WASHINGTON — A prominent United States senator is warning that the nuclear family is “under assault” as he points to faith as a unifying force rather than a divisive one.
“The nuclear family, I think, is pretty clearly under assault,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in a speech Wednesday at the Museum of the Bible. “It’s under assault from many corners. It’s under assault from a bunch of our popular culture, but also … we’re sitting in Washington, D.C., we can probably see the Capitol out those windows and it’s under assault from policy and from our government. I mean, we have a tax code that penalizes marriage. It doesn’t reward it, it penalizes it.”
“We have policy upon policy that makes it harder to raise children. We have a radical Left in this country that now wants the decisions about how to raise children to be made by [the] government, not to be made by parents,” he added. Hawley attributed the hostility toward the nuclear family to “decades and decades of denigrating the family” and “decades and decades of saying that there really are not a lot of differences between men and women.”
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Hawley made the remarks about the nuclear family at a luncheon hosted by the D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship, which describes itself as an organization set up to “support, equip, and empower Christian statesmanship and cast vision for the next generation of Christian leaders in the halls of government.”
The ministry, a project of the Florida-based Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, presented Hawley with the Distinguished Christian Statesman Award. It has handed out the award annually to an elected official seen as embodying the characteristics of a Christian statesman since 1996.
As he spoke with Center for Christian Statesmanship Executive Director William Russell after receiving the award, Hawley lamented that popular culture “sends to men the message that they are everything that is wrong with this country and the world.” He suggested a different approach. “We need to tell men that they are vitally needed,” he said. “We need to say to young men, you have a responsibility to get married, have a family, be a contributor and fulfill the God-given role that He has for you.”
“Every man and every woman has a God-given destiny on their life, a call on their life,” he insisted. Hawley maintained that popular culture should be telling men, “We need you. We need you desperately, and you can leave a legacy, a legacy for your family, a legacy that will change this country. But to do that, we need you to step up and take on responsibility, not shirk responsibility.”
Hawley also discussed his book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. He identified the purpose of the book as to help his three young children understand “what’s it mean to be a husband, what’s it mean to be a father, why is it that God calls us to do that, what’s it mean to go out there and shoulder responsibility?”
“It started in that way. And what I did in the book is I just went to the Bible and just walked through stories of the men in the Bible who got called and used,” he added. “None of them perfect, but all of them powerful because they had a powerful Lord, because they were willing to follow the Lord wholeheartedly.”
Hawley expressed concern that popular culture and the media are “so out of touch with the Scripture, they’re so out of touch with our history. We’ve got to take that message of biblical manhood, biblical womanhood, the great blessing that that is, the legacy that it leaves, we’ve got to take that, I think, to the whole country.”
“We often hear this lie from the Left that religion divides America,” Hawley added, pushing back on the idea. “The Left’s attempt to eradicate religion divides America. That’s what’s divisive. Faith actually is a great unifier in our national life.”
Proclaiming that “faith is what holds the country together,” Hawley characterized “the pursuit of worship of the Lord according to your conscience” as “a shared bedrock belief of Americans,” adding, “We’ve got to be bold in proclaiming that again and not afraid.”
Hawley cited the worship restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns as evidence of “hostility towards the witness of the Church, towards the witness of faith that permeates much of the governing class in this country.”
“And in that context, the Church cannot be silent. But also, the Church is the bearer of truth. We hold the hope of the world. How dare we be quiet. Ever. We’ve got to bring that hope to the world in winsome ways, in welcoming ways, sometimes in forceful ways when we have to say to those in power, ‘What you’re doing is wrong.’”
Reflecting on his Christian upbringing, Hawley said, “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Jesus Christ.” He praised his parents for giving him “the greatest gift that any parent can give, which is to introduce me at an early age to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”
“I can still remember sitting on my dad’s knee when I was 5 and praying to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior and then at 12, making a more public, mature confession of faith,” he recalled. Hawley expressed gratitude that he experienced “the incredible gift of a Christian home, to have the gift of being taught the scriptures at an early age growing up in a believing community.”
As his remarks came to a close, Hawley elaborated on what he views as his calling as a Christian statesman. Noting that “The United States is the greatest nation in the history of the world because the United States is founded on the truths of the Bible,” he declared, “I’ve got to be true to that reality, to that history, to the foundational principles of our Constitution.”
“I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. That means also defending the principles, the ideals and the realities on which that Constitution is founded. And the witness of the Bible is absolutely foundational to all of that.”
In an interview with The Christian Post, Russell portrayed Hawley as the ideal candidate to receive the Distinguished Christian Statesman Award. “Hawley is a wonderful representation of what a Christian statesman … should be,” he said. “He has his priorities in line: his faith, his family and his work. That shows through the work that he’s doing right now on Capitol Hill. But he also is resolute in his beliefs.”
Stressing that the award is designed for “someone who’s going to stand on principle, someone who’s going to still be loving and kind but is not going to back down,” Russell contended that Hawley is “not one of the fireball throwers that’s going to call ad hominem attacks on Democrats or whomever,” but rather “somebody who’s going to stand on principle and he’s going to live that out, talk that out.”
Past recipients of the Distinguished Christian Statesman Award include then-Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, who would later become the U.S. Ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, and then-Rep. Mike Pence, who would later become vice president. Former Arkansas Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have also been honored with the award.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
