There is one comfort people reach for when the numbers scare them. They call it divine providence. When the polls stop looking favorable, a higher power is put in charge instead, one that has no interest in percentages. That is exactly where Mike Johnson finds himself these days, and he stands there with a smile that leaves no room for doubt.
Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House from Louisiana, said his party will win the 2026 midterm elections, largely through God's intervention. He made the remarks during a far right program hosted by the president of the Family Research Council. Americans have entrusted House Republicans with leading this administration, Johnson said, and that is why they will keep their majority beyond November. He said he is becoming more confident every single day and that they talk about it constantly.
Mike Johnson says he is "more confident every day" that Republicans will keep control of Congress. Why? "This is God's work. We have intercessors right there in the Capitol praying over everything that's happening."
The host set him up by saying Republicans always outperform the expectations of commentators who still fail to understand the power of prayer. Exactly right, Johnson replied. He then described how he had recently stood before reporters and told them this was all God's doing. On the Capitol grounds, he explained, organized groups of intercessors pray over every single piece of Republican legislation, bill by bill.
Take a moment to picture that scene. Down below, lawmakers haggle over legislation. Up above, people are praying for heaven to take over where party discipline leaves off. It is the most elegant form of dodging responsibility imaginable. If you win, it was divine providence. If you lose, people simply did not pray hard enough, and God, of course, bears no blame. That is how politics becomes a game of chance where the house always wins because the house is in heaven.
But this display of piety has an address, and it is anything but private. Just months after Johnson became Speaker, a January 2024 report by the Congressional Freethought Caucus, a group of roughly 35 lawmakers dedicated to defending the separation of church and state, laid out what he has spent decades doing. According to the report, he has worked to deny and undermine that separation while promoting fabricated stories about the nation's founding.
Read also our article: The Investigation Gone Mad: They Call Themselves Defenders of Freedom - and They're Digging Up a Morality Law from 1873
The list compiled by the caucus is not a collection of oddities. It is a political program. Johnson interprets the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment as if it prohibited nothing more than an official state church, even though the prevailing constitutional consensus recognizes it as a barrier against laws rooted in religion. He advocates using public schools and public funding to promote evangelical Christianity. He frequently bases his policies targeting immigrants and LGBTQ people solely on his religious beliefs. He wrote the foreword to a right wing book filled with baseless conspiracy theories. And he once worked with the New Apostolic Reformation, a growing movement within Republican circles that calls on Christians to seize control of society's key institutions and rule over them, from business and the media to government itself.
This is where the story stops sounding quaint. Anyone who sees the state as a prize to be seized in the name of heaven is not praying for humility. They are praying for power. Prayer on the Capitol lawn is no longer a simple act of faith. It becomes a claim to authority, one that says majorities are granted from above rather than earned from voters. How sincere that piety really is was already on display in May. Trump was widely expected to attend an event called Rededicate 250, a gathering widely regarded as Christian nationalist and heavily promoted by the president himself. In the end, he never showed up. According to reports, he spent the day on the golf course instead. Prayer, it seems, is for everyone else as long as it serves a purpose, while tee time takes priority the moment devotion becomes inconvenient. Humility is delegated just as eagerly as the credit is claimed.
Read also our article: Prayer by Order - How the Most Powerful Country in the World Is Becoming an Evangelical Religious State Under Trump
Which brings us to the one group strangely missing from Johnson's equation - the voters. Their opinion is already known, and it is unforgiving. According to a poll released this week, only 32 percent of Americans view Republicans in Congress favorably, while 58 percent view them unfavorably. Asked whether the Republican Party has become too extreme, 51 percent said yes and only 34 percent said no. And when asked who they would vote for if the election were held today, 40 percent chose the Democratic candidate in their own district compared to 34 percent for the Republican, a six point Democratic lead just months before Election Day. It is not hard to see why a man confronted with numbers like these would rather hand responsibility over to heaven. Voters are stubborn sovereigns. Heaven remains silent and can be made to say anything. It is far easier to appeal to an authority that never has to face a poll than to confront the one that is preparing to vote you out of office.
And yet there is an unintended honesty in Johnson's words. The moment you declare victory to be God's work, you have already written off the voter. You no longer have to persuade people. You only have to sanctify your cause. That is where the real danger lies, far beyond a single remark. A democracy survives because those in power are accountable to the people, not to a heaven that never has to answer for anything. The moment one replaces the other, democracy has already been discarded in the mind long before the first ballot is counted. Which leaves one simple question. What happens if, on Election Night, God votes differently than Mike Johnson prayed He would? One thing is certain. It will not be treated as their own failure. It will be called a test, God's plan, divine providence, anything except what it would actually be - a defeat delivered by the American people.
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