Journos Hit Speaker Johnson With Scripture… So He Takes Them To School

Does it really surprise anyone that one of the most unabashedly devout Christians in all of Congress was NOT tripped up by a journo’s ‘gotcha’ question based on the Bible?

The same media that is happy to run interference for clowns like Don Lemon blatantly violating the law by harassing Christians in the middle of their worship services don’t even blush at the hypocrisy it takes in their effort to pit the voice of the Catholic Church in its objections to Christians working with the Trump administration.

If they think they backed him into a corner by citing the Pope, they couldn’t have been more mistaken.

He didn’t make the mistake of picking a fight with the Pope (that was the trap, after all), he ignored that bait and used his reply to show how scripture gives solid backing for his party’s position.

Q: Pope Leo cited Matthew 25:35 to critique Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda. How would you respond to Pope Leo in scripture?

MIKE JOHNSON: Sovereign borders are biblical and right and just. It's not because we hate the people on the outside. It's because we love the… pic.twitter.com/eS4A5dtXRt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 3, 2026

The question posed was “Pope Leo cited Matthew 25:35 to critique Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. How would you respond to Pope Leo in scripture?”

What the Pope drew was a private morality of personal interaction which (as we see from the verses Mike used in his response) differs greatly from the role of a government in maintaining civil order.

A private person, for example, has no right to decide someone has wronged him sufficiently that he deserves to die. But even the Catholic Church has defended the state’s right to capital punishment as a just consequence for some wicked acts since the Church Fathers themselves.

Revered names from Saints Augustine, to Chrysostom, to Ambrose, to Clement have all left room for the State using the sword (ie: Romans 13) when necessary for punishing the wicked, a decision that would not be left in the hands of private individuals settling personal grudges.

As for Borders?

God himself claims to be responsible for their establishment and enforcement. Feel free to flip through Deuteronomy 2 to see God’s admonitions for Israel to respect the borders of their neighbours, and not to take anything of theirs without paying for it. (An interesting detail in this scenario.)

You could also look at God’s faithfulness in the building of Nehemiah’s wall, which had an entire book dedicated to it, or the uncomfortable fact that every empire from Nebuchadnezzar through to the occupation of Israel (by Rome or Seleucid Greece, depending on whether you follow Catholic or Orthodox readings of the text) is predicted in remarkable detail by Daniel.

And before you invoke the left’s favourite shibboleth about Jesus being ‘a refugee’ — when he fled to Egypt, he fled a local despot, but remained within Rome proper. Since travel was not restricted within the Roman Empire, there is NO correlation in that example.

If you are going to make the case that legislators are bound at the personal level by the moral implications of Matthew 25, you must also explain how they are free to make difficult but necessary pragmatic life-and-death decisions about crime and punishment without violating that same standard.

How politicians (or soldiers, or police — see: John the Baptist in Luke 3) act in their office is measured by one standard. How they act in their private lives is measured by another.

For them to discharge their offices faithfully, it must be so.