Notes From a Scribe: On Senator Hawley’s “Kingdom”

In my old church, I was a scribe. When the pastor preached, I took notes. Not summaries. Actual notes, as close to verbatim as my hand could move. Then, during the week, I would go back through them. I would open the cited passages. I would check the reading against the text itself, commentaries, and what I had studied before to understand whether what I had heard on Sunday was what the Bible actually said.

That discipline did not leave when I left that church. I still take notes when I listen to a pastor preach. I still go back and check them.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary sign at the entrance to the Louisville campus. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville. The Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture was delivered here on April 16, 2026.

Senator Josh Hawley’s speech at the Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on April 16 came through my social feed. He was not preaching from a pulpit, but he was teaching. The audience was ministers and ministers in training. He built the address on 2 Samuel 24. He invoked the kingdom of God as the framework for American economic policy. He called for Christians to raise an altar on that ground.

I took notes. I went back and checked the text.

What he said is not what the text says. Not in one place. In almost every place he cited.

This is not a denominational quarrel. I am not writing about worship style or doctrine where Christians have reasonable room to disagree. I am writing about specific chapters, specific passages, and what they actually say in their own context. 2 Samuel 24 is not a template for claiming ground. It is a warning against a leader who tried to number and possess the people. Leviticus 25 does not describe a free-market family economy. It mandates periodic debt cancellation and land redistribution. The Proverbs 31 household is not single-income. Acts 2 and 4 describe a community that pooled its possessions, not one that opposed pooling. Luke 6, in the voice of Jesus himself, pronounces woe on the rich.

None of this is hidden. It is in the text he invoked, in the passages his audience could open in thirty seconds.

Below is an open letter I wrote in response, and an annotated transcript of the portion of his speech I watched, with the relevant passages laid out next to his claims.

If you care about what scripture says, or about what is being taught to future pastors in its name, read them both and check the citations yourself. This matters especially for women, single mothers, and blended families, whose households look nothing like the one Hawley described as the biblical ideal. The men being trained in that room will one day preach to you, your children, and neighbors.

Notes From a Scribe: On Senator Hawley’s “Kingdom”

Senator Hawley:

On April 16, 2026, you delivered the Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The audience was ministers and ministers in training. You called for what you named a Christian economy. A kingdom economy. You invoked the lordship of Christ over labor, over families, over the economic life of the nation. You said we should reassert that lordship. You said you would raise an altar to claim this ground.

I want to take you seriously on that. Because if the claim is scriptural, the text is available. Anyone can open it.

You built the address on 2 Samuel 24. That is where the altar language came from. The chapter is worth reading in full. David orders a census of Israel and Judah. The text presents the census itself as the sin: a king numbering the people, measuring what belonged to God, consolidating administrative knowledge over a nation he did not ultimately own. Seventy thousand die in the plague that follows. David buys the threshing floor of Araunah and builds the altar there in repentance. He refuses Araunah’s offer to give him the land and the oxen for free, saying he will not offer to the Lord that which costs him nothing. The altar is not a claim on ground. It is a confession that the ground was never his to claim.

A senator invoking that altar to stake out ground for a preferred political economy has the story inverted. The chapter is a warning against exactly the kind of leader who tries to measure, possess, and direct a people on behalf of a vision he has declared righteous. It is the wrong text to cite in support of the speech you gave.

The first economy the Hebrew Bible describes at any length is the one laid out in Leviticus 25. Every seven years, debts are released. Every fiftieth year, the Year of Jubilee, land returns to the families it came from. Hebrew slaves go free. Sales of property made under hardship are reversed. The stated reason, given in the voice of God, is that the land is not ultimately owned by anyone in Israel. It is held in trust. The passage exists because the authors understood that without a reset mechanism, wealth concentrates and families lose their standing across generations. That was the policy concern. That was the kingdom instruction.

That system is not conservative nor is it liberal. It is not compatible with either American political coalition as currently constituted. It is redistributive by design, and the redistribution is mandatory, cyclical, and theological.

You spoke of the Netflix CEO. You spoke of husbands and wives working endless hours for companies that pay them too little to see their children. James 5 addresses that directly. The wages you kept back from the laborers who mowed your fields cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. That is the text. The warning is issued to employers who accumulated wealth while underpaying workers. It is one of the few passages in the New Testament that names a specific economic sin and specifies who is committing it.

You did not cite it. It would have fit.

When you described what you called communism in New York and used the phrase “just give us the money,” you were describing, in caricature, something that appears in Acts 2 and Acts 4. The Jerusalem community sold their possessions and goods and distributed to any who had need. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own. Whether a modern state should replicate that arrangement is a separate argument. The textual fact is that the first Christian community described in scripture practiced voluntary collective provision, and the text presents it approvingly. You cannot invoke the kingdom and then describe its early economic shape as the thing you are against.

The single-income household you described as the North Star is worth examining too. The woman in Proverbs 31, frequently cited in exactly the rhetorical context you were operating in, is not a stay-at-home figure supported by a breadwinner husband. She considers a field and buys it. She plants a vineyard with her earnings. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. She makes linen garments and sells them. She supplies the merchants with sashes. Her husband is known at the gates, but her economic activity is what the chapter actually describes in detail. The household in the text is a productive unit. Both adults work. Your framing of the 1950s American breadwinner model as a biblical ideal requires ignoring the chapter that gets quoted most often in support of it.

On the lordship of Christ over economic life, which you raised directly: Luke 6 contains the version of the Beatitudes given in the voice of Jesus himself. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. This is not a passage about personal humility. The structure is parallel. The blessings and the woes are economic. A senator invoking the kingdom of God as a framework for American economic policy has to reckon with the fact that the person who named that kingdom pronounced woe on the wealthy and blessing on the poor, in those words, without qualification.

You framed your alternatives as communism on one side and what you called neo-feudalism on the other. That type of framing is useful for rhetoric, but textually incoherent. The biblical material does not map onto that spectrum. It critiques wealth concentration in terms considerably sharper than either modern American party is willing to use. It mandates periodic redistribution. It describes approvingly a community that pooled resources. It condemns employers who withhold fair wages. It does not describe a single-income nuclear family as the ideal unit of economic life. None of this is obscure. It is in the text you invoked.

You hold a seat in the United States Senate. You have access to the Congressional Research Service. You have staff who can pull commentaries on any passage in twenty minutes. If the claim is that scripture should shape American economic policy, then the scripture itself is the first document to read, and the reading must be honest about what is actually there.

You quoted a kingdom. You did not read it.

Annotated Transcript

Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. April 16, 2026. Notes in the right column show what the text he invoked actually says.