JOSH HAWLEY DECRIES ANTI-SEMITISM. BUT HIS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM POSES A MUCH GREATER THREAT TO JEWS.

If you’re looking for the perfect Christmas gift, the website of Senator Josh Hawley has just what you need.

As of this very moment, joshhawley.com is selling for just $20 a handsome “Show Me Strong White Coffee Mug” celebrating his iconic clenched-fist support for what would become one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in American history. Yes, Hawley is still rolling around like a pig in the mud of his celebrity from the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

It's a fine way to show your support for the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other patriots for whom Hawley has become a folk hero. By honoring the evil of these violent anti-Semites, you can rest assured no one can ever accuse you of the crime of wokeness.

Now these anti-Semites from the right – whom Hawley has never once criticized in his political career – are not to be confused with anti-Semites from the left, against whom the senator has courageously summoned the full weight of his outrage apparatus. For that, you need to visit a different Hawley website: his Twitter page.

There, you can find Hawley calling out some blowhard Washington University professor for musing that Hamas admirers might menace Jews at their homes. Of railing against a Department of Homeland Security employee who spewed anti-Israel rhetoric. (Hawley even paused his crusade against “cancel culture” to demand she be fired over her words.)

If you like your politicians vile and shameless, Josh Hawley is your masculine man. But mostly, of course, if you’re his type of Christian.

Five months ago, Hawley had this to say about the founding of America in a speech to religious-right supporters:

“You know, Christians, we believe. Why did the United States of America embrace the liberty of the individual? You and I know why. It’s because Jesus Christ went to a cross to pay for the sins of every individual.”

It has been a consistent theme throughout Hawley’s political career.

In 2017, then-Missouri Attorney General Hawley told an audience, “I feel a call to public service as a form of ministry.” He explained:

“As believers, we are charged to take that message that the Lord, that Jesus Christ reigns, that He is risen and seated on the throne, we are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch including the political realm.”

Last year, Hawley stated, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the bible. Without the bible there is no America.”

There are some who might question the historical accuracy of Hawley’s belief that America was conceived in service to Jesus or Christianity. Here are a few dissenting voices.

“As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now.” That was Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College.

That’s a bit less direct than how Thomas Jefferson’s views on Christianity are described at the site Monticello.org, which is dedicated to his memory:

“While Jefferson was a firm theist, the God in which he believed was not the traditional Christian divinity. Jefferson rejected the notion of the Trinity and Jesus’ divinity. He rejected Biblical miracles, the resurrection, the atonement, and original sin (believing that God could not fault or condemn all humanity for the sins of others, a gross injustice). In neither the eighteenth century nor today would most people consider a person with those views a “Christian.”

And Franklin protégé Thomas Paine, widely regarded as the intellectual leader of the Revolutionary War era, didn’t quite share Hawley’s revisionist opinion about the bible. “The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed,” Pane wrote in The Theological Works of Thomas Paine.

And in his work entitled “The Age of Reason,” he added this:

“Every phrase and circumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began to read.”

Now, Paine might have gone a little over the top there in attacking Christianity. Those words aren’t very nice.

But unlike Hawley, Paine was there in the 18^th century with a whole lot of fellow Founding Fathers who specifically considered themselves Deists – and not Christians – a few of whom would serve as president. So, when Hawley, a well-educated man, lies and distorts the unmistakably non-sectarian origin of this nation, this isn’t like some philosophical argument at the U.S. Supreme Court over the Founders’ intent.

All those Founders were keenly aware of Jesus of Nazareth, who had lived and died some 18 centuries earlier. The Bible had a fine circulation. Had they wanted to create American democracy in the image of Jesus, or the good book, they could have easily said so in any of their voluminous writings.

Josh Hawley wants to scrap what they did and replace it with a theocracy in which not only Jews – but anyone outside Hawley’s narrowly defined version of Christianity – is an outsider. At best, in this scenario, Jews can hope to be tolerated.

Now, should you call Hawley anti-Semitic for his un-American Christian Nationalist views? I don’t know.

Does it matter?