When Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson was elected to be the new Speaker of the House earlier this week, evangelicals celebrated that one of their own had been installed to the third highest office in the nation.
Johnson, who is a proud Southern Baptist, has personal connections with a number of high profile evangelical leaders and institutions—including Ken Ham, a creationism apologist, and Answers in Genesis, the organization Ham founded and leads.
In the days since his election, news outlets have begun profiling Johnson, exploring the background of the congressman, who was largely unknown to the American public until this week.
A number of those publications have pointed out that Johnson provided legal representation for Answers in Genesis in 2015 after the state of Kentucky withdrew tax breaks from the Ark Encounter theme park on the grounds that it requires employees to affirm young earth creationism.
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Johnson filed a suit against the state of Kentucky, alleging that the state was guilty of “viewpoint discrimination” for denying Answers in Genesis a tax benefit enjoyed by other organizations developing similar tourist attractions. Answers in Genesis eventually won the case, and the tax benefits were reinstated.
“One would expect that any project that will bring millions of dollars in new capital investment, create hundreds of jobs and be a tremendous asset to the communities of Northern Kentucky would be enthusiastically welcomed by every Kentuckian,” Johnson wrote at the time.
“This is clearly not a government ‘grant,’ as the secularists have claimed, because not a single penny will be pulled from the existing state treasury to help build or support the Ark project,” Johnson went on to argue. “Instead, the commonwealth has merely agreed as an incentive that it will refund a portion of the brand-new tax dollars that are generated by the park itself, if and when the park meets certain attendance-performance levels at the end of each year.”
Nevertheless, some news publications have characterized the outcome of the case as tantamount to the government being forced to fund the construction of the Ark Encounter.
Clint Rainey of Fast Company wrote in an article published on Thursday (Oct. 26) that “Kentuckians ultimately had to help pay for the wooden boat.” Similarly, Robert Tait of The Guardian wrote that Johnson “won taxpayer funding for a Noah’s Ark amusement park while working as a lawyer, in a graphic illustration of his uncompromising rightwing Christian beliefs.”
