Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s recent First Things essay, “Our Christian Nation,” may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists and confound historians and theologians who worry about continuing threats to the separation of church and state.
Every nation needs a common religious ideal and shared moral order, Hawley argues, writing, “Christian culture has been America’s common ground. … Our nation’s moral order has been distinctly biblical and Christian.”
He adds: “The Bible has been the main source of our national ideals. Christianity is the electric current of our national life. Turn it off, and the light will fade.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., echoed these themes in his own article, “Against Progressive Pseudo-Religion.”
Hawley says he rejects some forms of Christian nationalism, such as making the Constitution echo the Apostles’ Creed, electing a “Protestant Franco,” or living in ethno-racial separatism.
Instead, he calls for “a revival of Christian influence in America” by “Christian believers who are willing to bring the gospel to bear on every corner of our culture and politics.”
He calls for “a revival of Christian influence in America” by “Christian believers who are willing to bring the gospel to bear on every corner of our culture and politics.”
Hawley counts himself among the believers trying to do just that, and he has revived his own faith to accommodate Donald Trump, becoming the first senator to sign on to Trump’s effort to block the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
A month later, Hawley was on the Focus on the Family radio show telling Focus CEO Jim Daly about how his stand for Trump had made him a victim of “cancel culture.”
“It’s an honor to be able to stand for the Lord,” Hawley said.
“It’s an honor when you’re criticized for your beliefs, when you’re criticized for being faithful,” said Hawley, whose campaign sold coffee mugs “suitable for liberal tears” featuring a photo of the fist-bump he gave to the crowd gathered near the Capitol on Jan. 6.
His wife, Erin Hawley, is an attorney with the Focus-aligned Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful $104 million Christian legal group. She heads up ADF’s latest Supreme Court case, which seeks a nationwide ban on abortion drugs used for decades.
Josh Hawley’s essay in First Things, a conservative journal connecting faith and politics, proposes “a Christian politics that addresses our most pressing social challenges in unapologetically Christian terms,” not “the tired talk of ‘family values’ that politicians, usually Republicans, offer up ceremonially every two or four years.”
Hawley’s call for revival makes no mention of evangelism, conversion or discipleship. But he calls for “fresh Christian thinking — and Christian action — on our economic arrangements, on business and labor, on family life and education.”
“We must re-Christianize the great institutions of our society by rearticulating the gospel’s meaning for every aspect of life.”
Christians should demand that government promote this public, civic Christianity, he says: “We must re-Christianize the great institutions of our society by rearticulating the gospel’s meaning for every aspect of life.”
“Christians must stoutly defend the seminal Christian influence in our history,” he adds. “We need to talk about it, point it out, and teach it — and fight to see this heritage honored in public places. Laws and public symbols are educators, whether they are acknowledged as such or not. For this reason, the Ten Commandments belong in courtrooms and courthouses and city halls, just as one can find Moses holding the Decalogue in marble at the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Hawley says Christian America is threatened not by a historic decline in church attendance but by liberals, a monolithic group devoid of faith or patriotism.
“The left seeks salvation, but in political activism,” Hawley writes. It “works to impose an arid secularism.” They “reject the Christian influence as oppressive and screen it out of our history whenever possible.” Liberals undermine constitutional government, embrace censorship and reject religious liberty, he says. They promote “the religion of wokeness.” They’re “living off the Christian culture they inherited but now disdain.”
Hawley blames the left for society’s “darker trends” including bitter politics, intractable culture wars, youth drug and alcohol abuse and suicide, and “a pulsating hatred for Jews and Christians and the religion of the Bible that unites them.”
“Our Christian Nation” has generated little media debate.
Word&Way said Hawley’s article “continued his quest to rewrite history with misleading claims” and demonstrates that “bad history and theology are necessary to justify dangerous public policies.”
Theologians and historians and the historical record generally concur America was not, as claimed, founded as a “Christian nation.”
Yvette Walker, opinion editor of the Kansas City Star, called out Hawley in a piece titled, “Which Is It, Josh Hawley: ‘Our Christian Nation’ or Day 1 Dictator?”
“Does Trump deserve to lead ‘Our Christian Nation’?” asked Walker: “Is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley having an identity crisis? Or does he just want to have it both ways? There’s the Hawley who stands with Donald Trump. The fist-pumping Hawley on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. The election-denier Hawley. … And then there’s this Josh Hawley: the one who wrote a 4,300-word treatise on ‘Our Christian Nation.’”
Walker doesn’t see how Hawley’s vision of “fresh Christian thinking — and Christian action” comports with endorsing Trump for a second term.
“Kowtowing to a leader who has harassed women, incited an insurrection, emboldened the intolerance of others and endangered our democracy does not match the tenets of these words,” she wrote. “Sen. Hawley, if you, as a deep-thinking man of faith, ascribe to your idea of a Christian nation and the teachings of Jesus Christ, I implore you to work with the Republican Party and find a new leader to follow.”
Hawley, who has a history degree from Stanford, took heat last summer for a July 4 tweet that featured a quote from Patrick Henry that Henry never said.
In his First Things article, Hawley made an additional claim about the left: “They celebrate concentrated power, whether in the hands of bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci or of the megacorporations that do the left’s bidding.”
Hawley did not mention the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, which promotes a “unitary executive theory” that seeks to put an unprecedented concentration of executive power in the hands of Donald Trump.
Hawley, who has a history degree from Stanford, took heat last summer for a July 4 tweet that featured a quote from Patrick Henry that Henry never said.
Last year, the progressive publication The Nation gave Hawley an “F” in American History, saying “the relentlessly ambitious senator from Missouri … is spreading misinformation about the past in order to put a Christian nationalist spin on the present. … He has chosen to toss aside his learning in favor of a right-wing ideological fantasy and the political rewards that he hopes will extend from it.”
Rubio’s article, “Against Progressive Pseudo-Religion,” echoes Hawley’s essay, arguing “America needs traditional religion, not the religion of wokeness.”
“Those of us who belong to a historic faith must defend ourselves in legislatures around the country, never conceding that our rights are mere privileges” he says. “But we must also live out our faith in our local communities. When we do so, it will be all the more obvious that left-wing pseudo-religion is unequal to the real thing.”