Josh Hawley says America was 'founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ'
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., recently warned a group of seminary students that the United States is in the midst of a “spiritual crisis” caused by the rejection of Christian teachings, contending that the country “was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Hawley delivered a Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture at Boyce College of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 16, beginning by assuring students in the audience that “the nation needs you.”
“It’s not just churches that rise or fall with a good ministry, with a trained ministry, with a zealous ministry. It is the nation that rises or falls with the ministry,” the 46-year-old senator said. “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. This country was founded on the truth of Scripture."
“When the world says to the Church ‘stay put,’ the world is asking us to abandon not just our mission as Christians, which is the most central thing, it’s asking us to forget who we are as Americans," he continued.
He urged churches to reject any demand to “stay put.”
“We must not stay safe. We must not stay comfortable,” Hawley insisted. “Is the Lord Jesus Lord over all of life or Lord only of the four walls of the church?”
Hawley, an Evangelical Protestant, stressed the need for revival in the U.S. ahead of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“We are in a time of spiritual crisis,” Hawley proclaimed. “There’s a crisis of the unborn in our nation today. There are more abortions committed in the United States of America than there were when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization determined that the U.S. Constitution does not contain a right to abortion and overturned the previous legal precedent set in 1973 by the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling. The 2022 decision led many states to pass laws banning abortion in most or nearly all circumstances. Despite this reality, the number of abortions in the U.S. remains high because of the availability and relaxed regulations of the abortion pill mifepristone.
Mifepristone is responsible for more than 60% of abortions in the U.S., according to data shared by the pro-abortion research organization Guttmacher Institute.
As federal regulations relaxed under the Biden administration and maintained under the Trump administration have allowed for the abortion pill to be "mailed into every state and every city in the country” regardless of laws on the books in those states, Hawley detailed a bill he introduced that would ban the abortion pill nationwide.
“It is time to stand up for the lives of the unborn,” he insisted.
Pushing back on the notion that it is “too politically dangerous to talk about abortion,” Hawley asked, “What are we here to do as Christians if not to stand for the innocent unborn?”
Turning his attention to the “spiritual crisis in our families and our children," Hawley said that “fewer and fewer children grow up in families with moms and dads in this country."
"Do you know that more children will grow up in single-parent households in the United States of America than in any other industrialized nation in the world?” he questioned.
He also lamented “a spiritual crisis directed at men in this country,” where “fewer men are working than ever before” and “fewer men are getting married than ever before.”
“It is almost impossible now in this country, 21st-century America, to support a wife and children on a blue-collar wage,” he remarked, reflecting a complementarian theological framework. “Fifty years ago, you could do it. Today, it’s almost impossible. In fact, we’ve got fewer and fewer blue-collar jobs.”
“We need an economy where a man can support himself and his wife and family by the work of his own hands," Hawley continued.
He criticized the modern phenomenon of both parents needing to work to afford the necessities of life and the resulting dependence on daycare.
“We don’t need a more conservative economy. We don’t need a more liberal economy. We need a Christian economy,” he said.
“We need a Christian economy that rewards the family, that protects the family, that rewards marriage,” he added. “I think, as Christians, we ought to be unabashed about it.”
Hawley urged Christians to confront the problems head-on.
“That’s the opposite instruction of what the world tells the Church, is it not?” he asked. “The world tells the Church ‘stay put.’ The world says to the Church: ‘Stay within your walls, go within your churches, shut the doors, don’t talk to anybody else, don’t do anything else, certainly, don’t talk about Jesus in public, don’t witness in the workplace, don’t take your faith into the public square.’”
Hawley condemned the “philosophy of neutral public reason" as “practical atheism.”
He rejected the claim that the U.S. is "a secular nation," that "liberty is an inherently secular thing," and the "public square needs to be shorn of any religious language.”
“That is not what this country was founded on,” he declared. “That’s not what the Constitution says.”
