U.S. government and society must be remade to conform with a 17th-century pact made by Protestant settlers to establish a Christian colony in America, Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley said.
“This country was founded on a covenant, and I don’t mean primarily our Constitution — I mean something older than that,” Hawley said during the 2026 Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture delivered April 16 at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
McCall said he was referring to a covenant established by the European Puritans who launched the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and which its first governor, John Winthrop, described as a “City Upon a Hill” in sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity.”
John Winthrop
That covenant, Hawley insisted, called the on colonists “to worship the Lord in the freedom of their consciences, to worship the Lord according to the dictates of Scripture. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what this country was founded on. We were founded as a godly commonwealth, and that is in our DNA.”
Most scholars of American history differ with Hawley’s view and see the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the nation’s governing documents, not one man’s sermon.
Hawley served as Missouri’s attorney general before winning a U.S. Senate seat, and he was among those who tried to debunk the 2020 presidential election in order to keep Donald Trump in office.
Before government service, Hawley worked as a constitutional lawyer and was one of the lead attorneys in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a 2014 Supreme Court case exempting corporations from contraceptive mandates in the Affordable Care Act.
Hawley is a dedicated culture warrior opposed to what he calls the “woke” agenda, especially among large corporations, and he is author of The Tyranny of Big Tech and Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
The McCall Lecture adhered to that profile as Hawley named abortion, single-parent homes, transgender identity and toxic concepts of masculinity as among the many catastrophes facing the nation.
“We have a spiritual crisis over the unborn today. We have a spiritual crisis in our families and our children today.”
The nation is undergoing “a spiritual crisis over the unborn” due to the availability of mifepristone, an abortion medication that can be mailed directly to women’s homes, he said. “There are more abortions committed in the United States of America today than there were when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. Let that sink in.”
According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, abortions have “slightly increased” since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling overturned Roe in 2022.
“The upward trend in abortion volume is likely due to multiple reasons, including expanded telehealth capacity, the ability to mail medication abortion pills to patients, and the lower costs for telehealth abortions through virtual clinics compared to in-person care,” the foundation reports. “Medication abortion via telehealth now accounts for 27% of all abortions.”
Hawley said the situation should be addressed with urgency. “We have a spiritual crisis over the unborn today. We have a spiritual crisis in our families and our children today.”
American children also are threatened by the spread of single-parent homes and by “the false ideology” of transgender identity, which he said is “assaulting our children and threatening our families.”
American males are part of the problem, as well, Hawley said. “Fewer men are working than ever before. Fewer men are getting married than ever before. Fewer men are having children than ever before. We have a spiritual crisis today.”
Christians need to refute popular notions that masculinity is toxic and provide examples of healthy, biblical masculinity, he urged.
“We need an economy where men can get a job and afford to have a family. And increasingly they cannot in this country. And that’s more than a problem, it’s a crisis. It is almost impossible in 21st century America to support a wife and children on a blue-collar wage.”
Pushing back means debunking the idea that making the U.S. government, society and economy Christian violates to the Constitution, Hawley said. He did not explain how that squares with the First Amendment requirement that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
However, he did return to the supremacy of the pre-Constitutional covenant of the early settlers: “This country was founded on the gospel of Jesus Christ. This country was founded on the truth of the Bible. This country was not founded on some Enlightenment secularism. It was not founded on a series of neutral principles, whatever those would be.”
To proclaim Jesus as sovereign over all of government and society, then, requires the church to move boldly into the public square and to spark a religious revival, Hawley said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, men and women, we owe this country an encounter with the Risen Lord, and we can only do that if we have ourselves encountered the Risen Lord. We have to know the Lord ourselves.”
Americans who have had those counters must go out and proclaim it to their fellow citizens, he preached. “The Lord will use this moment as a catalyst for transformation in this country, as a catalyst to bring this country toward the purpose, toward the mission, toward the destiny that the Lord has purposed for us.”
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