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Back in December of 2023, House Speaker Mike Johnson told a gathering of White Christian Nationalists[1] [ #_ftn1 ] that God had prepared him to be a modern-day Moses for the House Republican Conference. He initially thought God had cast him as Aaron (more on him later) to someone else’s Moses, but then God told him it was his time. He, Mike Johnson, would be the one parting the waters for an approaching “Red Sea moment.”
If Mike Johnson had told that story at Oak Valley Lutheran Church or among any gathering of ordinary Americans, people would have looked at him as if insect antennae were sprouting from his forehead. There must have been some miscommunication between God and Speaker Johnson. In his prayers, Johnson was meditating on the wrong story, one much too early in the Book of Exodus. If anything, God was saying, “Holy Moses! You and your MAGA friends are like those Israelites in Exodus, Chapter 32!”
At that point in Exodus, God has already delivered the Ten Commandments, and Moses has climbed to the cloud-shrouded top of Mount Sinai for an extended chat with the Almighty. The Boss[2] [ #_ftn2 ] has seven chapters of “thou shalt” and “they shall” and “shall be” for Moses, including instructions for dressing up priests, hanging curtains, and building a tabernacle, an ark, a table, and an altar from shittim wood[3] [ #_ftn3 ]. (I shittim you not.)
God is very specific: Priest’s garments will be gold, purple, blue and scarlet, with an emerald here, a diamond there and a sapphire in another spot. The curtains and hangings in the tabernacle will also be purple and blue and scarlet and made of goat’s hair or fine twined linen, and the boards of the tabernacle will be ten cubits long and one-and-a-half cubits wide with two tenons in each board. God’s detailed interest in fashion and interior design must have surprised Moses. The thought may have crossed his mind that if God ever had a son, He would make him be a carpenter.
All that detail takes time—forty days and forty nights—and some impatient Israelites are distraught that Daddy Moses has been away so long. They need an authoritarian to comfort them, so they ask Moses’s big brother Aaron to make them some gods. Aaron thinks this is a capital idea. He has them collect the golden earrings—a must-have accessory when being led out of captivity—from their wives and sons and daughters, and he melts them down to make a golden calf. Then he makes an altar for it, and the next day the Israelites give burnt offerings to the golden calf and have a dance party.
Meanwhile, up on Mount Sinai, God notices these shenanigans and is incensed. He has sent plagues of boils and locusts and frogs for these people. He has led them out of Egypt, given them quails and manna from Heaven when they were hungry and water from a rock when they were thirsty, and now they are giving credit for all of that to a homemade art project. Moses barely talks The Big Guy out of immediately wiping those ingrates from the face of the Earth.
Shittim rolls downhill, and now Daddy Moses is walking down the mountain and about to turn into every parent who has ever returned home to find the kids have thrown an unauthorized drinking and groping party and mixed the good single-malt Scotch with Mountain Dew.
When he sees the golden calf and the dancing, Moses’s anger doth wax hot, so hot that he throws down the stone tablets God carved, front and back, up on Mount Sinai. The tablets break, and Moses—channeling Taylor Swift and every parent ever—says, “Look what you made me do!”[4] [ #_ftn4 ] He then grinds the calf into powder, sprinkles it on the water, and makes the people drink it, which is the Old Testament version of making the kid caught with a cigarette smoke an entire pack.
Uncle Aaron doesn’t take responsibility at all. When Moses presses him for an explanation, he says, “Thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.” Then he explains how those mischievous rascals brought him their gold and, “I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.”
Moses is not satisfied with Aaron’s explanation, so he sends the sons of Levi out to slay “every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.” Three thousand men fall by the sword, which is the worst-ever ending to a dance party.
Instead of a golden calf, Mike Johnson and MAGA Republicans have a daft cow, a bloated orange bovine that eats of the golden arches and drops steaming piles of dung as indiscriminately as a MAGA tourist in the halls of the U.S. Capitol. They credit this idol for the work of others, for things that have never happened, and for things they mistakenly believe will happen. They want to see all the covenants broken, if for no other reason than to hurt those with whom they disagree. Mike Johnson is no one’s Moses. He is, at best, Uncle Aaron. As the Constitution is torn asunder, he winks and says, “You know these guys; they’re just set on mischief.”
So, where is the new Moses for Americans who care about the Constitution and the rule of law? Right here. He is us. We are coming down the mountain. We have seen the sacred covenant broken. We have seen Elon Musk’s pogo-stick dance moves at the idolatry party, and our anger doth wax hot. This is our house, and these power-drunk jackasses are going to pay for every bit of damage done during their rich-white-people pity party. And they are going to replace that good single-malt Scotch, by God, or we will pull this car over and they will wish they were being visited by the sons of Levi instead. I shittim you not.
[1] [ #_ftnref1 ] All forms of Christian Nationalism in the United States are White Christian Nationalism.
[2] [ #_ftnref2 ] God, not Bruce Springsteen
[3] [ #_ftnref3 ] King James Version: shittim, Douay-Rheims Version: setim, NRSV: acacia, NKJV: acacia
[4] [ #_ftnref4 ] This is not in the text but can safely be assumed.

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