When I was in sixth grade my elementary class in Blue Ridge, Texas put on a production of The Emperor Has No Clothes. As I was the newest student in the class, having moved from Kansas City, MO to north Texas, I volunteered to perform in the play and was given a role as one of the royal tailors who convinces a naked emperor and his lackeys that he is wearing a resplendent garment worthy of an emperor. This came to mind as I was thinking about the speech that Senator Josh Hawley gave at the National Conservatism conference earlier this week. Many people have now seen the clip where Hawley, a Christofascist insurrection apologist, oh so smugly proclaims that America is a Christian nation and that he is a Christian nationalist. After seeing the clip, I found the entire speech posted on the NatCon YouTube channel and because I am a thoughtful scholar, steeled myself enough to sit down and watch Hawley’s speech in its entirety. Having done so, I came to a couple of conclusions — I am profoundly underpaid (no one should have to sit through that nonsense for free) and Josh Hawley also has no clothes –please forgive me for putting that image in your head.

As one might expect from someone as wholly disingenuous as Josh Hawley, the speech was replete with smug self assurance, fallacious arguments, lies and obfuscations, faux history, terrible theology, thinly veiled sexism and misogyny, pandering to “working men”, and a bizarre insistence that two mutually exclusive ideas can be simultaneously put into practice without canceling those ideas out. Most Americans likely remember Hawley’s “be careful what you wish for” sprint as he fled from the mob of insurrectionists that he had supported with his raised fist in the early stages of the attack on the US capitol building on January 6, 2021, but then ran from when it became clear just how dangerous things were. He was rightly derided for his insurrectionist ideas and his hypocritical and gangly run to hide. Likewise, he should be derided and called out for his laughable speech this week and his utterly absurd convictions regarding Christianity, democracy, and Christian nationalism.

Hawley peppered his speech with some common coded language used by far-right politicians and their supporters. One such words is “elites” and its derivations like “elitists”. He, like Heritage Project Founder and fellow Christofascist Kevin Roberts, is an elitist but likes to pretend that he is not despite his bachelors degree from Stanford University, a JD from Yale, and membership in the “millionaire’s club” we call the US Senate. In so doing, Hawley proves himself to be as disingenuous as his fascist fist pump was three and half years ago. For all the faux fighting for the common man rhetoric in his speech, he is not getting his hands dirty in any sort of blue collar way, just like he was never going to fight with the mob on January 6th. His words and actions expose him for who he is.

Like the tailors in the parable of the naked emperor, Hawley has seemingly been duped by the New Apostolic Reformation’s revisionist history about America and the lies that Christofascist propagandists like David Barton intentionally deceive historically illiterate Christians with. America never has been, never was intended to be, and should never be a theocratic “Christian nation”. Never mind that the framers of the Constitution were adamant that the nation’s founding documents and the government were to be completely secular, the U.S. has never been a Christian nation because it has never been remotely Christlike. As a country, we have yet to come even close to fulfilling the loftiest secular ideas of what America ostensibly is, much less to living up to the core teachings of Jesus. Both of these assertions can readily be cross referenced with history or with today’s news to be corroborated.

Hawley praised the Puritans repeatedly in his speech as models of Christian virtue. The Puritans were theocratic extremists whose arrival on the North American continent in the early 1600s was fraught with white supremacy, misogyny, and genocide. These folks were colonizers, but they did not found the nation as Hawley spuriously stated when he said that “Christian nationalism isn’t a threat to American democracy, but rather founded American democracy.” Utter nonsense pushed by the N.A.R. in their Orwellian, ahistorical Project Blitz playbook which cites the Mayflower Compact as a founding document. It was in no way a founding document despite its historical importance. That document applied only to the group of people who signed it, at the time that they signed it, and did not speak for the Anglo-Europeans who came later and actually began the process of creating a new country based on secular Enlightenment principles 150 plus years later.

Hawley also proclaimed that conservatives have three loves that the Left hates – work, family, and God. His motive was quite transparent as he repeatedly referred to “working men” and not the working class. It was a none too subtle verbal cue that women belong at home, barefoot and pregnant while the man should be working to provide for his family. That is certainly a choice a family can make together, but it is not a model that should be foisted on anyone just because conservative Christians have no idea what the Biblical ideas of a “family” were in the Ancient Near East. Hint: it wasn’t the American idea of “the nuclear family” as promoted by fundamentalists like James Dobson. Hawley did at least tell the truth when he called out his party for making it impossible for most people to earn a living wage, but then reverted back to type by claiming that anything related to climate change is a “boondoggle.” He must not realize how damaging climate change already is to families all around the world.

His claim that the Left hates God is laughable. Many Leftists are theists, and many are Christians. I am a Leftist because I take the words of the Prophets and the teachings of Jesus seriously. The alt-right would likely crucify Jesus again were he to show up in modern America preaching nonviolence, limitless forgiveness, love of both neighbors and enemies, and speaking truth to power. For many of the Christian nationalists like Hawley, their so-called love of God seems to stem from weaponizing scripture as a justification for hating other people. In his Left vs. Right dichotomy he claimed that Christian nationalism is actually class warfare, hence his ad nauseam appeals to “working men” and unions. He wasn’t fooling me. Christian nationalism is about making powerful people more powerful while taking rights and liberties away from the wide range of people they don’t like. His support for the working class rang hollow and disingenuous.

Some of the more absurd things Senator Hawley said were late in his speech. He claimed the Left wanted to take away the national religion, which he falsely claimed is Christianity, and replace it with the Trans flag. This false dichotomy was clearly just a bigoted dog whistle to allow him to show his audience that he shares their bigotry while hoping that they’re historically illiterate. There are Trans Christians. There are Trans ally Christians who see Trans people as beautiful individuals made in the likeness and image of God. For those Christians the Trans flag is an expression of Christian love and support for Trans people. I believe that they will see the kindom of God long before the likes of Josh Hawley will. Perhaps he should replace his religious nationalism for the teachings of Jesus instead of proclaiming that America needs more civic religion and not less. A preposterous notion with no basis in the Bible and especially not in the teachings of Jesus. As Dr. Peter Enns noted in one of his videos, the Book of Revelation is apocalyptic literature that warns Christians against participating in civic religion as was expected of people living in the Roman Empire.

Speaking of Revelation, Hawley was clearly referencing that mysterious and often completely misunderstood book when he claimed that the modern nation states of Israel and the “American republic” are mentioned in the Bible as having a special relationship and importance to Biblical prophecy. This is patently absurd. There is nothing in the Bible, not one single verse out of over 31,000 verses that has anything at all to do with predicting the events of the 20th and 21st centuries. Please read that again and let it sink in. I grew up being taught that prophecy was being played out on TV screens, in the newspapers, and in barcodes at the local Wal-Mart, but that was misinformation of the highest order. We can certainly get theological truths from the prophets and apocalyptic literature in the Bible, but we cannot use them to predict happenings in our current time and place in history.

As Hawley spoke, he oozed smugness and certitude like a slug oozes slime, while pandering to his audience of far right Christian nationalists. He lied when he said that Christian nationalism is compatible with the First Amendment and he lied when he pretended that his version of Christian nationalism isn’t rooted in anti-democratic white supremacy. He, like all Christian nationalists, has abandoned Jesus for the sake of earthly power, and he eschews democracy for the same reason, despite having been elected in a democratic election. There is nothing Christlike about Josh Hawley’s Christian nationalism despite his attempts to sanitize it with a veneer of respectability while pretending that it is a working class, democratic movement. It’s religiously based fascism and should be treated as such while we still can. Put some clothes on Josh. No one wants to see that…

If you enjoyed this piece, you’ll love my book Theological Musings Volume 1 from Quoir Publishing.