Mike Johnson’s religion-heavy speech falls flat: ‘I’m not at church’

House speaker Mike Johnson reportedly raised eyebrows at a weekend retreat for Republican lawmakers when a presentation he was delivering on maintaining the party’s slim majority in the lower chamber of Congress mutated into an unwelcome religious “sermon”.

The Louisiana representative, known to be a devout Southern Baptist, was addressing his party’s Elected Leadership Committee at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Miami, Florida, when his slideshow about the GOP’s prospects of clinging onto their two-seat advantage in the House of Representatives took an evangelical turn, according to several people in attendance who spoke to Politico on the condition of anonymity.

Mr Johnson is understood to have exasperated colleagues by veering off on a tangent about dwindling church membership in the United States, suggesting that citizens often look to the government for leadership when their spiritual needs are not being met and advised his fellow Republicans that they should seek to capitalise on that desire for direction and guidance.

One source cited by Politico suggested his inspirational message had fallen flat in the room and that the presentation had been “horrible”.

“I’m not at church,” the attendee complained. “I think what he was trying to do, but failed on the execution of it, was try to bring us together.

“The sermon was so long he couldn’t bring it back to make the point.”

Another source said Mr Johnson had devoted around a third of his talk to historical and religious themes and otherwise discussed recent polling around the issue of illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border, policy differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and party messaging.

The Independent has reached out to Speaker Johnson’s office for