(RNS) — Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley made a bit of news at the National Conservatism Conference last week by provocatively asserting, “(S)ome will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having?”
This was actually less provocative than it sounds. If you listen to the entire speech — and I recommend it — what you’ll find is a relatively innocuous version of the old-time American civil religion weaponized with latter-day anti-progressive rhetoric and wrapped in some progressive ideas and what can charitably be called an imaginary reading of history.
Let’s start with the last of these.
In Hawley’s imagination, the big historical moment for Christian nationalism came with the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in the year 410. “And with that fell stroke the age of the empire and the pagan world of antiquity came to a close,” intoned the senator in his signature basso profundo.
Where to begin? The Roman Empire aged on for more than a millennium after the sack. As for the pagan world of antiquity, it had already come to an end.
After the conversion of Constantine in 312, the empire became a Christian thing over the course of the fourth century, with the persecution of pagans starting under the Emperor Theodosius in 381. It was to defend Christianity against the charge that the sack was the result of Rome’s abandonment of its old, pagan religion that St. Augustine felt compelled to write his massive “City of God,” completing it in 426.
In Hawley’s account, the “City of God” created the Christian nationalism that created America, thanks to the colonists who, “inspired” by the work, founded their “city on a hill” in Massachusetts:
Just think: Those stern Puritans, our Augustinian forbears, gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty. Because of our Christian and biblical heritage we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience. Because of our Christian tradition we welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds to a nation constituted by common loves. The truth is Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy. Christian nationalism founded American democracy.
Augustine, who advocated coercive measures against the Donatist heretics, would doubtless have been surprised to be celebrated for devotion to liberty of conscience — as would the stern Puritans who banned Catholics, Jews and Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, imprisoning, lashing and executing a number of the latter who refused to leave.
There’s plenty more bad history in the speech, but, rather than dwell on it, let us note that it was put in service of a multi-religious, multi-racial, multi-ethnic vision of America that rejects libertarian economics to the point of calling on Republicans to support labor unions and suggesting that labor not be taxed more than capital.
Showing off his Stanford and Yale education, Hawley invoked the idea of civil religion as necessary social glue that has engaged Western political thinkers since the time of Cicero. “We need more civil religion, not less,” he declared. “We need open acknowledgement of the religious faith and the religious heritage that binds Americans one to another.”
In the 19th century, the call for such “acknowledgement” of America’s religious heritage was often advanced as a pan-Protestant rallying cry against Catholic immigrants. Hawley employs it against the left, which he accused of wanting an alternative civil religion.
They want the religion of the pride flag. We want the religion of the Bible. So I have a small suggestion. Why don’t we take down the trans flag from all of the federal buildings over which it’s flying around the world and instead inscribe on every building owned or operated by the federal government our national motto: In God We Trust.
Like the insertion of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God We Trust” was made the national motto during the Cold War to pose America’s civil religion against the atheistic communist faith. Hawley’s assault on the left’s alternative civil religion harks back to that historical moment precisely.
But there’s a certain irony in his celebration of the old-time American civil religion. In the ancient world, Rome’s rise to power was widely attributed to the unifying force of its civil religion. It was precisely this subordination of religion to national purpose that Augustine attacked in the “City of God.”