Boone Iowa Pastor Kevin Johnson Preaches Pseudohistory of Christian Nationalism
Kevin Johnson, pastor of the Boone Church of God of Prophecy in Boone, Iowa, teaches his followers a false history of the United States in which the Constitution was based on the Christian Bible.
Johnson isn’t just any old preacher. He’s a member of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, the religious organization that helped the 2024 Trump campaign dominate the Iowa caucuses and seize the Republican presidential nomination.
The following article is adapted from a recent episode of the podcast Donald Trump’s Army Of God.
The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is a group of people people who are supporting Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign in the name of Christianity. Many members of the Coalition claim that Donald Trump is a new messiah. They're even coming up with new prophecies, supposedly the direct word of God, asserting that Donald Trump has been anointed and therefore must become president of the United States.
Of course, if you look in the Constitution of the United States of America, it doesn't say anything about political leaders being chosen through anointing. Anointing is not a legal concept that applies in the United States of America. But you wouldn't think that if you listened to the Christian Nationalists of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
It takes a serious distortion of American history and a flawed understanding of American law to suppose that some kind of god who came from the Middle East thousands of years ago, has the right to dictate who our leaders are here in American in the year 2024. The USA did not exist even in its colonial form in biblical times, after all.
Christian Nationalists have a way of twisting history to make it all about the Bible, however. They pretend that everything we do, all the current events in American politics are nothing more than a reference to prophecies from the Christian Bible. The United States, they believe, doesn’t have much special meaning in itself. It’s only important, they say, as an echo of Iron Age mythologies from western Asia.
An example of what can happen when people indulge in this religious revisionism of American history is a pastor from Boone, Iowa named Kevin Johnson. Johnson is the pastor of the Boone Church of God of Prophecy in Boone, Iowa.
If you listen to Kevin Johnson’s sermons on the supposed religious roots of the Constitution of the United States of America, this is the sort of thing you’ll hear:
“The secular people, they get so upset with this. Sorry that they're ignorant of history. It's just the facts. Here it is: Our country was founded on the JudeoChristian ethic. What does that mean? That is principles found in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Do you know that the framers of our Constitution, the ones who laid the framework of what we know today, is the United States of America, they cited basically three sources for what they were doing. Number one, they said that their source and their inspiration for what they wrote was the Old Testament. They said, number two, that their source, their inspiration for that which they wrote, was the New Testament. And they said, thirdly, their inspiration for what they wrote were the sermons of Puritan preachers. That's what they said. That’s our foundation.”
Is this true? Did the founding American politicians who wrote and approved the Constitution of the United States of America base their work on the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the sermons of Puritan preachers?
The answer is simple: No.
If you look at the Constitution itself, you will find no Christian principles, none at all from either the Old Testament or the New Testament. You will find nothing that Puritan pastors would have been preaching about.
That's because the Constitution was written in such a way as to exclude religion from having power over government. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States does guarantee freedom of religion, but it does so by preventing the government from getting involved in matters of religion. That's why there can be no legislation or government action to establish or support any religion through governmental means.
If you search for terms like “god”, “Bible”, or “Jesus” in the Constitution of the United States, you will not find anything. You're not going to find anything about any church either.
What you're going to find in the original text of the Constitution is a statement saying that there shall be no religious test for any public office. That means that anybody can become a member of the government, regardless of their religious identity or lack of religion.
You can also critically examine Kevin Johnson’s claims about the historical sources of the Constitution by look at it from the opposite direction. You can consider whether the ideas that are in the Constitution are compatible with the ideas of the Christian Bible. Do they come from the Old Testament or the New Testament? Do they come from preachers?
Once again, the answer is simple: No.
Consider one of the fundamental elements of the structure of government in America: The balance of powers. Under the Constitution, the federal government has three branches: The Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial. Nothing at all similar to this arrangement is found anywhere in the Bible, or in the sermons of Puritan preachers in colonial times.
The very names of the government bodies set up through Constitution are historically divorced from Christianity. There is not one instance, for example, of the word “senate” in the Bible. It's not there at all. “Senate” is a word that comes from Roman culture, not from Hebrew culture. It that was also inspired by the Ancient Greeks, who had democratically-established legislative bodies long before Christianity.
For that matter, the word “democracy” is not at all a Christian word, or a Christian concept. It's not a Jewish concept, either. Democracy an Ancient Greek concept.
Instead of listening to the historically unmoored fantasies of a prophetic preacher in Iowa, let’s consider what the people who actually were involved in the framing and approval of the Constitution had to say about the relationship between religion and the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, considered the proposal that the Constitution should be regarded as a religiously sacred text akin to the Christian Bible, and soundly rejected the idea.
Jefferson explained his position in a correspondence with a man named Henry Tompkinson. The year was 1816, and Jefferson wrote:
“Some men look to constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well. I belonged to it, and I labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present, and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book reading. And this, they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions.
I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with, because when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them and find a practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I also know that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind, and as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances. Institutions must advance also and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when he was a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
It is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in blood. Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the gradual changes of circumstances or favoring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits.”
In this letter, Jefferson was giving a general picture of the relationship between the Constitution of the United States and the American people. Jefferson asserted that the role of the Constitution is not to preserve old ideas that we should revere, as if the Constitution is a Holy Of Holies. Jefferson’s fundamental point is that the Constitution must not be understood as a religious document. It is not a piece of sacred scripture. It's not a text that's based in religion that should be worshiped as if the people who wrote it were just wise in some kind of permanent way.
Jefferson valued the Constitution as a human creation. As a human creation, Jefferson wanted the Constitution and our understanding of its ideas to change over time, because people learn as time goes by. Jefferson argued that we can't just look back to ancient ideas to direct our current affairs, and we can't base what we do now on ancient laws, because people have learned over time, and we continue to learn in our own lifetimes. Jefferson believed that Americans could make progressive improvement as a society, adjusting in progressive accommodation to the progressive improvement of our minds, of our culture, and of our discoveries of fact.
Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the Constitution was that it should never be treated immutable and perfect. The idea of the Constitution includes the concept that it can be changed. The Constitution, after all, is a document of the people.
You'll notice that Jefferson makes no reference in his letter to any kind of god. He doesn't make reference to the Christian Bible.
That’s because the Bible in Christianity is supposed to be the very opposite of the Constitution. It’s a book that was written by people long ago, as if they knew everything, because they had a god that knew everything that could be known. This god was supposed to be omniscient, and so, Christianity claimed to have a perfect book that must never be changed. The Bible ends with a statement that declares that the text must never be added to or changed.
Thomas Jefferson favored an opposite approach to the Constitution. Jefferson’s thoughts about the Constitution were in opposition to the example of the Bible, not a celebration of it.
Somebody else that any reasonably educated American would recognize as a founding father is James Madison. Like Jefferson, Madison was president of the United States, and closely involved in the crafting of the Constitution.
In the 1780s, there was an attempt by some people in the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to make Christianity the official religion of the state of Virginia. Madison wrote to give his strong advice that this change would be a thoroughly bad idea. His letter is referred to as To The Honorable General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a Memorial and Remonstrance.
In this letter, Madison offered many arguments for why there should not be any official government religion. One part of that letter speaks to the claims that are being made by Pastor Kevin Johnson. In this section, Madison wrote:
“The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men.”
James Madison’s ideas may be mind-blowing to Christian Nationalists like Kevin Johnson who believe that the government should be run as if it’s a Christian church. Madison was clearly expressing the opposite opinion, arguing that government must be separate from religion. Government, Madison wrote is not inherently religious. Furthermore, Madison believed government should not command people or even suggest to them that they should follow one particular religious path, or any at all.
James Madison wrote that in the United States of America, people must be free to follow their own consciences. Madison believed that the United States was established by the people, establishing constitutional freedoms so that people would be free to make decisions based on the evidence that they discover about reality for themselves.
Such concepts are completely lacking from the Bible. The Christian Bible, in contrast to the American Constitution, is a totalitarian document. It is established through authoritarian commands, as we have seen with the recent push by Christian Nationalists in Louisiana to force the display of The Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state.
Part of what Christian Nationalists in Louisiana want to do is to teach children the false idea that the United States is a Christian nation. Going further, they also want to introduce the fundamental idea that American politics is not about an empowered citizenry, but is based upon top-down commands, like the commands from the Christian god. The political message of The Ten Commandments is that people should have one leader who has the natural right to tell everybody else what to do.
The revolution of 1776 and the United States Constitution that followed were organized by people who were dead set against the totalitarian approach of Christian Nationalism. The Constitution is an anti-monarchy document, and monarchy is a concept that runs throughout the Christian Bible. The Bible is infused with the presumption that people will always be ruled by kings.
The Christian god himself is supposed to be the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, but the United States of America is not a feudal society. It is not a monarchy. So, this religion of monarchy and monotheism, which are tied together, doesn’t fit well within the legal framework of the United States of America.
Americans have the right to believe in monarchy and totalitarianism and theocracy in they want to. However, as James Madison wrote, religion is an individual choice left to the conviction and conscience of every individual American. It's not something that the government can legislate.
In no respect does James Madison argue that the ideas of liberty in the Constitution come from the New Testament, the Old Testament, or from Christian Puritan preachers. It would have been absurd for him to make such an argument, because the concepts of liberty and democracy are alien to Christian theology.
Another founding father, Benjamin Franklin, was closely consulting with other leaders on the composition of the Constitution of the United States of America. Franklin wrote, in a message to James Parker, his partner in a printing business at the time:
“It would be a very strange thing if the Six Nations should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and to be able to execute it in such a manner that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impractical for ten or a dozen English colonies to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous.”
Benjamin Franklin’s referred to a source of inspiration for the Constitution that Kevin Johnson didn’t mention at all in his sermon. Nonetheless, it was a quite significant influence on the Constitution: The government of the Iroquois Confederacy. The idea in the Constitution that you can have states, but that those states can also form a larger nation was not an invention of the Bible. This concept was not something found in either the Old Testament or the New Testament. It came from the Iroquois, also known as the Haudenosaunee.
This isn’t a radical historical theory. It’s well-established fact. The Congress of the United States of America itself has recognized the significant influence of Iroquois political philosophy on the Constitution. In 1987, the United States Senate officially recognized the influence of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in a resolution that declared:
“The original framers of the Constitution, including most notably George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles, and governmental practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Whereas the confederation of the original 13 Colonies into one republic was explicitly modeled upon the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself.”
There is no democracy in the Bible. Christian political philosophy was devoid of democratic values before the revolution of 1776. The Iroquois, however had developed many elements of democracy in their society. The pre-Christian Greeks did too, as did the pre-Christian Romans. These were the sources of inspiration, along with Enlightenment figures like Voltaire, and John Locke that were the foundations of the Constitution.
Kevin Johnson states, without citing any sources to support his claims, that the opposite is true, that all of the known historical influences were somehow not important at all. Pastor Johnson seems to believe that if he believes strongly enough that the Constitution is a Christian document, it will become so.
Christian Nationalists like Kevin Johnson believe that they are present-day prophets with a special supernatural power to create a new history out of sheer force of will, without regard to any facts. In their pursuit of a new Christian Nationalist America, these pastors invent new facts out of whole cloth whenever they need them.
This Christian Nationalist practice of inventing fake histories to support their ideology has a direct bearing on the effort to maintain the freedoms and the equalities that we enjoy in our society today. To see you what I mean, consider what Kevin Johnson said in a sermon in March of 2024.
In this sermon, Johnson talked about how American families need to be broken up because their marriages do not comply with what he believes to be biblical law. Johnson told his followers,
“Sexual perversion is going on today. In fact, I heard just last night and I knew this would happen when we began to redefine what marriage was, you know, God's order was that marriage was one man and one woman. Man and a woman. Male, female, okay, that was marriage. Well, people began to redefine that, and they said, well, marriage can be two men, it can be two women. It can be, you know, this and that and the other. And I said, right then I said we have just stepped onto the slippery slope of the next thing they will recognize as a sexual preference is pedophilia. Well, guess what? They're pushing for that right now. And I had people tell me, pastor, you're crazy. There are laws to protect children. Well guess what? Laws can be changed and they will be.”
It's important when we listen to Christian Nationalist preachers like Kevin Johnson that we don't just listen to the surface of the arguments that they're making. We need to look deeper, because there are many unspoken premises they have to hold in order for their arguments to seem to make sense.
One unspoken premise in what Kevin Johnson said in his sermon three months ago was that advocating for laws new in a democracy is a problem, and that people having the power to change the government in their own country is a problem. Underlying all of Kevin Johnson’s theology is the belief that democracy itself is a problem.
What Pastor Johnson wants, instead of the problem of democracy, is the permanent order of laws that have not changed for thousands of years. What Kevin Johnson wants is for the power of the people to be replaced by commands from the invisible spirits his religion believes are real.
Johnson says that his god gave an order was that marriage should be between one man and one woman, and that's it. But why did his god want marriage to be that way? Johnson never explains that. He doesn't say anything about what makes a heterosexual marriage better than a homosexual marriage. He doesn't believe that he should have to explain it. Another unspoken premise in Christian Nationalist ideology is that whenever their god orders something, everybody must obey without understanding why the order has been given. Under Christian Nationalism, it is not the role of human beings to question orders that have been given by gods.
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the other framers of the Constitution chose to follow a different path. They chose the political philosophy of secular humanism, which holds that humans should make their own governments, and maintain the ability to make their laws what they want them to be.
The founders of the United States of America rejected the fundamental tenet of monotheism, that we can trust one all-knowing leader to have all the power to take action without any oversight. That's what monarchy was all about. That's what the British Empire was all about. Christian Nationalism is on the side of the Redcoats. The British Empire was a Christian Nationalist empire, and it was a tyranny.
The morality of Christian Nationalism demands that we don’t think for ourselves. It insists that we stop trying to figure out our own lives, and stop thinking about the rules that govern our society.
Instead, Christian Nationalists want us to allow them to control everything on our behalf. Christian Nationalism is based upon the psychology of a child who is not competent and so gives all decisions over to their father to take manage. Maybe that's fine for a person who is five years old.
In the United States of America, however, we have a different model for living that is reflected in our Constitution and our set of laws. The American model holds that when people grow to be adults, they become capable of making decisions for themselves.
There is a beautiful trust inherent in the Constitution of the United States of America that when we are faced with the complexity of life, we will work together. We will think together. We will debate together. We will figure it out.
Furthermore, none of us will have to figure it out on our own. As a society, we will cooperate with each other. We will help each other out. Sometimes, that means that we change the law. If there's a group of people in our society that says they haven't been treated, we will listen to them. We will work together to try to become better, and we don’t need an all-powerful totalitarian leader to tell us what to do.
Christian Nationalists want to undo all of that. They want to cram the immense complexity of American life into the vision of just one book. Out of all of the millions of books that have been written, they want us to pay attention to just one book. For the hundreds of millions of Americans alive today, they there to be only one voice, the voice of their god, telling us what to do.
They want to replace the vibrant freedom of American democracy with a totalitarian regime under which citizens have only one responsibility: To sit down, shut up, and do as we are told.
In order to convince Americans to quietly obey, Christian Nationalists need to frighten us. So, once again, the Christian Nationalist pastor Kevin Johnson invents a false history, making up facts that simply don't exist. He suggests that politicians are working right now to legalize sex between adults and children.
It certainly sounds frightening to consider that Democrats are pushing to legalize pedophilia. But the fact is, that's not happening.
There is only one member of Congress right now who is under any sort of investigation for a connection to pedophilia. That member of Congress, named Matt Gaetz, is from Florida's first congressional district. Matt Gaetz is a Christian Nationalist Republican who is under investigation for having sex with underage girls.
That's because there is no proposed law to make sex between adults and children legal. It does not exist. Kevin Johnson is making it up. When Kevin Johnson tells members of his church, the Boone Church of God of Prophecy in Boone, Iowa, that such legislation exists, he is blatantly lying to them.
It’s an easy fact to check. All you have to do is go to the website Congress.Gov and search the legislation there to see if there are any proposed laws to allow sex between children and adults. You'll see that simply isn’t any such thing.
Christian Nationalism is a paper-thin ideology that pretends to be more substantial than it is. It relies on the laziness of Americans who have grown weary of the work of citizenship.
In the United States of America, we have the privilege of freedom of the press, the right to free assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom from government religion. These are not god-given rights. They were created by people, and for generations they have been maintained by people.
Now, the time has come for our generation to do its part. If we want to remain free, we need to use our freedoms to resist the Christian Nationalists who seek to return America to the religious tyranny that prevailed before 1776.