It's in the Code ep 193: “Christian Nationalism On the DL”

Hello, and welcome to It's In the Code series, as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller. I am the Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. I am your host. Pleased to be with you as always. And, as always, want to say thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us in all the things that we do.

Want to let you know about some upcoming things. First, with regard to this series, we are almost finished with our current series, looking at Josh Hawley and the Christian nationalist vision of manhood that he presents to us, which means we're getting ready to start a new series — questions you weren't allowed to ask in church, or questions you weren't supposed to ask in church. The questions that got you in trouble, the questions that maybe sowed doubts, the questions that got you talking, the questions that maybe made you persona non grata in your congregation, whatever those were. Please, I'd love to hear them. I'd love to make them the focus in the upcoming series. You can email those to me at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. Put in the header "Questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church" or "wasn't allowed to ask in church" — that'll help me keep an eye out for those. I am compiling those, getting ready to start that series in short order, and excited about that. So, please let me know.

As well as always, ideas for upcoming series. I'm spending a lot of time going through books. If you've got other books that we need to talk about, other topics, sermons you heard, whatever it is, let me know. Happy to talk about those, decode those, and continue trying to explore the ways in which high control religion and Christian nationalism sort of circulate within our cultural context.

Tied in with that, news we've been talking about doing more live events and live streaming events in Straight White American Jesus — going to try to translate that here. Not positive exactly what it's going to look like, but I have visions of It's In the Code also live streaming. Keep your eyes out for that in upcoming weeks. It would give an opportunity for folks to join me as I do this, maybe responding to questions and comments in real time, just some ways to kind of change things up. So keep your eyes out for that. We're looking forward to trying to explore what that could look like.

In addition, this coming week I'll give my office hours a chance — for those who are subscribers with access to Discord — to join me, just a time to hang out, to chat, to talk about whatever you might want to talk about. It's always a great time, folks. We talk about sometimes things that are going on in the world, topics we've talked about, series, episodes. I think my nail polish has come up a time or two. I'm not really an expert, but happy to talk about, you know, why I choose the colors I do, and that kind of thing, whatever it is. Keep your eyes out in Discord — there'll be an announcement about when that'll be upcoming this week. Should be on Thursday. First Thursday of each month is what we aim for, so keep your eyes out for that.

Having said all that, I want to dive into this. As I say, we are in this ongoing series looking at Josh Hawley's book Manhood, where he outlines the vision of Christian masculinity that will save us all, save America, save us from the nihilistic decline that we are in. We've been exploring the five roles that he says men are called to play. The role of king — and we talked about last couple of episodes how, true to form, the masculine virtues that he spends a good deal of the chapter outlining, they don't seem to be all that masculine. It's not clear why specifically they're virtues for men. They also don't seem to be really kingly. Whatever. That's what Josh Hawley does — he just kind of takes whatever his vision is and calls it masculine. But we haven't talked about what I think are the specifically political and Christian nationalist dimensions about kingship, and I promised that we would get to that in this chapter, and that's what we're going to do. So, here we go.

Okay, now Josh Hawley is a Christian nationalist. You can Google Josh Hawley — if you Google "Is Josh Hawley a Christian nationalist?" it'll talk about places where he's explicitly taken up that nomenclature for himself. It's a term that he has specifically employed. It's no secret he's a MAGA standard bearer. He is, as I say, a dyed-in-the-wool Christian nationalist. But here in his book, the theme is understated. He's a Christian nationalist — I'm going to try to show how the Christian nationalism plays out — but it's Christian nationalism on the DL. It's low key, it's hidden, it's understated, and I think because of that, it's sneaky. It can sneak up on people, and I think that's by design.

As I've said, I think Josh Hawley is presenting what I call the sort of kinder, gentler version of a MAGA-loving Christian America model. That is, he's not the strident, angry guy. He's not the person who's trying to say really provocative things. He's not the person who's coming out swinging against everybody he doesn't like — except for all the liberals and Epicureans, as he calls us, the modern day Epicureans. It's the kinder, gentler version. And if you've listened to this series for a long time, you know that this is a theme I pick up on a lot in different elements of high control religion and Christian nationalism.

So, most of his discussion of man as king — it's not explicitly political, and it doesn't deal with issues of authority very directly, and that's sort of interesting by itself. Like, the concept of a king, in and of itself, is an issue of authority. We could say that the concept of authority is analytically implied within kingship — that is, the king is the highest authority within a particular kind of political order. So, it's built in. And yet Josh Hawley hasn't talked about that much. But if we look through what appears to be his avoidance of that, and we sort of piece the elements together that he has sketched out in this chapter, the Christian nationalist dimensions of his vision of kingship — of men as king, men as kings — I think it comes to the surface.

So, to start us off, I want to look at what he has to say about liberty. I'm just going to throw this out. There's a political theorist — philosopher, whatever you want to call him — a famous one named Isaiah Berlin, who wrote an essay called "Two Concepts of Liberty" a long time ago, and Hawley, in one of his pseudo-intellectual moments, ostensibly is discussing that essay in this chapter. It's an essay worth reading. Berlin contrasts what he calls positive and negative conceptions of liberty. True to form, Josh Hawley really flattens the discussion, radically oversimplifies it, turns Berlin into just another liberal to be dismissed, and so forth. I want to acknowledge that that's there — that it's Hawley trying to sound intellectual, but not handling the material very well. So I'm not going to take us through a walkthrough of what Isaiah Berlin is talking about, and what positive and negative liberty are, and so forth. That's something people are interested in. We can talk more about that. That could be a great office hours thing — who knows, if people want to hear more about that in episodes, let me know. But I just want to put that out there, that Josh Hawley is going to talk about that, but he doesn't do it very well.

But I do want to talk about what he thinks about liberty, because a lot of this chapter — a big chunk of it — is built up on the conception of liberty. True to form, what he wants to do is set up a contrast: an absolute, all-or-nothing, sharp contrast between what he calls the liberal or Epicurean conception of liberty — remember, "Epicurean" is his term for basically everybody who's not him, the modern day Epicureans — and what he presents as a true or authentic version of liberty.

So, once again, only the Christians have a true conception of liberty, and the rest of us are laboring under this false conception. He sets this up as a black and white opposition, all or nothing. We've seen this strategy over and over and over in Josh Hawley — and again, we're not reading Josh Hawley because he's unique, we're reading him because he's typical. This is a typical strategy on the right, and among Christian nationalists: to paint everything in stark black or white oppositions, binary oppositions. Whether we're talking about gender or sexuality or politics or anything else, there are only ever two choices.

Okay, so for the liberal modern day Epicureans, this is what Hawley tells us. He says that for them, freedom or liberty — quote — "this is his quote, this is what they think of freedom or liberty" — "Freedom or liberty depends on there being no moral order, no God, no eternity, or human nature, only your needs, which you must be free to satisfy here and now." End quote. Which means that for him, in his view, for liberals or Epicureans, liberty has to be nihilistic. To be free, to really be free, he thinks they say that you have to reject belief in anything that sort of transcends the individual. You have to deny all value or all worth. It's essentially: freedom is just the freedom to satisfy my immediate wants and desires. That's what he says liberty is for the Epicureans or the liberals.

And because Hawley says that they are the ruling elites — I would love to ask him, and this is another thing that the right always does: they accuse the left of being nihilistic and stupid and ridiculous and out of touch, etc., but then they're always telling us that we hold all the power. And you're kind of like, how do we get to have all the power if we're so dumb and so nihilistic and so incapable of doing things? But whatever. He says that the liberals and elites and the Epicureans are the ones who are the ruling elites, and because they affirm this nihilistic conception of liberty, it's leading America down a nihilistic path.

Okay, but he tells us that is a false conception of liberty. Real liberty, he says, flows out of order and self-command — those are his quotes. So false liberty — liberal Epicurean liberty — is completely self-serving. It's nihilistic, it believes in nothing beyond the individual. And the contrast is true liberty, which flows out of order and self-command. Well, where does that come from? That means the real liberty for Josh Hawley comes from submission to God. No surprise — there it is. Submission to God. He says a man discovers freedom by growing into the nature God has given him and responding to the purpose God has written into his life. That meaning of purpose comes from God. It is given to human beings — I guess, and specifically men, he's talking about men — it is given to men by God. And he continues: "The Bible says..." — Hawley always does that, "the Bible says," doesn't tell you where it's supposed to say this — "...that God freed the Israelites from slavery." He's referring to the story in Exodus. He's referred to this earlier in the book. "...so they could serve Him. Serving Him was freedom. Freedom is service to God, submission to God."

So here are the alternatives of conceptions of liberty as Hawley talks about it: the nihilistic left, on the one hand, for whom liberty is just pure self-indulgence with no regard for truth or meaning or value or anything that transcends us as individuals — or the Christian vision, which recognizes that when we submit to God's will and God's plan, we are truly free, that we are only free when we submit to God's will or God's plan.

Why am I spending the time delving into these conceptions of liberty he's putting forward? Because this is going to be, like, low key, the basis for Christian nationalism as he's going to put it forward in this chapter. And when he does, what he's essentially doing is echoing a lot of other Christian nationalist pseudo-intellectuals who present what we can call a common good, theocratic vision of society — a vision of society where the role of government is to tell people what the good is and lay that out and require them to pursue that, but all supposedly in the name of freedom. And we've talked about that on the podcast — we've talked about, you know, Peter Thiel and JD Vance, and a certain kind of Catholic Augustinianism within the Christian right and the MAGA movement and Christian nationalism. Okay, go back, check those things out. Drop me a line. Come to office hours. Happy to talk about that more.

All I want to say here is that Hawley is very much in that line of thinking, even though he's not invoking those terms or talking in quite the same way. So that's his conception — the all-or-nothing, stark binary opposition between a false conception of liberty that can only be self-serving and ultimately nihilistic, or Christian liberty, which comes by submitting to God.

So, I think it's important to highlight the fallacies of this way of thinking, and the biggest one, of course, is the all-or-nothing contrast that he presents. Said this with every chapter, every time he has an opposition — it's either this or it's this — he's radically simplifying what are actually complex notions, complex ideas, complex social realities. He is doing away with that complexity to try to present a simplified, all-or-nothing alternative. He does the same thing here, and it's pretty obvious.

It is simply not true to suggest that everyone who doesn't submit to his understanding of God — that everybody who doesn't appeal to God, or the people that don't believe in God, or whatever — it is simply not true to suggest that all of them define freedom or liberty in the self-serving terms that he suggests. It's just simply false. Lots of people — people of all different religious persuasions, and people of no religious persuasion, people with completely different value systems, people with different political and economic ideologies — they all exercise their freedom. And oftentimes, most of the time I would say, in the name of values or concepts or hopes or desires that go beyond their own benefits and interests, that go beyond their self-serving interests. In other words, I think that most people have a conception of liberty that does, in fact, imply more than just their own narrow self-gratification, and so forth.

And you don't have to go far to look for this, but I'll give an example. Still fairly recent for us, still ongoing for some of us — all those leftists, as he would say, who are exercising their constitutional liberties of protest and assembly to challenge the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies. Some of those people are doing that because they understand that to be a divine calling. There are lots of religious folks in that. There are lots of secularists doing that. There are lots of people on the hard left. There are lots of moderates. There are probably a few kind of traditional conservatives. But they're all out there doing that, and all of those people who are out protesting and doing that are out exercising liberty, taking advantage of liberty, exercising their freedoms in the name of other people, in the name of others — not in the names of themselves, not for their own self-interest, but for the cause and concern for others. Many times, others they will never meet in person, other people that they don't know.

The simple fact — and this is another sort of piece of the logically fallacious way that Hawley and the others think all the time — every time somebody makes an "always" statement: "This is what leftists are always like, this is what all the leftists are like," etc. If you find one counter example, you've proven them wrong. Now, somebody like Hawley, or you, or me, or whomever, we don't have to agree with what those people are doing. We don't have to agree with their politics. We don't have to agree with the ends that they're trying to bring about, to recognize that they are in fact exercising their liberties in the name of something that goes beyond their own personal self-interest.

It's simply a fallacy to suggest that the only people who exercise liberty in that way are card-carrying Christian nationalists. It's ridiculous, but it's common. Hawley and conservative Christians — and here I'm harking back on decades of experience in conservative Christianity, long before the MAGA movement, long before the contemporary articulation, the present articulation of Christian nationalism — this is a vision of reality that is common among conservative Christians: which is that everyone who doesn't share their views are ultimately nihilists.

I cannot tell you how many conversations I had when I was in that world of people who would say that everybody who wasn't a conservative Bible-believing Christian, as they understood it, was nihilistic and was selfish and acted only out of self interest, and so forth. And it's one of the things that I would look around and I'd be like, are you sure? Because, like, I don't agree with it, but that guy over there — he's like, he doesn't seem to act out of self-interest. Or maybe I don't agree with the politics of this person over there, but they're like sacrificing a lot for something that they seem to really believe in beyond themselves, and so forth.

But it's sort of a mantra among conservative Christians that everybody who doesn't believe what they believe has no meaning, has no purpose, doesn't act with a notion of anything that transcends themselves, and so forth. And it's an interesting question — we get into the why. Why do they think that? That's a whole other interesting question that maybe we can explore at some point. It's common, but it simply isn't true. Even if people within that community cannot imagine how somebody who doesn't have their convictions could possibly act out of conviction, it doesn't mean that people don't. It doesn't mean that everybody's a nihilist.

Okay, so it's a fallacy. It's simply not the way things are. But it's also, for Hawley and for the people who deploy it, a self-serving fallacy. Why? Because that becomes the reason that Josh Hawley or JD Vance or whoever else — it becomes their reason for arguing that everyone should accept their vision of society and the good life, and so on. Their argument is: if you don't accept our vision of society, of the good and the right and the true, and whatever, you're just nihilists. Those are your options. You have to accept our view. So it's a factual fallacy, but it is also self-serving.

And so, once again, as that illustration of the protesters shows — and we could multiply that illustration a thousand times with different issues — it just shows that reality is way more complex than Hawley wants us to think. Not everyone who isn't a Christian nationalist is a nihilist. There are options in between those. I would argue that most people exist on some continuum between nihilism and hardcore Christian nationalism. There's a lot of positions in between. I think there are very few people that I would qualify as a true nihilist, and because almost nobody is a true nihilist, it means the society doesn't break down into those sharp all-or-nothing oppositions that Hawley wants us to think that they do.

Okay, so that's the first part of this — that this conception of liberty that he has, it's a fallacy and it's self-serving. Here's the other thing that I think Hawley gets wrong when he talks about liberty, and I think this is — I'm getting at what I think is an intuition that lots of people have if we use words like liberty or freedom. Okay, those are complex topics, we can't do them justice here, but I think that what he misses is an intuition that most of us recognize.

So, here's what I would argue — this would be my argument: there is moral worth in doing what is right or good. And of course we can debate about what is the right, what is the good. But let's imagine for a minute that we have some sense of what is right, what is good, what we ought to be doing. Is there moral value in pursuing that? Of course there is.

But I would argue — and I think a lot of people would argue, and I think a lot of people have an intuition about this — that doing the right or the good has the greatest moral worth when we do it because it's right or good. When we do the right thing because it's the right thing, and we've decided to do the right thing. Rather than, for example, just because we'll get in trouble if we don't, or whatever. We have laws that protect us against various things. Most people would say a society is better if people are just decent and kind of do what the law says because it's a good thing to do, not just because they're afraid of getting in trouble if they don't do it.

I've got two kids. I know a lot of you listening have kids, or maybe other littles in your life. Maybe you remember this from your own childhood. I think most of us would agree that an element of maturing as a person in society is going from "well, I do this because my parents said so, or my teacher said so, or whatever" to "I do the things that I do because I think that they're the right things to do." That becomes my motivation.

Okay, here's what I mean, and here's why I'm bringing that up. Hawley wants to tell us that the exercise of liberty is either submission to an externally imposed good or self-indulgence. That's it. What he ignores is the possibility that doing the right or good thing has the greatest value when it is freely chosen. In other words, people have liberty — or should have, if we're talking about a social order — they should have liberty, which means that they are free to choose to do the right or the good thing. Now, the corollary of that is they're also free to do something else. They're free to act out of self-interest. They're free to just, I don't know, just be generally selfish assholes. Like whatever — they're free to do that. But that's a precondition, in my view, of having a society where people willfully and freely choose to do what is right. You need people who don't choose that. Hawley wants to ignore that.

He wants us to say everybody either chooses self-interest, or we need to impose an order upon them so that they do the right thing. And I'm saying it's more complicated than that. Lots of people who have liberty or freedom are doing everything they can to exercise those in ways that they think are good and right and that serve others. And I would argue that that is what makes doing the right thing, or the good thing, or serving others — that's what gives it the greatest value: when it is freely chosen, not when it is imposed by an external authority.

And that's significant for me, because for me, the notion that we're really free, that we're really exercising liberty, only when we submit to others — I think it's a standard authoritarian line. I do. And I don't care if it comes from theology, or if it's just, I don't know, a fascist leader somewhere saying, "I'm telling you what to do, and I'm going to march you down and put you in prison or execute you or exile you if you don't do it, but if you submit to my will, you're actually exercising freedom." I don't care if it comes from God or it comes from somebody else. I think it's a kind of authoritarian logic, and I think Hawley is exercising that — again, in a kinder, gentler way, super low key.

He's not one of those guys to be like, "I think people like Hitler and Mussolini might have had the right idea. I think Putin's pretty cool. I think people that are cracking down on freedom of speech and freedom of religion and trying to enforce the quote-unquote good society have it right." He's not going to say all of that. But the logic is there. The logic is there in his book. It's the same thing. It's an authoritarian logic that wants to tell us: when you don't have a choice about what you're going to do, that's when you're really free. Sorry, Josh. I agree that freedom entails a degree of choice, a degree of being able to have done something different, that the value of doing the right thing is that I could have chosen the wrong thing.

So, all of that — that's Hawley, that's liberty, that's freedom. What's the takeaway? The takeaway is: for him, you're only free when you submit to authority. And that's where and how he sneaks in his Christian nationalist vision. Because here's the key: he has this whole chapter about men and kingship, and I said earlier, the idea of kingship implies the idea of authority and ruling — I mean, that's what a king is. He's the highest authority, he's a ruler. And yet Hawley doesn't say that all men are called to rule. Now, he does say they're called to participate in popular sovereignty, but that sovereignty for him isn't really a sovereignty of the people. It's not the people who decide what to do as sovereign. What emerges as the will of the people doesn't actually come from the people, it doesn't have value because it's the will of the people for him. No, that popular sovereignty is actually in the service of God's design for society. The real sovereign is God, not the people. The real will that the people are called to live out is the will of God, not the will of the people.

And so, here's the question that comes up with that. If you say yes, everybody's supposed to participate in society and vote and be civically minded and all of that, civically engaged — as long as they're serving God's will and desires — here's the question: How do we know what that is? How do we know what God says or wants or wills or desires? How do we know what a quote-unquote godly society is? And those questions — answering those questions — those are where all the dynamics of how Hawley uses the Bible and the ways he talks about God come together in the service of Christian nationalism.

In this book, in this chapter, Hawley criticizes what he sees as the liberal vision of government by experts. He says those liberals and those Epicureans, they want a government by experts, they want to keep you, the regular person, out, and so on and so forth.

That's what he says. But here's what he doesn't come out and say: in his vision of American society, theocrats like him are the experts who are called to rule, not regular people. Regular people aren't called to rule. Regular people are called to self-mastery — that's their kingship. They master themselves. How? By bringing themselves into conformity to God's will. But who tells us what God's will is? Who tells us what it is that God wants? Who tells us what that society is? It's people like Josh Hawley. It's the theocrats who will tell us that. People like Josh Hawley, in the Christian nationalist vision, they are the rulers who speak for God.

So, for Hawley, it's men like him who will tell us exactly what a divinely approved social order is. It's not regular people — it's him, it's the theocrats. He is the one who will tell us, as he has throughout this book, what the Bible says. Not regular people reading the Bible, but Josh Hawley. And we've seen how selective and limited his Bible is. We've seen how he passes his interpretations off as being what the Bible says, and so forth. But he becomes the authority that tells us: this is what God wants, this is what God says. He's the one who can define God however he wants, because his concept of God is completely vacuous. We've talked about that a lot in this series. He appeals to God a lot, but his God is free-floating — God's not tied to anything distinctly Christian or even distinctly religious, which means he can fill that word "God" in any way that he wants.

And what's the end result of this? The end result is a social vision in which submission to God — supposedly submitting himself to God and to God's will — it's not submission to God or God's will. It is submission to Josh Hawley and Christian nationalists like him. It's submission to those who really put themselves in the position of authority as the spokespeople for God. We're not submitting to the Bible, we're not submitting to God — we're submitting to Josh Hawley or JD Vance or Pete Hegseth or whatever other Christian nationalist it is who claims the authority to speak for God. Or, quite frankly, within high control religion, the pastor of your church who arrogates that authority upon himself to be the spokesperson for God.

And I've talked about this before — I've talked a lot about how in high control religion, or conservative Christianity, or forms of Christian nationalism, people will talk a lot about the authority of God, but we never get to God. We only ever get to those human people who claim to speak for God — the mediators of God, the ones who put their own vision of society and their own will and their own authority and call it divine, because they're the ones who get to tell us what God is and what God demands, how we can know what God wants, who can speak for God, and so forth. It's always really about them. Which means the so-called submission to God — it's not submission to God. It's submission to Josh Hawley and the men like him.

That's the Christian nationalist vision, and that's exactly what Josh Hawley winds up advocating — again, in a kind of low-key, kinder, gentler, highly coded way. But it's what he puts forward in the final section of this chapter, which is called, appropriately, "Who is going to run the country?" His answer to that question is not actually all Americans. His answer to the question of who gets to run the country is not even all Christian Americans. His answer is ultimately all Christian Americans who accept his understanding of God's will — people who will acquiesce to Josh Hawley and the Christian nationalists like him, and what they tell us God wants, what they tell us a Christian society is, what they tell us the Bible demands. That's what a Christian America is: one where people submit to Josh Hawley and the theocrats. That's his vision.

So it comes through in this chapter. You've got all the — I talked about the therapeutic self-help dimensions of his chapter on kingship and the weird way he reads the Bible, all of that kind of stuff — but it all ultimately boils down to the Christian nationalist vision that finally slips in most clearly at the very tail end of the chapter. Kinder, gentler, understated, very much on the DL, but still there nonetheless.

So, as it turns out, if we're talking about Christian nationalism, Hawley's book is sneaky throughout the book. He strikes this tone, this kinder, gentler vision. But it's a kinder, gentler vision.

It's still a vision of patriarchy and misogyny and transphobia and Christian nationalism. It's still that vision — kinder, gentler, nicely packaged, not so shrill. He's got his folksy stories and so forth, but they all ultimately come down in the same place. His book is Christian nationalism on the DL. That's what it is. But when we cut through all the smoke and mirrors, when we look behind the curtain and see who's pulling the levers and the strings, we see who Josh Hawley really is, and we see another articulation of contemporary Christian nationalism. That's all it is.

Okay, and with that, we are almost done with Josh. I know there are people who are like, "Oh my god, Josh Hawley, I'm sick of you. Can we be done?" We're almost done. But he has a last word. He has an epilogue in his book. It's not enough to do everything he's done — he has an epilogue. And I've been like, "Do I talk about the epilogue? Do I not?" Here, folks, is my confession: I'm not great at letting people have the last word. People who know me know this. I've looked at parts of his epilogue — I can't, I can't just go and be like, yeah, Josh Hawley gets the last word. We're going to have one more episode on Josh Hawley, and then I promise we'll be done — until and unless he decides to, you know, come on and talk with me. I'm open for that. I haven't heard from his people, but you know, anytime they could reach out and say he wants to chitchat, I'm open to doing that.

We're going to do that. We're going to look at what his last word is, his kind of — if you want to stick with a kind of legal metaphor, Josh Hawley is an attorney, among other things — it's his kind of closing argument. We're going to take one last look at that, and then we will be done with Josh Hawley. We will move on to questions you weren't supposed to ask in church. I'm looking forward to those. Every time I do this series, a bunch of those questions that I was not allowed to ask in church come back into my mind.

So next episode will conclude with Josh Hawley. We'll move on from there. I want to say again, thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us in all the ways you do. Talked about this in the weekly roundup, but please keep listening. We've got new things coming, new ideas, some new directions that we want to go, and we're going to be asking you for your support to help do those things. So, thank you for the support you've given us. Keep your eyes and ears out for that. Office hours this week, all the things that we do coming up in the coming week as well. And, as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again. Thank you so much.