Speaker Mike Johnson is a Bible thumping creationist!

Wind On Capitol Hill published in The New Yorker by Oliver Whang: Mike Johnson’s Vote-Whipping Strategy: Two by Two?

A creationist offers a tour of a giant pretend Noah’s ark in Kentucky, which stands to earn eighteen million dollars in tax breaks thanks to the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

One criticism of Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, is that he doesn’t have much experience in Congress, but that’s not strictly true. Johnson was once the lawyer for a pretend Noah’s ark, and during that time he gained some conceptual experience with many animals, including a congress of salamanders. 

The ark is in the horse country of northern Kentucky, and it was built to the specifications given by God to Noah in Genesis. 

That’s three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high, or five hundred and ten feet by eighty-five by fifty-one. In the words of a cartoon giraffe featured on the side of a bus that transports visitors to the ark, “It’s SOOOOO big!”

Ark Encounter, as the attraction is known, was opened in 2016, by a Christian-fundamentalist nonprofit called Answers in Genesis. 

It was the vision of the group’s young-Earth-creationist founder, Ken Ham, and cost more than a hundred million dollars. 

Kentucky offers a tax incentive to big tourist attractions; for Ark Encounter, this could add up to ongoing rebates totalling eighteen million dollars. 

But in 2014, the state blocked Ark Encounter’s incentive; the organization, it turns out, requires its employees to make a “statement of faith,” which labels homosexuality an abhorrence and rejects modern science. At the time, Johnson was an attorney for the religious legal-advocacy group Freedom Guard, and he sued on behalf of Ham and Ark Encounter, claiming that the State of Kentucky had engaged in religious discrimination. 

Johnson said that the suit was about “the free exercise of religion.” The state lost.

The other day, Ham, who is seventy-two, surveyed the ark from the park’s welcome center. “Every day, there’s thousands,” he said of the visitors milling about the grounds. (General adult admission is sixty dollars.) 

An Australian, Ham has white hair and whiskers, and is a celebrity among creationists. “The main antagonism is from secular atheists that don’t want Christians to have a point of view,” he said, ambling up a ramp leading into the hull of the ark, which was lit by fake oil lamps and lined with clay pots for hypothetical food. Halfway up, he
was stopped by a couple riding mobility scooters.

“Is this the man everybody said was crazy?” the woman asked. 

Ham posed for a photo and then proceeded, past cages holding pairs of deer, sloths, and other animals made of Styrofoam or synthetic furs, up another ramp to the second deck, past squabbling children and young acolytes staring with their mouths open, and past more cages of pretend sabre-toothed marsupials and shrunken stegosauruses. According to Ham, the millions of land-animal species currently in existence, and the untold numbers that have gone extinct, all descended from around a thousand fundamental “kinds,” including the “cat kind,” the “cattle kind,” and the “pig kind,” conjured by God on the sixth day of Creation. 

“So we answer this question here, how so few kinds can become so many species,” Ham said. 

“The way we got our domestic varieties of dogs, the domestic species, the poodles and Chihuahuas and bichons, is similar to natural selection, except we do the selecting instead of the environment.” Some of the models look like hybrids—koalas crossed with wombats, say—that represent what could’ve been walking around with Noah thousands of years ago.

(Not surprisingly 😔😜😌 ya' think?) The scientific community hasn’t warmed to Ham’s views, which deny the findings of evolutionary biology, astrophysics, and geology. “Yeah, we’re all about the Bible,” Ham said. “But we’re also about experimental science. We admit our beliefs as well as promote science.” He made his way to the third deck, stopping to sign a Bible for a fan. He passed wall text that posed and answered a variety of big questions.

Q: How did the six-hundred-year-old Noah deal with animal waste?

A: Strategically placed wheelbarrows.

Q: Can you explain fossils?

A: Mostly bones in the graveyard of the forty-five-hundred-year-old flood.

“We have really gone into a lot of detail, based on research on what man is able to do,” Ham said. One question on a wall that didn’t have an answer: “The pre-flood world was exceedingly wicked and deserved to be judged. Does our sin-filled world deserve any less?”

Ham climbed a flight of stairs and shuffled out onto the top of the ark, off-limits to tourists. “There are these articles, they’re all saying that we used tax dollars,” he said. “They are attack articles on Mike Johnson. But what it has done is, we’ve had a very large influx of people checking out our Web sites. Peoplewant to check out the ark.”

In 2022, after Ham gave Johnson a private ark tour, Johnson said that it had almost brought him to tears. “Watching the faces of these kids and these families and how it’s just kind of opening their minds,” he said. “It’s just really an awesome, awesome thing.”

Standing atop the ark like a terrestrial sailor keeping watch, Ham pointed to a new hotel—a symbol, he said, of the economic boon he provides to the state. “When we apply for our rebate for the year, they send it straight away,” he said, smiling. “Money speaks.”