Johnson Evolved On Ukraine. Hearing About Evangelicals’ Persecution May Have Helped.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, across the street from House Speaker Mike Johnson’s hometown church, an unusual billboard would pop up occasionally.

During weeks when Congress was out of session and Johnson was home, it showed a picture of a bombed-out church in the southeastern Ukraine city of Berdyansk, next to a caption: “Speaker Johnson, ‘For a time such as this.’ Esther 4:14.”

While the debate raged in Washington over whether to approve another round of aid to Ukraine or pair it with an immigration overhaul, the billboard ― part of a campaign to remind Johnson of the price his fellow evangelical Christians were paying for American inaction ― stood as a mute reminder to Johnson, a Southern Baptist.

The inaction lasted for six months, only ending after President Joe Biden signed a law Wednesday giving Ukraine $60.8 billion in additional aid that passed Congress only days before.

Over the half-year time frame, advocates for Ukraine made argument after argument aiming to sway Republicans like Johnson: Inaction would reward Russia President Vladimir Putin and embolden other enemies of the U.S. Sending the weapons would reboot the industrial base needed to supply our own military. The U.S. owed it to Ukrainians who gave up their nuclear weapons in 1994, at the behest of the United States.

But the arguments appeared to make little impact on Johnson, who insisted on linking aid and border security until about two weeks ago.

Two pro-Ukraine groups, the Ukraine Project Freedom and Razom for Ukraine, settled on a much narrower, and ultimately maybe more potent, argument ― arguing Russian invaders were systematically and intentionally destroying churches belonging to evangelical Christians.

It’s not clear how much the argument