Missouri Senator Josh Hawley made a visit on Friday to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority 2023” conference.
Watch:
If you watched the speech you can see that Hawley wasted no time identifying with the crowd:
I’m proud to be here as a conservative, but much more important than that, I’m proud to be here as a follower of Jesus Christ. I am not ashamed of the Gospel, it is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe. And I just say this: to our friends on the Left who are constantly telling us that faith and politics have to be separated, that we as Christians are supposed to keep our beliefs and our faith and our expression inside the church walls I just say no way, no how, not in the United States of America.
Hawley then quotes the 19th-century Dutch politician and theologian Abraham Kuyper: “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Notice that Hawley, unlike David Brooks this week in The New York Times, does not cite Kuyper for the “one square inch” line. By the way, the full Kuyper quote is “There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not cry, ‘Mine’!”). Check out Kuyper biographer James Bratt’s piece, “Why I’m Sick of ‘Every Square Inch.’“
At one point in the speech Hawley suggests that the Great Awakening led to the American Revolution. In the last several years this claim has been a staple of Christian Right politics and Christian nationalist calls for spiritual awakening in America. I’ve spent a lot of time at this blog addressing this claim and hope to publish something more substantial soon.
In another example of Hawley playing fast and loose with the historical record, he says, “Can I just tell the truth here again that the Left finds hard to believe? Here it is: Christianity is the faith and America is the place that slavery came to die. And we should be proud of that.”
Actually, Denmark banned the importation of slaves to the West Indies in 1792 (taking effect in 1803). In 1848 it ended slavery completely. Great Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807. The United States outlawed the slave trade in 1808, but it continued illegally and internally until 1865. In 1833, Great Britain ordered the gradual emancipation of slavery in its colonies. France abolished slavery in 1848. Netherlands abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies starting in 1863.The United States, after a bloody Civil War with over 700,00 casualties, formally ended slavery in 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteen Amendment. It should also be noted that while Christians played a significant role in the abolitionist movement in the United States, evangelical Christians in the South used the Bible and Christian theology to defend the institution of slavery. This, of course, is missing from Hawley’s speech.
Hawley refers to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Party.” Click here to get a better understanding of why he does this.
The rest of Hawley’s speech focuses on “cultural Marxism,” a catch-all category that includes the teaching of systemic racism in schools, multiculturalism, open borders, woke corporations, the disrespecting of American history, and transgenderism. He calls it a “new religion”–the “religion of woke.” He calls the “Leftist elites” the “high priests” of this new religion.
Hawley says that “corporations are not people.” I wonder if he would have said the same thing if he was a Senator when the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Hobby Lobby v. Burwell case. In this part of the speech Hawley’s conservative populism becomes clear as he takes on Coke, Target, and Bud Light. He quotes Galatians 5:1 about tied to a “yoke of slavery” (the “woke corporations”) as if this is what Paul meant by that verse.
Hawley ends by connecting American individualism to his evangelical Protestantism. It’s all about God-given rights. This kind of commitment to American individualism is why I often find myself sympathetic to communitarianism, civic humanism, and certain forms of socialism.
Click here for our complete and ongoing coverage of Road to Majority 2023.
Christians ended child labor and won the 40 hour work week? Did they give us the EPA and OSHA too?
Listening to him I’m tempted to think the poor guy’s having an aneurysm on stage.
For an educated person, there is a lot he does not know. Either that, he plays up to what his audience does not know. In that case, he does not serve them well.