House Speaker Mike Johnson has already faced scrutiny for what some are labeling his “religious fundamentalism.” Now, he faces scrutiny for the use of the program Covenant Eyes with his son, Jack. A user on X with the handle “Receipt Maven” shared a clip of Johnson from 2022 as he participated in a panel with his church, Cyprus Baptist Church, in Benton, LA. During the panel, which was about technology, he revealed how he and Jack, who was 17 at the time, used Covenant Eyes, a program which can be downloaded to a user’s personal devices and will report to an accountability partner about questionable searches or inappropriate content. “If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate. It’s really sensitive, it’ll pick up almost anything, it looks for keywords, search terms, and also images, and it will send your accountability partner a blurred picture of the image,” Johnson told the congregation. 

After the clip went viral, Johnson’s critics piled on. Late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, said, “It is possible to be too close with your children,” as he noted that the app would give father and son information about their porn habits. Business Insider criticized the software’s effectiveness, noting that Josh Duggar had used Covenant Eyes. Duggar had used the program with his wife as his accountability partner but had used the Tor browser to bypass the software. He was convicted in 2021 for possessing child pornography and sentenced to 12 years. Duggar had appeared in “19 Kids and Counting,” which has also been under scrutiny lately after the documentary “Shiny Happy People” and revealing memoirs by members of the family have brought to light its “religious fundamentalism.” 

Vanity Fair went further in its criticism, speculating whether the software might also be a security issue. “In addition to the deep weirdness of a father and son being each other’s ‘accountability partner(s)’ concerning pornography, as the account that unearthed the clip noted, it’s probably not a great idea for a sitting member of Congress to allow ‘a 3rd Party tech company to scan ALL of his electronic devices daily and then uploading reports to his son about what he’s watching or not watching,’” speculated the article, which went with the title “Mike Johnson Said He and His Son Monitor Each Other’s Porn Usage, and Yeah, It’s Exactly as Weird as It Sounds.” Wired and Newsweek did share concerns about the app’s possible invasion of privacy. At the time of the Wired article, Covenant Eyes told The Christian Post that they shared concerns about spying. “Our usage policy explicitly prohibits using Covenant Eyes to monitor someone without their authorization. We do not allow spouses to use Covenant Eyes to spy on one another or employers to secretly monitor employees,” a spokesman told CP.

The National Catholic Register came to Johnson’s defense. “No doubt, there is a clear and ongoing assault on all that is true, good and beautiful. To the pure, all things are pure, and to those who have no anchor, no North Star, no God — well, they do not know what to do with truth, goodness, vulnerability, humility, manliness, fatherhood and accountability,” wrote Ryan and Mary-Rose Verret, noting that Johnson had previously interviewed them about their marriage ministry. They noted how mainstream media had turned accountability and openness between a father and son into something laughable and weird. A Google search of “Mike Johnson Covenant Eyes” turns up a number of articles with headlines including words like “creepy” and “weird.” Others frame it as a father and son enjoying each other’s porn intake. The National Catholic Register, however, stated that the world is too broken to understand what Johnson is doing. “It is only in a world as broken and lost as ours that such a noble testimony and witness of accountability and trust between a father and son could be so twisted and mocked.”