Sen. Josh Hawley Promotes 'Christian Nationalism' and Replacement Theory at Conference
Sen. Josh Hawley Promotes 'Christian Nationalism' and Replacement Theory at Conference
Transcript
00:00Thank you very much. Thank you, Anna, for that kind introduction.
00:06Thanks to all of you for having me. My goodness, this conference gets bigger and bigger every year.
00:11Yoram, congratulations. It's fantastic to see so many folks.
00:14I'm actually just back in D.C. today myself.
00:18You may know that the Senate has been out of session since June 20th,
00:23which means that there have been no votes,
00:26no executive or official functions, no official meetings of any kind for two whole weeks,
00:32or as President Biden calls it, a debate prep.
00:37Which I feel like went really well, right?
00:39I mean, things seem to be just going great at the White House.
00:41They're in such a happy mood over there. It's really something to see.
00:44I noticed that after the debate, I read, maybe you read this,
00:47I read that the family is now going to take greater prominence in doing the staffing, the Biden family,
00:52which I have to say I think is a fantastic idea.
00:55I mean, really, you think about it, Hunter Biden alone has such incredible expertise.
01:00He could be the drug czar.
01:03He is an expert on human trafficking and prostitution,
01:08and also on foreign relations in the biblical sense.
01:14I do want to thank, on a somewhat more serious note,
01:26I do want to thank Yoram again for starting this fantastic, fantastic event
01:31and for having me every year.
01:33Thanks to Chris DeMuth, thanks to Rofi Ives, to Rachel Bovard, to Sohrab Sharma,
01:38and everybody who has worked to make this already such a successful event.
01:42It really is a highlight for me. I look forward to it, and it's such an honor to be invited.
01:47Would you join me in giving all of those folks and everybody else who has worked on this event a round of applause?
01:52I want to talk to you tonight about the future,
02:03about the future of the conservative movement, and about the future of the country.
02:09Of course, every future is rooted in some earlier past,
02:14or as Seneca supposedly said, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
02:19So let me begin in the year of our Lord, 410, which was the year of an end.
02:26That was the year, you might recall, that the city once thought eternal, immutable, unconquerable,
02:34that capital of the ancient world, Rome, finally vowed to be invading Visigoths.
02:40And with that fell stroke, the age of the empire and the pagan world of antiquity came to a close.
02:47Yet in that end for Rome was a beginning indeed, our beginning, the beginning of the West.
02:54For even as Rome lay shattered and smoldering a thousand miles away across the Tyrrhenian Sea,
03:00the Christian bishop of Hippo, a man named Augustine, took up his pen to describe a new age.
03:07His vision would inspire the West for millennia to come and help shape the destiny of this country.
03:14He called his work, his masterpiece, The City of God.
03:18Augustine's first ambition in that manuscript was to defend Christians from blame for Rome's fall.
03:25Some said that the Christian religion, with its new virtues like humility and service,
03:29with its glorification of common things like marriage and labor,
03:34with its praise for the poor in spirit, the common people, had made the empire soft,
03:40left it vulnerable to its enemies.
03:43Now Augustine knew that just the opposite was true.
03:46The Christian religion was the only vital force left in Rome at the time of its collapse.
03:50And now Augustine imagined that religion rising from the ruins of the ancient world to forge a new one,
03:58a new and better civilization.
04:01And what would be the secret to this new order?
04:05Love.
04:07Love was a great word for Augustine.
04:10It contained the whole of his political science.
04:12Every person, he said, is defined by what he loves.
04:17Every society is driven by what it loves.
04:20A nation is, in fact, nothing other than, to quote Augustine,
04:24a multitude of rational creatures associated in a common agreement as to the things which they love.
04:32The trouble with Rome was they loved the wrong things.
04:35And as its affections became corrupted, the Roman Republic fell into disrepair.
04:40Rome began by loving glory and practicing self-sacrifice.
04:45They ended by loving pleasure and practicing every form of self-indulgence.
04:49And so Rome rotted from its core.
04:52But amid the Roman wreckage, Augustine envisaged a new civilization animated by better affections.
04:58Not the old Roman lusts for glory and honor, but the sturdier, stronger loves of the Bible.
05:06The love of wife and children.
05:08The love of labor, neighbor, and home.
05:11The love of God.
05:14And while Augustine said that all nations are constituted by what they love,
05:18his philosophizing actually described a new idea of the nation completely unknown to the ancient world.
05:26A new kind of nationalism, if you like.
05:29A Christian nationalism.
05:32Organized around Christian ideals.
05:35A nationalism driven not by conquest, but by common purpose.
05:41Animated not by fear, but by common love.
05:45A nation made not for the rich or for the strong, but for the poor in spirit, for the common man.
05:51And his dream became our reality.
05:55A thousand years after Augustine wrote, some 20,000 practicing Augustinians made their way to these shores
06:02to found a society here on his principles.
06:06History knows them as the Pyrrhians.
06:08Inspired by the city of God, they founded the city on a hill.
06:12We are a nation forged from Augustine's vision.
06:17A nation defined by the dignity of the common man as given to us in the Christian religion.
06:22A nation held together by the homely affections articulated in the Christian faith.
06:27Love for God, love for family, love for neighbor, home, and country.
06:31And I'm sure some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation.
06:38And so I am.
06:46And some will say that I am advocating Christian nationalism.
06:51And so I do.
06:56My question is, is there any other kind worth having?
07:00The nationalism of ancient Rome led to bloodthirst and conquest.
07:05The old pagan tribalisms led to ethnic hatred.
07:09The empires of the East crushed the individual.
07:12And the blood and soil nativism of Europe in the last two centuries led to savagery and genocide.
07:18By contrast, Augustine's Christian nationalism has been the boast of the West.
07:24It has been our moral center.
07:26And it has supplied our most cherished ideals.
07:29Just think, those stern Puritans, our Augustinian forebearers,
07:34gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty.
07:40Because of our Christian and biblical heritage, we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience.
07:47Because of our Christian tradition, we welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds
07:52to a nation constituted by common loves.
07:55The truth is, Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy.
08:00Christian nationalism founded American democracy.
08:07And I just say this, it is the best form of democracy yet devised.
08:12It is the most just, the most free, the most humane, and the most praiseworthy.
08:17And my claim to you tonight is that we must recover the principles of our Christian political tradition now
08:23for the sake of our future.
08:25This is true whether you are a Christian or not, whether you are a person of a different faith, or none at all.
08:31The Christian political tradition is our political tradition.
08:35It is the American political tradition.
08:37It is the greatest source of energy and ideas in our politics, and always has been.
08:42It has inspired conservatives and liberals and reformers and activists and moralists and trade unionists down our history.
08:50And we need to hear from this grand tradition again.
08:53For the common loves that sustain our nation are framed.
08:58And as they do, the nation itself risks coming apart.
09:03You know the litany of our ills as well as I do. You can read the signs of our times.
09:08Our streets are not safe, not least because our borders stand starkly and utterly open.
09:14And millions and millions of illegal migrants pour into this country who have no interest in our common heritage
09:20and no commitment to our common ideals.
09:23Good, stable work is in too short supply.
09:27Our economy has entered a new and decadent gilded age where working class jobs disappear
09:32and working wages erode and working families and neighborhoods fall apart
09:37while the denizens of the upper class live a cloistered life behind gates and private security
09:42and woke CEOs make in, rake in millions of dollars in pay.
09:46Meanwhile, religion is hounded from the public square and fanatics take to our campus quadrangles
09:52to chant death to Israel precisely because they despise the biblical tradition that links the nation of Israel to the American Republic.
10:02And at back of each of these trends, and all of them,
10:06at back of the chaos and coming apart, is an assault on our common loves.
10:11The affections that come to us from our biblical inheritance.
10:14God, work, neighborhood, home.
10:19The great affections of the West.
10:22They are dissolving before our eyes.
10:25And why? Well, not by happenstance.
10:28The modern left wants to destroy our common loves and replace them with others.
10:33To destroy our common bonds and replace them with another faith.
10:37To dissolve the nation and to remake it in their image.
10:41This has been their project for 50 years and more.
10:44But I submit to you, it is the right that is failing this country more acutely.
10:49The left's agenda we know. The left's threat we expect.
10:53Now it is conservatives who should be defending this nation.
10:56Who should be defending what makes us a nation.
11:00But instead...
11:04Instead, in this moment of crisis, they're busy tending the dying embers of neoliberalism.
11:10They're reading their copies of John Stuart Mill and Ayn Rand.
11:15They're still talking about fusionism and its three-legged stool.
11:20For conservatives, for the country, that will no longer do.
11:26In this hour of chaos and crisis, conservatives' only hope, and the hope of this nation,
11:32is to recover the Christian tradition on which this nation subsists.
11:36Our only hope is to renew our common loves.
11:39Now we need not the ideology of Rand or Mill or Milton Friedman, but the insight of Augustine.
11:46For the future, to save this country, this must be our mission.
11:51To defend the common loves that unite the country.
11:54Defend the loves that make us a country.
11:57Defend the common man's work, the common man's home, the common man's religion.
12:02Now let me just say this. I fear that my fellow Republicans labor under a certain misunderstanding.
12:09The left's strategy, their overriding aim, is not simply to slow our economy with more regulations.
12:17It is not merely to grow a big government bigger. Concentration is only part of their program.
12:23The left's primary purpose is to attack our spiritual unity, our common loves.
12:28They want to destroy the affections that link us one to another and substitute a set of altogether different ideals.
12:35The left preaches its own gospel, a creed of intersectionality, of deliverance from tradition,
12:42from family, from biological sex, and of course from God.
12:46They regard the faith of our fathers as a fetter to be broken.
12:49They deem our common moral inheritance as cause for repentance.
12:53Instead of Christmas, they want Pride Month. Instead of prayer in schools, they venerate the trans flag.
12:59Diversity, equity, and inclusion are their watchwords, their new Holy Trinity.
13:04And they expect their preachments to be obeyed.
13:08They may speak of tolerance, but they practice fundamentalism.
13:12Those who resist are called deplorable.
13:16Those who question are labeled threats to democracy.
13:19And this is why progressives, I submit to you, have such little patience these days for working people.
13:25They're too attached to the old ways, to the old faith of God and family, home and nation.
13:33Now this is the left's true replacement theory, their true replacement agenda,
13:39to replace the Christian ideals of which this nation was founded,
13:43and to silence those Americans who dare still stand by them.
13:47Sadly, the Republican Party of the last 30 years has been in no position to resist the onslaught.
13:55Instead of defending the affections that bind us one to another,
13:58Republicans of the Bush-Romney era have championed libertarian economics and corporate concerns.
14:05Their fusionist faith has become one note.
14:09Money first, people last.
14:12In the name of the market, these Republicans cheerleaded for corporate tax cuts
14:17and low barriers for corporate trade,
14:19and watched those same corporations ship American jobs overseas and use the profits to hire DEI experts.
14:25In the name of capitalism, these Republicans sang the praises of global integration
14:31while Wall Street bet against American industry and bought up single-family homes
14:36so that after the banks took the working man's job, he wouldn't be able to afford a house for his family to live in.
14:43And then Wall Street crashed that global economy multiple times, and the housing market,
14:49and these same Republicans kept right on rhapsodizing and subsidizing.
14:54It was all just too big to fail.
14:57These Republicans forget that economics is first and last about people and the things they love.
15:05About providing for family, about personal independence, about having a place to call home,
15:11and a job that gives you pride.
15:13You could put it like this.
15:15The free market is valuable exactly to the degree it sustains the things we love together.
15:20Otherwise, it's just cold profit.
15:22And somewhere along the line, Republicans fell in love with profit at any price.
15:27And they seem almost embarrassed that their most committed and reliable voters are people of faith.
15:34Let's be honest.
15:35In that three-legged stool of yesteryear with the religious conservatives, national security hawks, libertarians,
15:40it was always the religious people who supplied the votes.
15:43And it was our shared religious tradition that supplied conservatives most compelling ideas,
15:49like constitutional government, or individual liberty, or the rights of workers.
15:54Still today, church-going Americans who are married and raising children,
15:58whether white or Hispanic or black or Asian or whatever, are the backbone of the Republican Party.
16:03If Republicans are going to have a future, that future lies with them.
16:07And these are exactly the people the party takes most for granted and serves least well.
16:13Give the left this, at least they know people make politics.
16:17I mean, they reward their people.
16:19Witness the trans flag on every federal building and a sluice of federal money flowing to every climate change boondoggle you can think of.
16:27But Republicans?
16:29Republicans give their voters this Hobson's choice between the high-tax, high-regulation globalism of the left
16:36or the slightly lower-tax, lower-regulation globalism of the right.
16:42Between the aggressive social liberalism of the left or the accommodating social liberalism of the right.
16:49Even as we speak, Republicans are threatening to drop from their platform the party's long-time commitments to life and marriage.
16:57And then they wonder why they have managed to win the popular vote only twice in the last nine presidential elections.
17:05Republicans need a place to stand.
17:08They need a future to offer the country.
17:10And for conservatives who want to save this republic, there's only one place worth standing and there's only one vision worth propounding.
17:16It is the Christian tradition of nationalism that unites this country.
17:27Work, family, God.
17:30These are the great loves that define America.
17:33And these are the ideals the Republican Party must now defend.
17:37Republicans can start by defending the common man's work.
17:40In the choice between capital and labor, between money and people,
17:45it's time for Republicans to get back to their roots and start prioritizing the working man.
17:50The recent Republican Party, the 1990s party, privileged the money crowd in just about every way possible.
17:57In policy, in the tax code, in praise.
18:01Think of all that worshipful talk about corporate tax cuts.
18:05Think of all that rhetoric about the efficient allocation of resources, which really just means profits for Wall Street.
18:12Workers, meanwhile, were left to fend for themselves.
18:15To watch their factories shut down, to watch their wages flatline, to watch their mortgages soar and their home values plunge.
18:22To explain to their children why they had to move out of the home they grew up in.
18:26Why they couldn't go to the doctor because daddy couldn't find work.
18:29And to all of this, Republicans said, it's the nature of things.
18:35I would simply point out, that has not been the nationalist or Christian tradition of this country.
18:40Abraham Lincoln said it best when he said, capital is only the fruit of labor.
18:46Labor is superior to capital and deserves much the higher consideration.
18:50Theodore Roosevelt spoke for the same tradition when he said, I'm for business, yes,
18:55but I am for manhood first and business as an adjunct to manhood.
19:00That's the spirit we need.
19:02The Republican Party of tomorrow, a party that can unite the nation, must put people before money.
19:07And the way to do that is to prioritize the interests of the working person.
19:11The greatest economic challenge of our time is not the debt or the deficit or even the value of the dollar.
19:17It is the astounding number of able-bodied men who are without good work.
19:21To get them that work, we need policy change.
19:25Look, we're about to have a big debate about extending tax cuts.
19:31Maybe we should start with this question.
19:33Why should labor ever be taxed more than capital?
19:37They should not be.
19:39Why should families get less tax relief than corporations?
19:44Families should always be first.
19:46And we haven't heard the word usury in a few centuries,
19:49but it certainly occupied a lot of Christian thinkers over the years and it should occupy us again today.
19:54There is no reason why credit card companies or the banks behind them should be charging working people 30 and 40 percent interest.
20:09No profit margin in the world justifies that kind of extortion.
20:13No amount of money excuses profiting off other people's pain.
20:17We ought to cap credit card interest rates by law.
20:20And it's time Republicans embrace unions.
20:23The trade unions of the working man are absolutely vital to the future of the working man in this country.
20:29I'm not talking about public sector unions.
20:32I mean the unions that go to bat for the working guy and his family.
20:36I've been on the picket line with the Teamsters.
20:38I voted to help them unionize Amazon.
20:41I supported the railway strike and the autoworker strike and I am proud of it.
20:45And when it comes to woke corporations, I'll just say this.
20:49If you want to change the priorities of corporate America, make the suits in the C-suite responsible again to an American workforce.
20:56If you prioritize labor, you will change the priorities of capital.
21:07But maybe one reason why Republicans in recent years have not put the working man first is
21:12they haven't been willing to put the working man's family first.
21:17A party of a Christian nation has to defend the family.
21:20Republicans have talked about the family, I'll give you that.
21:23There's been talk aplenty.
21:25But Bush-type Republicans have rarely paused to ask themselves why so few of their countrymen are actually forming families.
21:34You know, happy and hopeful people have children.
21:37Yet fewer and fewer Americans do.
21:40Why is that?
21:42Could it be that the economy Republicans have championed,
21:45the globalist, corporatist economy they helped create, is actually bad for the family?
21:51Time was a working man could support his family, a wife and children, by the work of his own hands.
21:57You and I both know those days are long gone.
22:00These days, Americans toil away in dead-end jobs in cubicles servicing the global corporations
22:05while paying outrageous sums for housing and health care.
22:09They don't have families because they can't afford to have the families they want.
22:14No wonder they're anxious. No wonder they're depressed.
22:17And those that do have children can't afford to be all of them.
22:21Today, two parents have to work to make the kind of money with the kind of purchasing power that one wage got you 50 years ago.
22:29So government daycare now shapes our children's worldview.
22:33Screens now teach our children self-worth or self-criticism.
22:38The media and advertising industry shape their sense of right and wrong.
22:43You want to put family first? Make it easy to have children.
22:47And put mom and dad back in the home.
22:49Make it the policy of this country to get American workers a family wage.
22:54One that a man can support his family on.
22:57The kind of wage that allows a married couple to raise their children as they see fit.
23:08Because the truest measure of American strength is the flourishing of American home and family.
23:14And conservatives must defend the common man's religion.
23:18Of all the affections that bind together a society, none is more powerful than religious affection.
23:25A shared vision of transcendent truth.
23:28Now when our talking heads deign to acknowledge religion at all,
23:32what they usually say is religious liberty is what is most valuable.
23:37Religious liberty unites Americans.
23:39That's not strictly speaking true.
23:42Religion unites Americans.
23:44Which is why the liberty to practice it is so important.
23:47Every great civilization has sprung from a great religion.
23:51And ours is no different.
23:53Despite experts telling Americans for decades that religion divides them,
23:57that religion destroys their civil peace, that religion is out of bounds,
24:00most Americans share broad and basic religious convictions.
24:05Theistic, biblical, Christian.
24:08Our national faith is right there in the Declaration of Independence.
24:12All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights.
24:18Our national faith is there on our currency.
24:21In God we trust.
24:23President Eisenhower summed it up well when he said about that motto back in 1954,
24:29Here is the land of liberty and the land that lives in respect of the almighty's mercy to us.
24:35Now the elite consensus on religion is exactly wrong.
24:39Religion is one of the great unifiers of American life.
24:42One of the great common affections.
24:44Working people believe in God.
24:46They read the Bible.
24:47They go to church.
24:48Some often.
24:49Some not.
24:50But they consider themselves in all events members of a Christian nation.
24:53And they understand this fundamental truth.
24:56Their rights come from God, not from government.
24:59The 70 year push to eliminate every vestige of religious observance from our public life
25:05is precisely opposite what the nation needs.
25:08We need more civil religion, not less.
25:11We need open acknowledgment of the religious faith
25:14and the religious heritage that binds Americans one to another.
25:18The campaign to erase America's religion from the public square
25:22is really just class warfare by other means.
25:25It's the elite versus the common man.
25:27It's the atheistic money class versus America's working people.
25:31And by the way, it's not really about eliminating religion.
25:35It's about replacing one religion with another.
25:38Every nation observes a civil religion.
25:41Every nation is a spiritual unity.
25:43The left wants religion.
25:45They want the religion of the pride flag.
25:48We want the religion of the Bible.
25:51So I have a suggestion.
25:53Small suggestion.
25:54Why don't we take down the trans flag from all of the federal buildings over which it's flagged
26:00around the world
26:05and instead inscribe on every building owned or operated by the federal government
26:10our national motto, In God We Trust.
26:18Symbols matter. Symbols matter.
26:21Most Americans, most everyday Americans, most working Americans find solidarity in faith.
26:26They believe that God has blessed America.
26:28They believe God has a purpose for America.
26:30And they want to be part of it.
26:32And that conviction is what gives them the sense that, as Burke wrote,
26:36the nation is a partnership between those who are living,
26:40those who are dead,
26:42and those who are yet to be born.
26:44Decades of misguided court rulings and elite propaganda
26:48have not erased Americans' religious convictions.
26:50Not yet.
26:51And that's a prime reason we still have a nation.
26:53Conservatives must defend our national religion and its role in our national life.
26:58They must defend this most fundamental and ancient of moral bonds.
27:03As Macaulay put it,
27:05the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our God.
27:08Work, home, God.
27:13These are the things we love together.
27:16That sustain our common life together.
27:18That make us a nation.
27:20And provide the ground of our unity.
27:22And this is what Christian nationalism means in the truest and deepest sense.
27:27Not every citizen of America is a Christian, obviously.
27:30Never has been, never will be.
27:32But every citizen is heir to the liberties, to the justice, to the common purpose
27:38our biblical and Christian tradition gives us.
27:41That tradition is why we believe in free speech.
27:43It's why we believe in freedom of conscience.
27:45It is why we deplore the virulent anti-Semitism
27:48on display in our supposedly elite institutions and campuses.
27:52Now, I do notice that some who call themselves Christian nationalists
27:57offer different counsel.
27:59A counsel of despair.
28:01There's a certain end of days flavor about some of their rhetoric.
28:05All is lost, they say.
28:08America cannot be saved or is not worth saving.
28:12And from that place of fear, they recommend fearful policies.
28:16An established church, ethnocentrism, a Protestant Franco.
28:22That is not the way.
28:24That is not our tradition.
28:26That is not what we believe.
28:27Let us not be controlled by fear.
28:29Let us not return to the harsh ethnic nationalism of the ancient world
28:33or to the authoritarian ideology of blood and soil.
28:37That's not what the Christian legacy has left us.
28:39Now, in this land, we defend the liberty of all.
28:41In this nation, we practice self-government of the people.
28:44Let us return instead to what joins us in common communion.
28:49The dignity of labor.
28:51The sanctity of the home.
28:53The love of family and of God.
28:55That's our civilization.
28:57That's America.
29:03And I would just say that those great loves in which our nation is founded
29:06have not failed.
29:08They are as compelling today as they were when Augustine wrote about them.
29:12They are as vibrant now as when the Puritans first set sail for these shores.
29:17We need only recommit ourselves to defending them,
29:21to strengthening them,
29:23to renewing our devotion.
29:25And when we do, we will save the nation.
29:28Thank you for having me.
29:30God bless you all.
29:31Thank you.