Mike Johnson's evangelical 'persecution complex' is eating his movement alive: analyst

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and his evangelical compatriots have for years tried to galvanize voters with a narrative of conservative Christians facing constant attack, but that strategy may no be working the way they hoped, argued Ruth Braunstein for Religion News Service on Tuesday.

In her analysis, Braunstein looks at Johnson's work with the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom and challenges the group's narrative that religious liberty must be protected from a hostile liberal elite, as the New York Times reported in October.

"There is not an open effort to silence and censor the viewpoints of other religions," Braunstein writes. "This ties into a worldview evangelicals have espoused for decades, where they have 'cultivated a myth that Christians are under siege by a hostile secular culture.'"