Earlier this month Katherine Stewart, writing for The New York Times, published an article that many are reading to aid in understanding what happened in Washington, DC, on 6 January: The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage. Joshua Hawley is the junior United States Senator from Missouri, having served in that capacity since 2019. A graduate of Yale Law School, he is the author of Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness. A professing Christian, he played a small role in the storming of the Capitol, as Stewart recounts:
In today’s Republican Party, the path to power is to build up a lie in order to overturn democracy. At least that is what Senator Josh Hawley was telling us when he offered a clenched-fist salute to the pro-Trump mob before it ransacked the Capitol, and it is the same message he delivered on the floor of the Senate in the aftermath of the attack, when he doubled down on the lies about electoral fraud that incited the insurrection in the first place.
After a photographer captured this clenched fist, NBC reported that Hawley had become a pariah even in his own party. That he had dragged the 19th/20th-century Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper into his rhetoric appeared to discredit Kuyper himself, with Stewart leading the charge:
Mr. Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared–paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper–“There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.
“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”
I will not offer a detailed response to this article, as others are likely better positioned than I to do so. Nevertheless, I will make what should be an obvious point: misinterpretations of a person’s writings do not by themselves discredit that person. But have Hawley and Stewart misread Kuyper? Yes and no.
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