Barton has frequently been cited or called on to testify in favor of bills that critics say would erode church-state separations.the separation between church and state is a mythprofound influence
“Johnson's rise means that Barton and his fellow Christian nationalists now have unprecedented access to the levers of power on the national stage, paralleling the access they already have here in Texas and some other states,” said David Brockman, a non-resident scholar in religion and public policy at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
“We would best understand the actual context of the First Amendment by saying, ‘Congress shall make no law establishing one Christian denomination as the national denomination,’” he has said. “‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” his group’s website that most of what he considers society’s ills — from school shootings, low standardized test scores and drug use to divorce, crime and LGBTQ+ people — are the natural consequences of abandoning the Judeo-Christian virtues, as articulated in his form of Christianity, that he says are the bedrock of the nation’s founding.
Tyler said that Johnson’s views are particularly concerning because of his background as both a Southern Baptist and as a constitutional lawyer. Baptists, she noted, have a long history of advocacy for strong church-state separations because of the persecution they faced during the country’s founding — a stance that she said Johnson has betrayed throughout his legal and political career.