Years before Mike Johnson would become second in line for president, a German TV news outlet profiled him and his then-teenage daughter preparing for and then attending a purity ball. "This looks like a wedding," a news reporter says in German in a 2015 n-tv news segment unearthed by ABC News. "But they are not bride and groom — but rather father and ... daughter," the reporter adds, referring to Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah. The news segment examined purity balls and the purity movement among conservative Christians with the Johnson family as the lens, highlighting Johnson and his daughter at the ball with other pairs and showing Johnson's daughter vowing and signing a pledge to live a life of purity.
The controversial formal dance event gained notoriety in the early 2000s but remained popular among some conservative Christians. Purity balls typically saw fathers and their teenage daughters dressed up for a night of dinner and dancing that ends with the daughter signing a pledge to her father to abstain from dating and remain sexually abstinent until marriage. The news segment features interviews with Johnson's daughter, now in her 20s, vowing to her father "to make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children ... to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity," with shots of Johnson nodding in agreement interlaced.
In one brief interview clip, Johnson's wife, Christian counselor Kelly Johnson, told the German news outlet, "We don't talk to her about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question." Mike Johnson's participation in the 2015 news story provides another example of the previously almost-unknown lawmaker's staunchly conservative and religious views, which have informed his political career and ascent in Congress.
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