Republican Senator Josh Hawley is an unabashed Christian nationalist who believes that conservative Christians must get more involved in politics because "America as we know it cannot survive without biblical Christianity."
This was the message that Hawley delivered to students at Liberty University when he spoke at their convocation last week. Preaching from the Book of Judges, Hawley called upon Liberty students to display the courage and conviction of Gideon and his army and rise up to free this nation from its secular "spiritual oppression."
"This story [of Gideon] actually sounds a whole lot like today," Halwey proclaimed. "We have the nation oppressed and we have Gideon afraid. Isn't that a lot like our situation today? Can we just be honest? Is not our nation in so many ways spiritually oppressed? Are we not suffering the spiritual oppression of the forces of secularism in our society?"
"For decades now, the forces of secularism—the false god, if you will, of secularism—have said that Christians should be silent in the public square, that Christians should have no place in law or in business, or in academia or in government," he continued. "The forces of secularism would cut us off from our spiritual history, from our spiritual foundations, from what makes us who we are as a nation."
"Every civilization is founded on a set of religious convictions and the United States of America, I firmly believe, is the greatest nation in the history of the world because our spiritual convictions are the convictions of the Bible," Hawley declared. "They are the convictions of the truth of the word of God, but the forces of secularism seek to cut us off from that truth. It seeks to destroy it and in so doing, to oppress our nation."
Hawley’s dishonest caricature of supporters of church-state separation and secular government is typical of Christian nationalist propaganda that overflows with grievance and claims of victimization, and uses claims of anti-Christian persecution to mobilize conservative Christian voters. Hawley does not actually name anyone who claims that “Christians should have no place in law or in business, or in academia or in government.” In the real world, it is Christian nationalists who are likely to assert that anyone who doesn’t share their religious or political worldview has no place in public life.
