Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
Josh Hawley says out loud what other politicians treat as an accusation: he is a Christian nationalist. He raised his fist to the January 6 mob on his way into the Capitol. His wife helped end Roe v. Wade. The Senate is where he keeps his pulpit.
Key Takeaways
- Hawley embraced the Christian nationalist label in July 2024. He wants “In God We Trust” on every federal building in place of the “trans flag,” and in 2025 he introduced a bill to require it.
- He was the first senator to announce he would challenge the 2020 electoral count. On January 6, he saluted the crowd with a raised fist, then fled on camera when the mob broke in. His campaign sold the salute on $20 coffee mugs.
- His wife, Erin Hawley, helped Mississippi with the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and argued the Supreme Court challenge to the abortion pill. She wanted a federal appeals seat; her husband, who helps vet judicial nominees, says he will not recuse himself if her turn comes.
- He preaches revival at Christian campuses and introduced a national ban on the abortion drug mifepristone, promoting the ban from a seminary lectern, and calling for “a Christian economy.”
The senior senator from Missouri had reached the line his audience would remember. “Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation,” Josh Hawley told the gala dinner of the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Washington on July 8, 2024 — the annual gathering where the transnational far right meets. “And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having?” The ballroom applauded.
Hawley is 46. He was the nation’s youngest state attorney general when he won a U.S. Senate seat in 2018. What separates him from so many of his colleagues is that he answers to the Christian nationalist name.
When he decided this year that the abortion pill should be banned nationwide, he pitched the bill from the lectern of a Baptist seminary. Apart from pulpits, Hawley also carries his Christian nationalism into rooms with subpoena power. He holds a seat on the Judiciary Committee and a vote on every federal judge in the country. In 2025, he named an advisory committee to help him vet nominees.
Preacher of Righteousness
Hawley grew up the son of a bank executive in Lexington, Missouri, a town of about 4,700. At 14, he was writing columns for his hometown paper about the leader America needed: “a man who takes the ridicule but doesn’t back off.” At the time he thought that man was Dan Quayle.
Hawley studied history at Stanford — writing columns for the Stanford Review, the conservative student paper Peter Thiel founded — and law at Yale. After clerkships, the second for Chief Justice John Roberts, he litigated for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty from 2011 to 2015 and worked on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the decision that allowed religious business owners to refuse contraceptive coverage for their employees. His campaign bio calls him one of the lead attorneys on the case; The New Republic sized it up as a “relatively modest role,” but it was enough to make him a celebrity on Missouri’s religious-liberty circuit.
By then he had published a biography of Theodore Roosevelt with Yale University Press, subtitled Preacher of Righteousness. He ran for attorney general in 2016 as an outsider, backed by the old-guard Missouri Republican establishment, and left for the Senate two years into the term.
Thiel bet on him early. The billionaire, an early Facebook investor, gave $300,000 to the attorney general campaign, then, on November 9, 2017 — a month after Hawley announced for the Senate — maxed out donations on that race, too.
Four days after announcing his run for Senate, Hawley’s office opened its antitrust investigation of Google, a company Thiel had publicly called a monopoly. The New Republic, profiling the freshman senator in 2019, called Thiel “an unlikely patron” of his political career. Hawley kept at it, attaching his name to five Big Tech bills within six months and telling Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg in a letter that the burden of protecting Americans from “forces parasitic on our national life” fell to him.
Six months after his swearing-in in D.C., on July 16, 2019, he keynoted the inaugural NatCon, held that summer in Washington, and identified an enemy: “a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.”
Show-Me Strong
Hawley announced on December 30, 2020, that he would object to certifying Joe Biden’s victory — before any other senator — on the theory that Pennsylvania’s mail-ballot expansion violated the state’s own Constitution.
The announcement followed him home. On the evening of January 4, demonstrators from a group called ShutdownDC gathered outside his $1.3 million house in Vienna, Virginia, where the Hawleys had moved after selling their Missouri home; his voting address pointed to his sister’s house in Ozark, Missouri. Erin Hawley was inside with the couple’s newborn daughter while the senator was in Missouri with their two sons. “Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter,” he tweeted. “They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door.” The group livestreamed all 30 minutes of it. There were candles. There was sidewalk chalk. And on the way out, by their own account, a few protesters walked a copy of the Constitution up to his door and left it there. Vienna police counted 10 to 20 people and called the gathering peaceful.
At 12:35 p.m. on January 6, 2021, on his way into the joint session, Hawley crossed the Capitol’s East Front and raised a fist to the crowd massing at the security gates. Francis Chung, a photographer for E&E News, caught the moment — fist high, officers and barricades between the senator and the people he was saluting — and later described the exchange: fist pumps, waves, thumbs up, “shows of solidarity and support,” with the crowd more animated than Chung had seen it all morning. A Capitol Police officer told House investigators the gesture “riled up the crowd” and “bothered her greatly” because he made it from that protected spot. The barriers on the east side fell soon after. The crowd he saluted went through them.
Security cameras caught him fleeing a few hours later, as the mob came inside — footage the public would not see for a year and a half.
On the night of January 6, with the building cleared, Hawley stood firm in his loyalty to Trump, and objected to Pennsylvania’s electors anyway.
Simon & Schuster canceled his book contract the next day, citing the “disturbing, deadly insurrection” and “his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.” Hawley promised the publisher, “We’ll see you in court,” and took The Tyranny of Big Tech to the conservative house Regnery instead.
The Hawley insurrectionist fist became merchandise in February 2022, when his campaign store put the salute on a $20 mug over the slogan “Show-Me Strong!” A fundraising email pitched it as “the perfect way to enjoy Coffee, Tea, or Liberal Tears!” and Hawley assured HuffPost the merchandise celebrated no riot. The image on it is Chung’s photograph, which belongs to Politico. The company’s lawyers sent the campaign a cease-and-desist that March. The campaign dismissed it and kept selling the mug.
The tape aired on July 21, 2022, at a prime-time hearing of the House January 6 committee. Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA) put the raised fist photograph on the screens, read the officer’s account into the record, and said Hawley had fled when that crowd stormed the building. “See for yourself.” The footage ran about three seconds — Hawley at a gangly gallop through a Capitol hallway, past at least four officers — and the committee played it again in slow motion. The room laughed out loud, an audience that had included police officers and their families all summer. By morning the internet had set the clip to the Chariots of Fire soundtrack and the theme from Benny Hill.
The Label
Hawley was writing the theology long before he claimed the term. In a 2019 essay for Christianity Today, he blamed the drift of the modern West on Pelagius, a monk condemned in the fifth century for heresy for emphasizing free will. He returned to the theme at NatCon’s Miami gathering on September 12, 2022: “Without the Bible, there is no modernity. Without the Bible, there is no America,” he said.
On the Fourth of July, 2023, Hawley tweeted a quote he attributed to Patrick Henry — the nation was founded “not by religionists, but by Christians,” on “the Gospel of Jesus Christ” — in a post viewed nearly two million times. Henry never said it. Readers appended a correction to his post, tracing the line to a 1956 article about Henry in The Virginian — a segregationist magazine. Eleven days earlier, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference, he had told the activists that Christianity “formed the soul of this country” and that “the time for Christians to rise is now.”
Kings
Hawley staked out the masculinity front at NatCon’s Orlando gathering on October 31, 2021, warning of a Left campaign to give America “a world beyond men.” The Left, he said, was out to define traditional masculinity as toxic. “They want to define the traditional masculine virtues — things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness — as a danger to society.” He told Axios afterward that masculinity would be his signature political issue.
The book followed. Hawley published Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs in 2023. “No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood,” he writes in it. Its second half walks a man through six biblical offices, a chapter apiece — husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, and, at the summit, king.
Hawley works the men’s-conference circuit, too. He attended the Stronger Men’s Conference at Missouri’s James River Church in 2022, an arena weekend that celebrates monster trucks and professional bull riding. Hawley returned as keynote speaker in April 2023, clad in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, telling the men what it takes to be a “mighty man of valor.”
Co-Counsel
Hawley’s wife, Erin Morrow Hawley, comes from a New Mexican ranching family and earned her first degree in animal science at Texas A&M. Yale Law School came next, then Chief Justice Roberts’ chambers, where she met her husband. Her résumé ran conventional for years — appellate work at Kirkland & Ellis and the boutique Bancroft, counsel to an attorney general of the United States, a law professorship at the University of Missouri, a devotional book about motherhood called Living Beloved. The conventional part ended in 2021, when she joined Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). She rose there to senior counsel and vice president, with the Center for Life and Regulatory Practice under her. ADF’s tax filing for the year ending June 2024 put her pay at $272,673, plus $10,890 in other compensation.
On ADF’s behalf, she helped Mississippi draft the merits and reply briefs in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that ended Roe v. Wade. “The Supreme Court has taken the shackles of Roe off of states,” she said when the decision came down. Nineteen days later she testified before the House Oversight Committee on the ruling’s impact. Roe, her written testimony said, had cost more than 60 million unborn lives; Dobbs gave America the opportunity to “reaffirm motherhood, and in doing so, truly empower women.”
She took the Supreme Court lectern herself on the morning of March 26, 2024, arguing FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine as lead counsel — ADF’s bid to end mail-order access to the abortion pill mifepristone. Her husband watched from six rows back, a son on either side of him, and walked the boys out the moment she finished — before the government’s lawyer rose for rebuttal. That June the justices threw the case out, 9-0. Her clients had no legal standing to sue.
She helped win 303 Creative v. Elenis, the ruling that let a Christian web designer refuse to design same-sex wedding websites and carved out a First Amendment exception in anti-discrimination law. In Moyle v. United States, she advanced Idaho’s argument that federal emergency-room law does not oblige hospitals to end a pregnancy, even for a woman in medical crisis.
She now teaches at Regent University, the law school Pat Robertson built. And her husband’s mifepristone bill hopes to deliver by statute what the nine justices declined to deliver by ruling. One Hawley writes the briefs; the other votes on the judges who read them.
A seat opened in October 2025, when a judge on the Eighth Circuit — the appeals court that hears Missouri’s cases — announced he would step back to senior status. Erin Hawley wanted it. She conveyed her interest through intermediaries with White House contacts, Bloomberg Law reported that November. Nominations to that bench run through the Senate Judiciary Committee, where her husband sits. Asked whether he would step aside if her nomination came before it, he said he would not recuse himself.
The seat went to the president’s own lawyer. In February 2026, Trump nominated Justin Smith, who was defending Trump personally in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case. Smith stayed on that case after the nomination went in. The Senate confirmed him on June 15, 48-43. The same month Trump nominated Smith, Erin Hawley made her own move, leaving her ADF post to chair the Supreme Court and appellate practice at Lex Politica, a Washington firm built in 2025 by the former chief lawyer of Elon Musk’s America PAC, to take the conservative cases it says Big Law won’t — with Erin keeping an of-counsel line to ADF.
That’s Where It Belongs
In June 2024, with Missourians petitioning to put abortion rights on the ballot, Hawley told PBS News he was “pro-life,” favored exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother — and that the question belonged with voters. “I just think voters deserve to be able to debate this among themselves, talk it out and vote on it and have control of the issue,” he said. “That’s where it belongs.”
He campaigned against the measure anyway. At a church conference in Ozark that September, he attacked Amendment 3 by tying it to gender surgeries for minors — care Missouri had already restricted in 2023. The vote came on November 5, 2024. Amendment 3 took 52 percent, put abortion rights in the state Constitution, and killed the ban that had taken effect the day Dobbs came down. Hawley was on the same ballot, and won.
In December 2025, he and Erin launched the Love Life Initiative — Axios called it a dark money group, free under the law to keep its donors unnamed — to fight abortion-rights measures in other states and on Missouri’s next ballot. The group says it will buy national advertising promoting the “sanctity of life,” push ballot referendums, and work against statehouse bills that expand access. The Hawleys describe a “burning desire” to win back the public “argument on abortion.”
Shoshanna Ehrlich, a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston, writing in Ms., read the couple as fronting different wings of the same movement. Erin Hawley had told the House Oversight Committee that women “should never be prosecuted for having an abortion.” Her husband greeted Dobbs as an abolitionist triumph generations in the making — and in movement terms, the abolitionists are the faction that rejects every exception and would prosecute the women themselves. Ehrlich found no record of him going that far, only of him cheering the branch that does.
On March 11, 2026, at a Washington press conference, he introduced the Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act — S. 4066 would pull the FDA’s approval of mifepristone for abortion nationwide and let women sue its manufacturers. Abortions have risen since the ruling, he said, driven by pills arriving in the mail. The bill remains in committee.
When the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act in November 2022, writing same-sex and interracial marriage into federal law, Hawley voted no. “The predicate of this is just wrong,” he had said of the bill that summer. “I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to overturn any of that stuff.” ADF, where his wife remains of counsel, says the Court “invented” the right to same-sex marriage.
Take Ground for the Lord
Hawley preached his way through 2025 and 2026. At Liberty University’s convocation in March 2025, he opened with the story of Gideon for the students and told them, “Catch God’s vision for your life.”
He had been pressing the same cause in the Senate. In January 2025, Hawley introduced the Defense of Conscience in Healthcare Act, which would order the Department of Health and Human Services to restore Trump-era rules shielding doctors and nurses who refuse to take part in abortions on moral or religious grounds. Religious freedom, he said, “isn’t nullified when someone puts on scrubs or a white coat.” That September he introduced the In God We Trust Act, which would give the General Services Administration a year to inscribe or display the national motto on every federal building in the country. He had made the same proposal from the NatCon stage in 2024, when he called for taking “the trans flags down from our public buildings.”
He gave the Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville in April 2026. President Al Mohler welcomed him as “a friend and a statesman” known “for his convictions, for his patriotism, for his passion, and for his service to our country,” and the seminary’s own write-up ranked him among the “most faithful, effective, and thoughtful Christian statesmen of our age.” Hawley preached from 2 Samuel 24, where David raises an altar in the middle of a plague, and declared, “What the United States needs above all as we approach our 250th birthday is revival.”
He cited the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper’s boast that there is “not one square inch” of creation outside the lordship of Christ, and told the seminary the church must be bold in insisting “there are two genders, male and female.” A culture of life, he argued, requires “a Christian economy,” a country “where a man can support himself and his family by the work of his hands.”
In June he put on black tie to keynote the American Compass gala at Washington’s National Building Museum, telling the populist think tank’s 500 guests about America’s “founding covenant.” The age of artificial intelligence, he said, would test the country’s commitment to it, and his party had a choice to make: “the party of the boardroom” or “the party of the covenant.” “For we are all endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights,” he said. “And we choose to honor those rights, and the God who gave them, again in our time.”
Before June was out, his office clipped a sermon for his social feeds: Hawley in a room of men, on the story of the shepherd who came to the Lord “empty-handed” to face Goliath. The spirit of God, he told them, “is being poured out again to reclaim the Lordship of Christ over every aspect of our society.” He closed on conquest: “I believe there’s an anointing on this generation, the generation of every man who’s here tonight, to go and take ground for the Lord. He will give into your hand what it is you need.”
In His Own Words
“This class lives in the United States, but they identify as ‘citizens of the world.’ They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.”
— July 16, 2019: describing America’s ruling class at the inaugural NatCon in Washington.
“The deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men.”
— October 31, 2021: keynoting NatCon in Orlando.
“It is not a pro-riot mug. This was not me encouraging rioters.”
— February 15, 2022: defending his campaign’s January 6 merchandise to HuffPost.
“This is a momentous day in America, when the efforts of generations of modern-day abolitionists come to fruition. One of the most unjust decisions in American history has been overturned.”
— June 24, 2022: celebrating the fall of Roe v. Wade on social media.
“Whatever your own beliefs, whatever your background, the revolution of the Bible is worth defending. It is worth preserving. It is the true source of the rights of man and the liberties we cherish.”
— September 12, 2022: addressing the NatCon gathering in Miami.
“The truth is, Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy. Christian nationalism founded American democracy.”
— July 8, 2024: making his case at the NatCon gala in Washington.
“We think that there needs to be a voice, [a] strong voice, advocating for life, and not just in the narrow political sense, but also advocating culturally.”
— December 12, 2025: unveiling the Love Life Initiative to Axios.
“The Lord isn’t interested in your strength or self-reliance. He’s interested in your surrender.”
— June 28, 2026: posting a clip of his sermon to X, where he has 2.5 million followers.
