Our new Speaker of the House, second in line to the presidency, is closely associated with young earth creationism, having successfully sued the state of Kentucky on behalf of the Ark Encounter theme park. You might not know how immensely popular the Ark Encounter and adjacent Creation Museum are, but they’re ranked by USA Today as the “No. 1 and No. 2 religious museums in the nation.” This shouldn’t surprise you, because there are a ton of Americans who believe humans were created by God in the current form within the last 10,000 years.

James Ussher, a 17th-Century theologian from Dublin, made a good faith effort to estimate to the date of earth’s creation and came up with 4,004 B.C.E. and that became a bit of a standard, appearing authoritatively in the King James Version of the Bible beginning in the 18th-Century. Advances in geology brought young earth hypotheses into disrepute in the 19th-Century, and quite obviously the existence of dinosaurs presents a conceptual problem. The Ark Encounter and Creation Museum solve this conceptual problem by arguing that dinosaurs and humans once co-existed.

One sign inside the Noah’s Ark replica, which is 510 feet long by 85 feet wide and 51 feet high, reads, “Did you know? Up to 85 kinds of dinosaurs were on the ark, including 2 Tyrannosaurids, 2 Stegosaurids, 2 Ceratopsids, and 2 Brachiosaurids.”

Needless to say, 510 foot long boat with 85 pairs of dinosaurs aboard doesn’t make any kind of sense. But Johnson successfully argued that the Ark Encounter park was deserving of a tourism tax rebate despite its policy of hiring only people who profess a belief in young earth creationism.

I don’t know how Johnson feels about the merits of the young earth theory, however. At the time, he boasted, “The court has affirmed a longstanding principle that the Constitution does not permit a state to show hostility towards religion. The First Amendment does not allow Christian organizations to be treated like second-class citizens merely because of what they believe.”

I know for certain that he’s a creationist because he’s been quite open about it.

During a 2016 sermon at the Christian Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, Johnson said that a “series of cultural shifts” in the United States — led by “elites” and “academics” in the 1930s who were engaging with the theories of Charles Darwin — erased the influence of Christian thinking and creationism from society.

“People say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’” Johnson asked the audience. “Because we’ve taught a whole generation — a couple generations now — of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”

Johnson blaming school shootings on teaching evolution was first identified by Meidas Touch.

Earlier in the sermon, Johnson had discussed the necessity of a creationist view of life. “If [the theory of evolution] is true, there really probably isn’t a God anyway, right? There really isn’t a creator,” Johnson said. “So remember when the founders said ‘God’s up here and he’s transcendent and all men are down here.’ Well [the academics] just erased God from the equation entirely.” He said that when there is no creator, “then that means that man gets to make all the decisions,” and that the the infiltration of this philosophy into government and schools had begun to “teach a generation of Americans that there really isn’t any God, and there really isn’t any right and wrong.”

Now, some surveys show nearly 40 percent of Americans share elements of this world view. In 2017, Gallup found 38 percent “believe that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so.” So, if that’s what Johnson believes, it’s really not much of an outlier.

I don’t think there’s a lot of political juice in ridiculing Johnson for his beliefs, as it just feeds into anti-elitist resentment. If ridicule could get rid of fundamentalism, H.L. Mencken would have finished the job during the Scopes Trial.

But I do think it’s dangerous to have someone in such a position of power who basically has a form of brain damage. I’m not a politician, so I can say it. If you can’t understand the science that explains the age of the Earth, your brain isn’t operating properly, and you might be a wonderful person but you can’t be trusted to make big decisions for the country.