so if they couch their brain-dead politics as being more aligned with them, it’ll make their policies go down easier. It’s similar to how Republicans who would rather expel people of color and brush aside the poor and the starving claim some kind of ownership over Christ, a figure that would very likely be appalled to see this much gleeful cruelty carried out. 

The fact is, there is a separation between church and state. Just because Johnson and his goons wish there could be Christian prayer in school doesn’t somehow make that separation “a misnomer.” We are a nation of many creeds, and to whatever extent the democratic process still limps along, we are not a theocracy. It frankly shouldn’t and doesn’t matter what the founders wanted. We are not working for the values of people long since dead. The country as it is now needs a government that protects its freedoms. And the separation protects Christians as much as it protects any other faith. The desire to break down this separation seems to be assumed by Johnson to empower only his ilk when in reality it would leave the door open for all kinds of religions to take part in government. 

At the end of the day, Johnson and his ship of fools are willing to say whatever it takes to make a Christian theocracy sound like an enactment of the founders’ will and, therefore, the only right direction for our country. Not only is he wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter. Our country should be for the people who live within it, not the ones from the distant past.