Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, has a long essay in the February issue of First Things headlined, "Our Christian Nation." It complains, "The conservative 'fusionism' of yesteryear, that combination of anti-communism, free-market economics, and social conservatism, taught too many Christians that their faith was relevant only to 'cultural issues,' whatever that means." Hawley concludes:
A Christian society requires a Christian economy. ...A Christian economy is one in which parents—and I mean everyday folks, not just the most talented and well-placed—can afford to have children and raise them, without turning to a government day care so that both parents can rush back to the service of the global corporations that claim every second of their waking energy, often in return for paltry wages.
Today we have the opposite of a Christian economy, one that privileges hedge funds and global capital over workers, the childless banker in Manhattan over the welder and his family in Missouri. The dirty little secret of Washington, D.C. is that for decades now both parties have embraced largely the same agenda: the free flow of global capital, unlimited imports of cheap foreign goods, tax handouts to corporations that ship away American jobs, and the ready supply of cheap labor. These policies add up to a massive system of preferences for a tiny set of industries—Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, principally—and one social class, the tippy top. This is not right. It is not just. And Christians who care about marriage, family, and labor should not stand for it.
...We must do far more—rebuild the kind of American industry that pays good wages, reward marriage and child-rearing in our tax policy, stop the fleecing of American families by the pharmaceutical industry, and break the control of our public discourse by Big Tech. I could go on. Instead, I'll make my point one last time. America has been a Christian nation. We can be again—if Christians will recover again their confidence that the gospel of Jesus Christ speaks to every facet of our common life. For the future of the nation, and the honor of the gospel, we must.
Usually the ones attacking "global corporations" and "the pharmaceutical industry," "hedge funds" and "global capital" are the Democrats, not the Republicans. It's easy to beat up on "Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley," but would Hawley really prefer that the world's financial, cultural, and technology capitals were in Europe, or China, rather than in the United States? Moreover, suggesting that there is something un-Christian about Wall Street and Hollywood, where there happen to be a lot of Jews, is going to make some people uncomfortable, and perhaps for good reason.
Anyway, give Hawley credit, I guess, for explicitly laying out his vision for "a Christian economy." Left unsaid is his program for accomplishing his proposed transition from the current economy to a Christian economy. I don't see how it happens without a Democrat-style tax-and-redistribute effort to take stuff away from his disfavored groups and then hand it out from Washington to his favored groups. In the details, Hawley's policies often echo those of Senator Bernie Sanders, who is not a Christian but is a socialist who caucuses with the Democrats.
Anyway, Hawley at the moment is an outlier among Republicans, but he's worth keeping an eye on because the ideas are so at odds with the pro-growth, big-tent, Ronald Reagan approach that helped make America prosper as a world economic superpower. There are two separate and related issues: whether the policies are wise or unwise, and whether it's accurate, or useful, to promote them as "Christian."