It's in the Code ep 192: “Deep Thoughts…By Josh Hawley”

Dan Miller: Hello, and welcome to It's in the Code. The series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College. I am your host, as always. Pleased to be with you, as always. Thank you for listening. As always, thank you for supporting everything that I do here and everything that we do on Straight White American Jesus. We cannot do it without you.

Want to keep plugging — just a few episodes away from starting a new series of episodes on questions I wasn't allowed to ask in church, or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church. What were the questions that got you in trouble? What were the questions that got you a stern talking-to? What were the questions that maybe led you out of the tradition you were part of, or made you rethink your faith? Please send those to me at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. If you would put in the header "questions I wasn't allowed to ask" or "questions I wasn't supposed to ask," that'll let me know that those are coming. Really looking forward to doing those. Been thinking of a few of my own to put into that series, so look forward to seeing where that goes.

In the meantime, continuing on today's episode — we're continuing close to the end of our look at Josh Hawley's view of masculinity and the supposed masculine virtues that he claims will remake America. We're in the final chapter of his book, Manhood, where he presents the last of the six roles that he says men are called to play, and that by playing these roles, we mere men can exercise and develop our masculine virtues and save America. So what is the role that Hawley develops in this final chapter? It is the role of king — men as kings. And I suppose this isn't surprising for somebody who's a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who's putting forward what is, by definition, a patriarchal vision of society, but there are some interesting things to note about the way that he does this in his chapter.

I introduced the chapter a little bit last week. We're going to take a deeper dive into it this week, and in particular, what I want to note here is he occupies sort of two spaces in this chapter — and throughout the book, but this chapter sort of highlights these two spaces that have defined conservative Christians to the present. The first is a kind of spiritual self-help understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith — understanding Christianity and articulating it really as a form of spiritual self-help. The second, of course, is a monarchical vision of society whereby the social order is overseen by effectively a king. We have to remember that Hawley is an advocate of the unitary executive theory. He's a guy who believes the president — at least when the president is Donald Trump — should have undivided authority, essentially playing the role of a king. So, surprise, surprise, he sees kingship as a masculine virtue tied in with those.

I have also talked a lot as we've gone through this book about how Hawley reads the Bible, but as we come to this final chapter, it's also worth noting what the Bible is for him, and I hope that what I mean by that will make sense here in a few minutes, because Josh Hawley's Bible is weird. I don't know what I'm going to call this episode yet — I usually come up with titles after I record — but Josh Hawley's Bible is weird. That could be an episode. Josh Hawley's Bible is weird. So, here's what I want to do in this episode: I want to look at some of the reasons why I say his Bible is weird, what I mean by that, and then I want to look at the self-help dimension of the spirituality, or the Christian vision, that he's putting forward in this book. And then next episode I want to take up really the kind of political dimensions of his focus on kingship, because I think that they're there — they're understated, but I think they're there. We're going to talk about those in the next episode, which will be the last episode on this chapter.

Okay, so let's talk about Josh Hawley's weird Bible. What do I mean by saying it's weird? I don't want to rehash everything that we've said about how he reads the Bible up to here, but I do want to point out and just remind us that he has structured his entire book around what he calls the Adam cycle — that that structures the Bible. And again, what does he mean by that? He means that God created the first human person, first man, Adam, and tasked him with being his representative on earth, and told him to convert the earth into a temple and a space for God, and to go and work and do all these sorts of things. And Adam essentially failed to do that, he failed in that mission, and so the Bible is essentially a series of stories of new Adams — these stories of these biblical exemplars that Josh Hawley has been giving us. They are all examples of a kind of renewed Adam raised up by God to carry out the mission that Adam failed to carry out, and ultimately it is the mission of all men. That's his story.

Now, I have said lots of times that the Bible doesn't actually say this anywhere. Hawley thinks that's what the Bible means. It doesn't actually say anywhere that there's this Adam cycle. It doesn't call Joshua another Adam or David another Adam, or what have you. Fine, I don't want to rehash that. That's its own weird thing. But when I say that his Bible is weird today, I mean something different. What I mean is that his example in this chapter is weird. And who's his example in this chapter? It's King Solomon. So you had King David — we've talked about him before — his son Solomon, King Solomon. That's Hawley's example. And I've got a few things to say about why I think Solomon is a weird choice.

I want to start with this: he tells us in this chapter that the Adam stories — again, he references this Adam cycle; the Bible doesn't call them this — that the Adam stories "culminate with another king, Solomon." The Adam stories culminate with King Solomon. Folks, that's weird. And if it's not clear why, I'll tell you. Okay, what Hawley is saying is that the Adam cycle — what for him is the core of the Bible, the core teaching of the Bible, the cycle that recapitulates over and over and over and structures the Bible as he reads it — that that Adam cycle starts with Adam and ends with Solomon. And here's part of why I think that's weird: I looked it up. The Bible tells the story of Solomon's death. It's in two places, the last of which, the latest in the Bible, is Second Chronicles. If you're watching, you can see this. If you're not watching, you can't — I'll describe it. You look at that, and I'm looking at — that's like a quarter of the way through the Bible.

So, the first reason I say that this is weird is, Hawley says the Adam cycle is the whole point — the whole point of the Bible — it culminates in Solomon. Which means that for Josh Hawley, the whole damn Bible is like a quarter. There's like a quarter of the Bible that's worth reading. We don't need to go any further than a quarter of the way through the Bible. That's weird. It's weird that Mr. Christian Nationalist apparently stops reading at like the quarter-way mark of the Bible. It's like, yep, we're done. We're done. We got all the message we need. I've already pointed out this is also weird because the only person in the Bible that it says is the second Adam is Jesus. He hasn't talked about Jesus at all. There's nothing distinctively Christian about this — it just kind of reinforces that point. So, the first reason why his Bible is weird, and his choice of Solomon, is he says Solomon is the culmination of the Adam cycle. So this whole structuring cycle runs like a quarter of the way through the Bible, and then I guess we're done. That's weird.

Okay, I think it's weird for other reasons. I think Solomon is a weird choice, never mind that it's a quarter of the way through the Bible. Imagine that Solomon isn't even the culmination of this cycle — he's just the example that Hawley wants to give us of a king. I still think it's a weird choice, and here's why. And this is a critique I have that goes way beyond Josh Hawley. This is actually one of the questions that I posed in church before and got shouted down for, and I guess it's not one that we'll do an episode on because I'm going to talk about it now. But it was something that stuck out for me, and it runs throughout a lot of Christianity.

He notes, and the Bible says — I'm quoting the Bible, Second Chronicles 9:22 is what I'm quoting — that Solomon "excelled all the kings of the earth in wisdom." Solomon is presented as the paragon of wisdom within the Hebrew Bible. We ask God for wisdom. He's known for being a wise man. He makes wise decisions, and so forth. There's a lot of writing in the Hebrew Bible called the wisdom literature that is traditionally attributed to Solomon. The wisdom of Solomon becomes just like a sort of part of Western culture, a Western cultural trope. He's presented as possibly the wisest man who ever lived, after God granted him great wisdom. And Hawley really leans into this. This is a big part of why Hawley chooses Solomon as his example of masculine kingship.

But here's something that Hawley and everybody like him overlooks. Okay, we can make a pretty strong argument that Solomon was a pretty shitty king. He's known for amassing great wealth — going to mention that again in a minute. He's known for being wealthy. He's also known for wisdom, yes. But he's also famous for constructing the lavish Jewish temple — the first Jewish temple — that created a permanent worship structure for the undertaking of Israelite worship. He constructed the first temple. But — and this is in the Bible, if you read it, it's all here — his domestic policies, Mr. Wiseman King, his domestic policies as king also led to civil war and the destruction of the kingdom of Israel. His policies led to the downfall of the kingdom over which he was king.

The big temple that he built — and we know, Hawley likes his leaders who build big buildings, that's a thing that Hawley likes — so he likes Solomon. Solomon the builder, that's what he should have said. He should have had Solomon the builder. Solomon is the one that built the temple, not, you know, David, whatever. Solomon the builder. The Bible says that to pay for this temple complex that he built, he taxed his people heavily for it. He extracted resources from different parts of the kingdom. He conscripted laborers, and this policy exacerbated tensions between the northern and southern portions of the kingdom. In particular, it alienated King Solomon from a lot of the people that he ruled. And specifically — you know, there were twelve tribes of Israel, and different tribal loyalties that these people had — it sort of elevated his tribe above others. There were lots of political and economic resentments, and so forth. And after his death, the kingdom ultimately split into two as a result. The northern kingdom comes to be known as Israel. The southern kingdom comes to be known as Judah, named after the tribe of Solomon, each of which also eventually falls to a foreign power dominant in the ancient Near East — first the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians.

What's the point? Great example, Hawley. Wisest man who ever lived, wise king rules the ways of God, and so on and so forth — who enacts domestic policies that lead to the downfall of the kingdom over which he rules. I just think that's not a great example. If I want a great example of a king, that's not the dude I'm choosing — whose domestic policies literally split the country in half. So I think it's a weird choice.

Gonna back up one more step. Here's another reason why I think Josh Hawley's Bible is weird in this chapter: I think the whole notion of a king is a weird choice. Now, that might sound strange, because the Bible says a lot about kings and the Christian tradition says a lot about kings, and so forth. It might seem obvious that kingship is something you would look at. But Hawley insists throughout his chapter that kingship is not just a model for masculinity and leadership, but God's model for masculinity and leadership. That's Josh Hawley's claim. But what he fails to mention — and if you know the Bible, you know where this is going. If you know this portion of the Hebrew Bible, you've got to be like, "but what about, but what about, but what about?" — we're going to get to the "what about" here.

Anybody who reads the Bible is going to know this. He fails to mention that the Bible is also really critical of kingship. Famously, in the book of First Samuel, God is pissed when the Israelites ask to have a king appointed over them. They asked to have a king. Eventually, the first king is Saul, and then David, and then Solomon — so we're not far removed from the initiation of kingship within Israel. And we don't need to get into the hows and whys, but the bottom line is that in that passage God is really critical. He says that asking for a king is a condemnation of God, that the people are abandoning him, they're being unfaithful to him, and so forth — he's really down on the whole kingship thing. So it's weird to me when Christians are like, "king, king, king." I don't know, man, like, it was pretty critical in the first place.

Now they'll say — Hawley might point out, and maybe if he reads the Bible well and you're talking to him, they might point out — "well, you know, in Deuteronomy, God gives a bunch of things about what a king is supposed to be like, and it really sounds like God's okay with a king." You'd be like, "okay," but that doesn't fix anything, because now you've got one passage in the Bible that seems to say that God affirms kingship, and another passage where He says that kingship is like a failure and a rejection of God — never mind the later development in the Bible where it comes to be just taken for granted. I remember that whole inerrancy thing. The Bible's supposed to not have any contradictions, and it's supposed to mean one clear unified thing, and so on and so forth. It doesn't. So the whole idea of kingship is like a muddled mess in the Hebrew Bible, in my view. And so, when Hawley appeals to it, I find that weird.

Okay, so Hawley's Bible is weird for a number of reasons, and they all stand out, I think, vividly in this chapter. Okay, I want to set that aside. That's one thing — his Bible's weird. Here's the other thing I want to look at today: I want to look at this whole thing of the Bible as a kind of spiritual self-help. And this runs throughout his book, but it's really egregious in this chapter.

Here's what I think is going on. Here's why I think it's so egregious. If you didn't grow up within this kind of Christian tradition, if you didn't grow up in church, or you didn't grow up in a kind of church that believed that everything you did was supposed to refer to the Bible, and that being a Christian meant that the Bible is not only true but relevant — everything in the Bible is directly relevant for your life — you might be told about this king in this relatively minor kingdom in the ancient Near East and you're like, "Well, I guess that's cool and interesting, but, like, so what? That doesn't feel relevant." It seems absolutely irrelevant, even if you think that the Bible contains teachings that we're supposed to believe in and whatever. The relevance of this passage is not immediately clear. We don't live under a monarchy — at least according to the Constitution, and the efforts of particular politicians notwithstanding. We don't live under a monarchy. Most of us will never exercise any kind of authority that could remotely be viewed as kingly. And even if we did, it's not immediately clear that if you're looking for an example of kingship, an ancient Near Eastern kingdom is the place to go. Like, why go to an example that is so far removed — culturally, ideologically, linguistically, whatever — from our own kind of cultural experience or background? The point is, it's not clear when you're busy talking about King Solomon that it is relevant for us.

Now, I think that for Hawley it's relevant for political reasons as well — we'll get into that next episode. But what I want to highlight here is the way that he navigates this problem, in a way that is typical and has been typical of American evangelicalism for a long time. Because he needs it to be relevant. That is one of the evangelical claims about the Bible — not just that it is true, but that it is relevant. If you go to an evangelical seminary and you take a preaching class, a big part of that will be how you have to be able to show that the Bible is relevant. You have to be able to connect it to people's lives. You have to show that these ancient teachings have value for everyday regular old American Christians, and so forth. He's got to be able to show that. He has to find a way to make this ancient story about an ancient Near Eastern king, half a world away, relevant. And so one of the ways that he does this — and again we're talking about Josh Hawley because he is typical here, not because he's unique, but because he's typical — one of the ways he does this that is typical of American evangelicalism, and has been for a long time, is by essentially baptizing the language of self-help, popular self-help psychology, and calling it Christian.

And we could have broader discussions here. You could have broader discussions about the rise of the kind of therapeutic self-help movement and how that influences evangelicalism — conversations about evangelicalism in popular culture, conversations about evangelicalism and capitalism, the whole self-help pop psychology thing and capitalism and marketing, and so forth. All kinds of directions we could go with this. Don't have time for it today. I just want to highlight that this is the strategy he uses.

So, let's look at how this works. When he's talking about Solomon, he talks about Solomon and he says that Solomon is a great king because he attends to his character and submits himself to God. Okay, so you get the religious language — submission to God, and so on. But here's his takeaway from that. He goes from "Solomon submits himself to God, that makes him a good king" to this. He says that is how he will be able to "bring blessing and order to others when his own soul is ordered and blessed." "Self-discipline is self-mastery, and self-mastery is strength, and a man's strength, in the biblical view, can bless and empower others." Let me read that again. Here's the takeaway. You ready for it? "Self-discipline is self-mastery, and self-mastery is strength, and a man's strength, in the biblical view," he says, "can bless and empower others."

See what he does here — he shifts his description from a king, or maybe an idea of kingship, and turns it into a basic kind of saccharine insight about how we can influence others, how we can better ourselves and influence others. The whole "submission to God" just disappears. He's like, "self-discipline is self-mastery." What do we need to submit ourselves to? To ourselves. It's self-discipline. There's no transcendent authority here. There's no submission to God. It's now self-discipline. What is true strength? True strength is self-mastery. And what is the purpose of strength? To bless and empower others. And then he says, "This is the biblical view." We talked about this last episode — the Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says Solomon submitted himself to God, and from that, Hawley's like, "Well, the biblical view is that if you exercise self-mastery, you can influence others."

You can hear the infomercial pitch. Now, I realize that I'm old, I realize I just referenced infomercials, I realize many of you listening probably don't know what an infomercial is, but just hear him hawking his wares with me. You can do it too. For only $19.95, or whatever the book costs, you can learn how to master yourself, and by doing that, how to influence others. That's what it turns into. It's just self-help. And if you're listening to that, you're like, "What needed the Bible to get to that, Josh?" They needed the Bible to tell us that self-mastery is strength and strength influences others? Like you needed the Bible, number one. And number two, if you're saying that's from the Bible, that's not anything like what it actually says. That's a real stretch — to get from "Solomon submitted himself to God" to "self-mastery is how we influence others." Gag, gag, gag. I hate that kind of stuff. I hate "self-mastery is strength." Ooh, that's deep.

Josh thinks he's not done. Here's another one. He quotes Deuteronomy, another Bible book, and says that the king "shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away." Now, first of all, it's worth noting that Solomon — his exemplar, his exemplar of a biblical king — the Bible says kings shouldn't have many wives. Solomon, according to the biblical tradition, had 700 wives and 300 concubines. It's 1,000 wives and concubines. Doesn't sound like a great king by biblical standards. But you know, whatever. The point is, for most of us this is not remotely relevant. "A king shall not acquire many wives." Cool, I'm not a king, I'm not looking to acquire many wives, whatever. So Hawley is going to make it relevant. The verse he cites is "the king shall not acquire many wives for himself." Okay, and here's the lesson he says. He says, "In other words —" notice that "in other words" — "I, Josh Hawley, am going to tell you what this Bible verse really means. It looks like it's about wives, but that's not really what it's about." In other words, he says: don't indulge yourself, don't live for personal gratification, don't make satisfying desire your life's aim.

Okay, wow. Josh, thanks. I never could have gotten to that without the Bible. I never could have gotten to a deep lesson like "don't live for personal gratification, don't make satisfying desire your life's aim." Never ever could have come to the conclusion that there could be a higher purpose in life than seeking to live for my own desire. Folks, you don't need the Bible for that. Number one. Number two, it says what it says — it's not remotely what it says. Like if you went to somebody and they said, "The Bible says you shouldn't make satisfying your desire your life's aim," and you're like, "Wow, okay, that's interesting. Where does the Bible say that?" And they say, "Well, it just says not to have a lot of wives." You'd be like, "Oh, wow, okay, that's weird." You don't need Christianity to get to that. You don't need the Bible to get to that. I would argue you don't need religion to get to that. And I would also say, Josh Hawley, you're not giving me anything I can't find if I go peruse the shelves at Barnes & Noble, or get online and cruise around Amazon for a while. I can find that lesson anywhere.

But he's not done. Here's a final example. He quotes the Bible again. He says the Bible says — and it does say this — "the king shall not acquire for himself excessive silver and gold." Again, worth noting that King Solomon was fabulously wealthy. It says he exceeded all of the kings in wealth and wisdom — he, Solomon, the shitty king, by biblical standards. Okay. But here, this one's interesting, because Hawley has to be really careful to make this one relevant. The most clearly relevant part would seem to be: "Oh wow, I guess we shouldn't have excessive wealth." Folks, Josh Hawley — who serves a billionaire president who endorses and bows before an oligarchic cabinet — is not going to endorse a reading of the Bible that says wealth is bad. And neither are most white American evangelical Christians. I challenge you to find them. White Christians in the most affluent society that has ever existed in the history of the world are not fond of reading the Bible in a way that says wealth is bad. We have centuries of powerful, wealthy Christians refusing to read the Bible as saying wealth is bad, even when the plain meaning of scripture that they affirm otherwise seems to say it's bad.

So, what does Hawley do here? He doesn't want to read it literally — and they're not literalists. This is one of the reasons. He doesn't want to literally say that we shouldn't have wealth. So, here's how he interprets it. He says that what it really means, folks, is "don't make wealth your god, don't worship social status. Ambition is good and worthwhile, but money for the sake of money is ultimately an empty pursuit."

Again, wow. Never mind the fact that that doesn't seem to be what the Bible says. The standard strategy here for conservative Christians is to say wealth is fine as long as you also love God, as long as you still recognize that it came from God and you worship God, and whatever — wealth is fine. We even have a Christianity that goes so far as to say if you really worship God, you will be wealthy. It's a very convenient kind of teaching that I would argue is really at odds with what the text actually seems to say, but that's fine. But what he does say — "money for the sake of money is ultimately an empty pursuit" — again, do we need the Bible for that, Josh? Like, that's your whole thing? That's your deep insight? I didn't need the Bible to teach me that. I watched my dad, or my grandpa, or whomever, burn out pursuing wealth and not developing relationships and making decisions in life that didn't bring about lasting and satisfying change. I saw how empty that was. I could come to that conclusion on my own. Maybe I'll just go read some Buddhist texts and learn that. The point is, I don't need the Bible to say that. I don't need Christianity to say that. I really don't need religion to say that. And again, I can go to lots of places and find the same trite statement: don't live just for money. I don't know anybody personally who would say "I live just for money." Even most of the billionaires will tell us that they don't live just for money.

It's pretty removed as well from what the Bible says. So this is the story — this kind of watered-down pablum passed off as divine revelation. You're like, this is the best that God can do? Creator of the universe, wisest entity that exists, what have you — this is the best He can do? "Don't live just to fulfill your desires, and don't chase just money." Like, really, that's the best He can do. That kind of pretty trite, vacuous, baptized secular pop psychology — that kind of stuff is a part, only a part, but a part of what led me away from American evangelicalism. It is part of what led to my disillusionment with and ultimate rejection of that tradition. It is this kind of shallow sermonizing — the statement that the Bible is the ultimate divine revelation, and then this is the best you can do. I find it ironic, more than ironic, that in the name of making the Bible relevant, you essentially make it irrelevant by having it just say what everybody else says. If all the Bible is going to do is tell us what every other self-help book or self-help guru can teach us, or everybody else who will send you 20 bucks to get their little guide about how to make friends and develop personal and moral strength — if it's just the same as that, it's irrelevant. It's not relevant. It becomes just one more voice in a marketplace of voices all saying the same thing. So that's a dimension of Josh Hawley's book that is front and center, and I think it's very much a part of a longstanding evangelical tradition.

I also just want to point out — while we're at it, if you're sitting there like, "Hold on, Dan, where did the masculinity bit go?" — great question. Once again, there doesn't seem to be anything distinctively masculine about these virtues that he has. I mean, is he saying that people who aren't men are supposed to seek self-satisfaction and self-gratification? Is he saying, "Well, you know, men aren't supposed to seek money for the sake of money, but if women want to, that's fine, right?" No, I don't think so. I think he's putting forward what are essentially human virtues, which again undermines his whole notion of divine masculine virtue. Just gonna point that out.

I'll throw this out there too: his example this time of learning self-discipline — he talks about self-mastery, his model of somebody who taught him self-discipline and self-mastery — it's his mom. It's his mom. It's not his dad, it's not his grandpa, it's not his concrete-laying uncle. Nope. It's his mom again. Josh Hawley, masculine virtues. You insist on these fundamental differences between men and women — like, where are they, man? It doesn't hold up.

Okay, I'm losing my mind, I've got to stop, I've got to be done for today. So, those are the two takeaways. His weird Bible — what it is — and that's worth paying attention to, because any Christian who appeals to the Bible, and I'm not just talking about conservatives here — liberal Christians, liberal Protestants, progressive Catholics, fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals — if they appeal to the Bible, they're never appealing to the whole thing. They are always appealing to certain parts of it and certain sections of it, and that's just worth noting. I don't even intend that as a criticism. I only critique it when somebody claims that they're speaking for the Bible as a whole. If somebody says "here's the core for me" — somebody comes along and says, "You know what, the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, for me, that's the core biblical teaching, and everything else revolves around that" — I can go with that. Or at least the acknowledgement that we're not pretending that we're speaking for the whole Bible. So that's the first part. Josh's Bible is weird — they're all weird in some ways, because it's never the full Bible.

And the second one is that his vision of kingship here just gets watered down and sermonized into basic spiritual self-help. Don't chase money. Invest in things that matter in your life. Develop self-mastery and inner strength, and people will be drawn to you, people will be influenced by you. People like confidence, essentially, is what it comes down to. Great, thanks, Josh.

We're not done with Josh. We're not done with Josh Hawley. We're not done talking about kingship. Next episode, we're going to pick up what I think are the political dimensions — they're understated. He does it in, as I say, his kinder, gentler vision of a monarchical, patriarchal society, but it's still there. We're going to pick that up next episode.

As always, until then, thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. There are lots of other things you could be doing. You're choosing to be here with me doing this, so thank you. If you have ideas or questions you weren't allowed or supposed to ask in church, let me know — danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. As always, keep your eyes out for other things coming up — live events, office hours, what have you. We have some new developments. Brad's been plugging this as well. I'm going to be talking about those in more detail in coming weeks. Please keep an ear out for those. And as always, thank you not only for listening, but please be well until we get a chance to talk again.