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Today we are concluding our exploration of Josh Hawley’s book Manhood. Over the past weeks, I’ve been tracing its arguments, testing its claims, and trying to connect the dots between Hawley’s presentation of “biblical manhood” and the broader social and political world that gives that presentation its power. Hawley ends his book with an epilogue, a kind of closing argument - and if we want to stick with the lawyer theme, that feels fitting enough. So I figured it was worth offering a final word of my own.

Hawley’s Unkept Promises

As we close this out, it’s worth remembering what Josh Hawley actually promised us in his book. He promised to tell us what a “biblical” conception of manhood is. He promised to outline the “masculine virtues” that men are called to live out. And he promised, either explicitly or by unmistakable implication, that if men would embody these virtues, they could save America - restoring its promise, and, crucially, restoring the promise of a “biblical” vision of a patriarchal social order. That is not a small promise. In fact, it is a huge one. And reminding ourselves of it matters for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, Hawley is not unique in making this promise. This is not just one senator’s personal hobbyhorse or one author’s eccentric obsession. It is a core part of conservative Christianity, American Christian nationalism, and the broader MAGA movement. It can be articulated in slightly different ways, with different emphases and different packaging, but the basic promise is the same: recover “biblical” manhood, recover patriarchal order, and you recover the nation. Hawley has essentially promised to articulate the core of this social and political vision. In lawyerly fashion, he has promised to make the case for it. And so when we look closely at Hawley, we are actually looking at far more than Hawley. We are looking at a worldview, a political theology, and a social vision that extends well beyond the covers of one book.

The trouble is that Hawley utterly fails to deliver on what he promises. I’m not going to relitigate the whole case here. We have spent enough - probably more than enough - time walking through the details. But throughout the book, we have seen that his case is not “biblical” in any serious sense, is not specifically “Christian” in the way he wants us to assume, does not even seem particularly “masculine” except by stipulation, and offers no real evidence that his prescriptions would fix what ails America. The claims are asserted, not demonstrated. Authority is invoked, not earned.

This vision of American society is, at bottom, a statement of dogma. It is a claim backed by a supposedly unassailable authority, but one that is not grounded in reality or in any serious desire to understand the facts of the world or the complexity of social life. It is a fantastical vision of what a subset of Americans want America to be, paired with an attempt to conceal the fact that it is, in the end, merely a fantasy.

At this point, though, I am less interested in rehearsing every failure in Hawley’s argument than in asking what those failures reveal. If we step back from the individual claims and look at the book as a whole, certain patterns emerge. And those patterns, I think, tell us something not only about Hawley, but about Christian nationalism and high-control religion in the United States more broadly.

The Use and Abuse of the Bible

The first pattern is the use - and abuse - of the Bible. I want to begin with a story. Some time ago I found myself in a Facebook argument with an evangelical about philosophy. He accused “secularists” of having presuppositions they were unwilling to call into question. That accusation, of course, is supposed to function as both critique and mic drop: secular people are allegedly blind to their own assumptions, while believers are candid about theirs. But I responded by saying that I would be happy to engage if he was willing to allow that he might be wrong about the Bible. That ended the discussion immediately. And honestly, that told me everything I needed to know.

Christians like Hawley rely on the Bible a lot. Or at least, they rely on appeals to the Bible a lot. But they tend not to do so in the way that they - and I suspect Hawley himself - think they do. Bart Ehrman has famously described the Bible as “much revered and little read,” and that observation gets at something important here. Appeals to the Bible are often not actually appeals to what the Bible says or teaches. They are identity statements. They are a kind of conservative virtue signaling. They are shortcut claims to authority. If someone can persuade us - or persuade themselves - that the position they hold is “biblical,” then, in their minds, nothing more needs to be done. The position is now authoritative. It cannot be questioned. It does not need to be defended further, and they do not need to take seriously the objections, challenges, or questions of others. “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” That slogan captures the posture perfectly.

And when this kind of blind faith in the Bible is combined with ignorance of what the Bible actually says, it becomes a recipe for precisely the kind of patriarchal and authoritarian social and political positions Hawley advances. It allows exactly what we have watched him do over and over. You can take whatever social or political positions you already most value, feed them into the Bible, and then pull them back out again, now cloaked with unassailable authority. The Bible becomes less a text to be interpreted than a machine for blessing prior commitments. It no longer functions as a source of challenge, disruption, or reflection. It functions as a sanctifying device.

And this is not just something Hawley does. Nor is it limited to high-profile MAGA figures like JD Vance or Pete Hegseth. It is how Uncle Ron uses the Bible. It is how his pastor uses the Bible. It is how the pastor you grew up with uses the Bible. It is how the Bible is used in the Christian charter schools our taxes support. It is how the Bible was used by the parents who raised us according to the dictates of James Dobson. We could multiply examples indefinitely, but the point is straightforward: this is a key dynamic in high-control Christianity in America. It is one to watch for whenever you encounter the high-control religionists. And it is why I think the same basic test I offered that evangelical interlocutor is still useful. If a person is unwilling even in principle to admit that they could be wrong about what the Bible means or how they are using it, then there is very little point in engaging. It is a rigged game from the start.

The Reduction of Masculinity

A second pattern in Hawley’s book is what I would call the reduction of masculinity. There is no doubt that Josh Hawley, like so many on the right, has a strong vision of what he thinks masculinity is. It is a vision of man as alpha, as powerful, as strong, as - in Hawley’s own framing - warrior, priest, and king. It is a vision of masculinity rooted in strength and power, and one in which strength and power become the primary basis of authority. That vision is rhetorically potent, especially in an age of social anxiety and political grievance. It gives its adherents a feeling of clarity. It offers certainty, role-definition, and a kind of mythic grandeur. But what Hawley never manages to do is show us why this is what masculinity simply is, much less why it is the only valid form masculinity can take.

That failure, I think, is deeply revealing. Time and again, Hawley sets out to demonstrate that his vision of masculinity is not merely one possible model among others, but the model - the natural, normative, God-given reality of manhood. And time and again, he fails. But the reason he fails is not simply that he has not marshaled enough evidence or found the right proof text. He fails because the claim itself is reductive. Masculinity, like every other social identity, is not one thing. It is not expressed in only one way. There is no singular, authorized, universally binding essence of masculinity waiting to be discovered and imposed. And whenever anyone tries to tell you that there is, they are advancing an agenda. They have something to gain by elevating one version of masculinity into “masculinity” as such, and almost always someone to marginalize in the process.

That is one reason the insistence becomes so fierce. The vehemence with which people like Hawley defend their preferred model of masculinity - and the visceral rage they often display when confronted with alternative visions - is not evidence that they are securely defending something authentic, natural, or God-ordained. If anything, it suggests the opposite. It is not an expression of confidence. It is an expression of insecurity. People who are genuinely secure in what they love, value, or embody typically do not need to convert the entire world to it in order to feel stable themselves. I do not need to convert the world to metal music in order to feel secure about liking metal. The intensity of the attack often reveals the fragility of the thing being defended. Hawley and those like him protest so loudly because, at some level, they know their account of masculinity is not self-evident, not universal, and not inevitable. It has to be enforced because it cannot simply be demonstrated.

“The softness is aesthetic. The coercion is structural.“

That brings me to another lesson Hawley’s book offers, and one that I think is especially important right now: do not be fooled by the kinder, gentler presentation. Several times in discussing Hawley, I have used a phrase I first introduced in an I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist episode a long time ago. I have said that Hawley presents a “kinder, gentler” vision of patriarchy and Christian-nationalist America. By that I mean that his presentation is carefully toned. As he himself indicates, he is trying to be more inviting and less strident. He wants to soften the edges. He wants to humanize a patriarchal social vision. He wants to make it feel wholesome, stable, rooted, maybe even comforting. And that matters, because this is not just a personal rhetorical style. It represents an entire sub-species of high-control religionists in America.

But we should not be fooled by that softer packaging. When you cut away the qualifications and look past the folksy presentation, when you tear Hawley’s argument down to the studs and examine how it is really put together, the patriarchal and high-control dimensions become impossible to miss. The softness is aesthetic. The coercion is structural. The friendliness does not change the hierarchy; it simply makes the hierarchy easier to sell. And that, too, is illustrative of a much broader reality. High-control patriarchal religion is not always loud, angry, harsh, or overtly domineering. Sometimes it is soft, inviting, friendly, and even comforting. Sometimes it comes wrapped in the language of home, belonging, protection, and virtue. Sometimes it smiles. But that does not make it less controlling. It just makes it more difficult to recognize. It is, in that sense, the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This is part of why examining Hawley has been worthwhile, even if I am more than ready to be done with Josh Hawley himself. His book tells us something about him, certainly. It tells us about his politics, his ambitions, his anxieties, and the world he wants to inhabit. But I think it tells us even more about the contemporary Christian nationalist movement, about conservative American Christianity, and about the vision of militant masculinity that animates so much of both.

Hawley’s book is not important because it is intellectually impressive. It is important because it is representative.

It distills patterns that are widespread and influential. It gives us a polished, articulate, senator-approved expression of instincts and arguments that are already circulating in churches, schools, homes, podcasts, ministries, and political movements across the country.

And if that is right, then what Hawley’s failure reveals is not just the weakness of one author’s argument. It reveals the fragility of the whole ideological project. Again and again, the project presents itself as obvious, natural, timeless, biblical, and indispensable. But under scrutiny, it turns out to be selective, reactive, insecure, and deeply dependent on borrowed authority. It survives not because it explains reality well, but because it offers a certain kind of person a compelling fantasy: a fantasy of order, control, hierarchy, certainty, and restored dominance. It promises that if men will just become the right kind of men, the social world can be put back into its proper shape. It promises that patriarchy is not merely traditional, but redemptive. It promises that domination is really care, that hierarchy is really harmony, and that submission is really flourishing. Those are powerful promises. But they remain promises - assertions masquerading as arguments, fantasies draped in the language of divine sanction.

Final Thoughts

So yes, I am done with Josh Hawley. There is always more that could be said, but there is no need to keep circling the same terrain. What matters now is not Hawley as an individual, but the patterns he helps us see. The abuse of the Bible as an identity marker and authority shortcut. The reduction of masculinity into a single rigid and politically useful ideal. The attempt to repackage patriarchy in a kinder, gentler form so that it becomes more socially acceptable and harder to detect. Those patterns matter far beyond this one book. They matter because they shape lives. They shape churches. They shape families. They shape schools and politics and public imagination. And if we are going to resist high-control religion and Christian nationalism in any meaningful way, we have to learn to recognize those patterns when they appear - not only in their most aggressive forms, but also in their polished and inviting ones.

That, to me, is the final word. Hawley promised to give us a biblical vision of manhood capable of restoring America. What he actually gave us was a revealing case study in how patriarchal ideology works: how it claims authority, how it narrows human possibility, how it masks insecurity as certainty, and how it repackages domination as virtue. In that sense, the book has been useful after all - not because Hawley succeeded in making his case, but because in failing so thoroughly, he exposed more than he intended.

-Dan Miller

We are assembling the Religion and Politics Avengers! Starting June 17 Axis Mundi will begin dropping the Daily Brief every weekday - a short analysis of the most important religion/politics story from the day. And look at this team! In addition to Dan Miller and Brad Onishi, you’ll hear from contributors Holly Berkley Fletcher (author and ex-CIA analyst), Matthew D. Taylor (scholar, author, public intellectual) and Thomas Lecaque (historian and writer).

This is part of our new chapter at Axis Mundi Media and SWAJ. We’re expanding Axis Mundi into a daily analysis platform—a place you can go not just to listen to SWAJ but an every day video, audio, and text hub for content on religion + politics.

This Week: The first live version of the Weekly Roundup!

Join us at 1:30 ET.

The discussion dives into how traditional religious imagery—such as framing God exclusively as a punishing "Father," "King," or "Judge"—subtly normalizes abusive and hierarchical dynamics in families, intimate relationships, and broader civic life. Rev. Alba and Brad unpack how white Christian supremacy shapes what the American context recognizes as violence, using the deployment of Romans 13 during the separation of immigrant families at the U.S. border as a chilling case study in theological terrorism. Crucially, the episode addresses Christianity's historical condemnation of "the flesh," explaining how policing the body strips individuals of their bodily autonomy and self-trust. Ultimately, Rev. Alba shares why she fiercely maintains her faith, arguing that naming these systemic abuses is not a rejection of spirituality, but the vital first step toward true healing, resistance, and collective liberation.

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• Read: The Interview

• Podshots: This Week on SWAJ

• Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week

• Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media

• Reasons for Hope

• The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

• SWAJerati: What We Are Reading

• SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

• Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

• Read: The Interview (cont.)

Read: The Interview

Naming the Harm: Rev. Alba Onofrio on Spiritual Violence

A conversation between Brad Onishi and Reverend Alba Onofrio, author of the new book Spiritual Violence: Religious Phenomena That Defile the Faith.

Brad Onishi: You’ve spent years doing this work through Soulforce, through your ministry, and through Shameless Theology. What made you decide it was time to put all of this into a book?

Rev. Alba Onofrio: Our people are what made it necessary. You know when you find yourself telling the same truth over and over again and wishing there were more hours in the day because you can’t possibly reach everyone who needs to hear it? For us, that truth has always been: It’s not your fault. God doesn’t actually hate you. There is an entire system of power behind the version of Christianity you were given.

So many people come to us believing they failed somehow. They believe their suffering is evidence that God is disappointed in them or that they weren’t faithful enough. What we’re trying to help people understand is that there are structures behind those experiences. There are systems that teach people to think about themselves in certain ways, to understand God in certain ways, and to accept forms of harm that they would never otherwise accept.

The book became a way to take nearly thirty years of Soulforce’s work and put it into a form that could travel farther than we ever could. Maybe it ends up in a seminary classroom. Maybe someone reads it on a train ride home from work. Maybe it’s picked up by a parent trying to decide what kind of faith community they want their children to grow up in. The goal is to make the language available.

Because language matters. If you don’t have words for what happened to you, you often feel isolated. You think your story is uniquely broken. What we’re trying to say is that while every story is unique, the structures behind them often aren’t. Once we can name those structures, we can begin to heal. We can organize. We can interrupt harmful systems and imagine alternatives. But all of that starts with naming what happened.

The Interview continues at the end of the post…

Podshots: What’s Happening on SWAJ

The Sunday Interview: Fighting Spiritual Terrorism w/ Rev. Alba Onofrio

Wednesday: It’s In the Code

Friday: The Weekly Roundup

Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week

Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media

A New Chapter:

If the second Trump term has shown anything, it’s that religion is not a side story - it’s the decoder ring for understanding rising authoritarianism, election results, court decisions, education wars, media bias, and the erosion of democratic norms in real time. And too often, the mainstream coverage still misses what’s really happening.

So we’re entering a new chapter.

We’re expanding Axis Mundi into a daily analysis platform—a place you can go not just to listen to SWAJ but an every day video, audio, and text hub for content on religion + politics.

Here’s a preview of what’s coming.

Supercast → Substack: Over the next few months, we’re moving our membership platform from Supercast to Substack.

Supercast was recently acquired by the Fox Corporation that produces podcasts for Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Bill O’Reilly. That means SWAJ’s subscription fees and subscriber data are now flowing to Fox. To state the obvious, we don’t want that.

By moving to Substack we can expand into an integrated written, audio, and video platform in one place.

What this means for you:

You’ll be invited to migrate your membership to Substack so you can:

• Listen to SWAJ on a premium ad-free feed

• Access the new Daily Brief

• Receive member briefings

• Join live events

We’ll walk you through this step-by-step. Nothing is changing for a few weeks.

What’s New?

• Starting June 12! This Friday! The beloved Weekly Roundup with Brad Onishi and Dan Miller is becoming a live video show across YouTube and streaming platforms. Join every Friday in order to ask questions, watch the show live, and catch up on the most important religion/politics stories from the week.

  As always, it will be available on YouTube and the SWAJ podcast feed after it airs. If you want to listen, you can do just like always.

  

• Starting June 16! Bradley Onishi will be live every Tuesday at 1:30 pm ET to analyze the most important developments shaping religion and politics in the United States and around the globe.

  As usual, we skip the cable-news hot takes and superficial social media clickbait in order to provide historical context, theological analysis, and rigorous reporting delivered in real time.

  And wait, there’s more: MATTHEW D. TAYLOR will join Brad all summer!

  

• Starting June 15! A short, focused analysis of the most important developments in religion and politics. Not just what happened—but what it means, and what to watch next. This is our historic expansion into a daily platform—and it’s only possible because of members.

  • Daily 10-minute video/audio/article on the most important religion/politics story of the day.

  Team of contributors: Brad Onishi, Dan Miller, Matthew Taylor, Holly Berkley Fletcher, Thomas Lecaque, and more.

Reasons for Hope:

• 

  Queer YA author Kelly Quindland just published This Must Be the Place, a joyous novel about a young girl inheriting a gay bar from her closeted uncle. As with Quindland’s other novels, the book deals explicitly with questions surrounding faith and religion. As she once explained:

  “It often feels like we live in this weird Venn diagram space where being queer and being a person of faith are supposed to be mutually exclusive, but that’s reductive, and it’s wrong. Faith does not belong to straight/cis people and queerness does not belong to secular people. You can be both! Growing up Irish Catholic has been a huge part of my identity, and I will never give that up just because I fall in love with other women. If anything, I have come to understand my faith better through surrendering to the coming out process and trusting that I’m letting my heart work the way it’s meant to.”

• Speaking of books, the American Booksellers Association says that contrary to popular narratives about decline, independent bookstores are booming. ABA membership grew by over 500 in the past year alone—-“nearly triple what it was a decade ago and the highest level since the late 1990s.

• Mangrove forests are also making a notable comeback; a new study revealed that since 2010 the world has been gaining more mangroves than it has been losing. This is good news for us all; mangrove forests store up to five times more carbon than their land based counterparts!

The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

Why IRMCE Exists

Religious extremism threatens democracy through a pointed, organized political strategy, not just rhetoric. It has built infrastructure—media networks, legal organizations, political campaigns—designed to reshape American governance.

The Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement creates and distributes scholarly resources on the promises and threats religious communities hold for global democracy. We train, advise, and mentor researchers, journalists, and other leaders to communicate their research to the broader public using traditional and non-traditional educational channels and various forms of media, and to work with organizers and activists to broaden their impact on the ground.

IRMCE is a close partner of Axis Mundi Media. It helps fund the research and knowledge production that turn into public scholarship.

If you want to support through a tax-deductible donation, all of the funds will go to independent public scholars working to protect democracy through their work on religion and politics: https://www.irmce.org/donate

SWAJerati: What We Are Reading

After you read the Sunday Interview, be sure to check out Rev. Onofrio’s new book Spiritual Violence: Religious Phenomena that Defile the Faith. As the tagline says, “Faith shouldn’t hurt.”

SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

Rono: I love the juxtaposition of discussing artificial intelligence in the same conversation as the announcement of the expansion and next stage of Axis Mundi media – you are on the right path – community, culture and connection is essential - we are craving intimacy and engagement – thank you so much for your work, dare I say, vocation

Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

Virginia W.

Isaac L.

Sean M.

Daniel G.

Linda M.

Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.

Read: The Interview (cont.)

A conversation between Brad Onishi and Reverend Alba Onofrio, author of the new book Spiritual Violence: Religious Phenomena That Defile the Faith.

What Spiritual Trauma Does to People

Onishi: One of the first concepts you tackle in the book is spiritual trauma. Many people have become familiar with that language over the last decade, but it’s still a relatively new framework for understanding religious harm. How do you think about spiritual trauma?

Onofrio: The book is really about spiritual violence, and spiritual violence exists on a spectrum. At one end are the small, daily experiences that many people dismiss as normal—comments, assumptions, exclusions, and judgments that slowly wear people down. At the other end are the most devastating examples imaginable: physical abuse, sexual abuse, colonization, slavery, and the full-scale weaponization of Christianity to justify oppression.

Spiritual trauma emerges when those experiences begin interfering with our ability to move through life in a full and abundant way. It affects our ability to trust. It affects how we understand ourselves. It affects our relationship to God, to community, and even to our own sense of worth. People often describe feeling disconnected, suspicious, abandoned, or unable to believe that love is available to them.

The effects can be small or enormous. Sometimes it’s a wound that shows up unexpectedly years later. Sometimes it reshapes an entire life. As a theologian rather than a mental health professional, what I’m interested in is helping people recognize that experiences carried out in the name of God have consequences that extend far beyond the moment in which they occur. Those consequences often remain long after the event itself has passed.

What I’ve found over and over again is that people feel relief simply from hearing that their experience has a name. Once they understand they’re not alone and that others have experienced similar patterns, the possibility of healing becomes real.

How White Christian Supremacy Normalizes Harm

Onishi: A major theme in the book is the connection between spiritual violence and white Christian supremacy. How do you understand that relationship?

Onofrio: They’re deeply connected. In fact, one of the reasons this book took so long to write is that I originally thought I was simply translating a project I had worked on with theologians in Latin America. But over time I realized that the United States required a different framework entirely. The histories are different. The myths are different. The political structures are different. The relationship between Christianity and power developed differently here.

The sword and the Bible traveled together wherever Christianity was used as a tool of colonization. That part of the story isn’t unique to the United States. But the specific forms that spiritual violence takes are always shaped by place. In this country, white Christian supremacy provides much of that framework.

One of the things that concerns me most is how our understanding of God becomes normalized and then gets transferred into our understanding of human relationships. Christianity offers many images of God. We find images of God as a mother, a midwife, a mother hen, a laboring woman, a protector. Yet most people grow up hearing only one dominant image: God as a male authority figure who must be feared, obeyed, and never questioned.

That matters because our theology becomes a template. If we are taught that fear is a normal part of love, we become more likely to accept fear in our human relationships. If we are taught that punishment is evidence of love, we become more likely to tolerate punishment from people who claim to care about us. If we are taught that questioning authority is dangerous, we become less likely to challenge abusive leaders.

These assumptions become so embedded in everyday life that many people stop noticing them. They become the water we swim in. That’s how spiritual violence becomes normalized—not because people consciously choose it, but because it becomes part of the moral and emotional landscape.

Onishi: One of the most striking distinctions you make in the book is between spiritual violence and what you call spiritual terrorism.

Onofrio: The difference is about intention and scale. Spiritual violence can happen in many forms. It can be personal, relational, and localized. Spiritual terrorism goes further. Its purpose is not simply to harm an individual. Its purpose is to send a message to an entire community.

One example I discuss involves immigrant families separated at the border. We know these stories. A mother fleeing violence arrives with her children. The family is separated. The children disappear into a system designed to make reunification difficult or impossible. Officials then invoke religious language to justify what is happening.

What makes that terrorism isn’t simply the harm done to one family. It’s the message being sent to every other family watching. The message is that if you attempt to cross this border, this could happen to you. The goal is fear. The goal is deterrence through terror. Spiritual terrorism relies on the idea that certain groups of people are less worthy of dignity, protection, or even humanity. Religious narratives are then used to justify that conclusion. That’s why it’s so important to understand the theological dimensions of these systems. They aren’t simply political. They aren’t simply legal. They are moral narratives that tell people who belongs and who does not.

The Body, Desire, and Religious Control

Onishi: One of the most powerful parts of the conversation is your discussion of the body. You argue that many forms of religious harm begin by teaching people to distrust themselves.

Onofrio: Absolutely. Christianity is, at its core, a religion of incarnation. It is a faith built around the claim that God became human. God entered flesh. God experienced life in a body. And yet so many Christian communities teach people that the body is fundamentally suspect.

People are taught to distrust desire, intuition, pleasure, and even their own emotional responses. The body becomes a site of suspicion rather than wisdom. Every feeling becomes a potential gateway to sin. Every desire becomes something that must be monitored and controlled.

The problem is that once people stop trusting themselves, they become dependent on external authorities to tell them what is true. They stop listening to their instincts. They stop paying attention when something feels wrong. They begin believing that someone else knows their relationship with God better than they do.

That transfer of authority is where control becomes possible.

One of the gifts I think many queer people have experienced is learning what it means to trust themselves despite overwhelming pressure not to. Many of us have known what it feels like to encounter a love, a desire, or a truth that remains undeniable despite everything we’ve been taught. That experience can become a doorway into a deeper understanding of ourselves.

What concerns me is how many people never receive permission to develop that kind of trust in themselves. Instead, they spend years learning how to silence their own bodies and hand authority over to institutions or leaders who may not have their best interests at heart.

Invisible Harm

Onishi: One thing that comes through repeatedly in your work is that spiritual harm often remains invisible even when other forms of harm are recognized.

Onofrio: That’s exactly right. We are getting better at recognizing physical harm. We are becoming better at recognizing emotional harm. But we still struggle to recognize harm to the spirit.

Take the example of clergy sexual abuse. The sexual violence is real and devastating. The psychological consequences are real and devastating. But there is another layer that often goes unnamed. The survivor entered that relationship believing the faith leader represented God. They entered vulnerable, trusting, and open. The abuse occurs within that specific power dynamic.

If we only talk about the physical or psychological dimensions, we miss part of the wound. We miss the damage done to a person’s understanding of trust, meaning, faith, and belonging. We miss the ways their image of God may have been distorted or shattered.

That’s why spiritual healing matters. It’s not a substitute for therapy, accountability, or justice. But it addresses dimensions of harm that other frameworks sometimes overlook. Until we understand how religious authority functions and how theological narratives shape relationships, we won’t fully understand why these wounds run so deep.

Why Faith Still Matters

Onishi: After everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve written about, how do you remain a person of faith?

Onofrio: The answer is learning to disentangle God from religion as a system of power. In fact, I would say that it isn’t despite this work that I remain faithful. It’s because of this work. My faith is what propels me.

I know God personally, in my own life and experience. I have lived the miracles. I have lived in communities where grace, love, and transformation were real. Those experiences are not things I am willing to surrender. If anything, seeing how thoroughly God has been co-opted by systems of power makes me feel even more committed to fighting for a different vision of faith.

I don’t condemn people who leave Christianity. I don’t try to convert anyone. People have to find the path that is right for them. But this is the language I was given to talk about the divine. These are the stories that formed me. This is the tradition through which I learned about mercy, justice, and love. It belongs to me as much as it belongs to anyone else.

In some ways, all of that evangelical formation is still in me. The mission has simply changed. The goal now is to save as many people as possible from white Christian supremacy. The goal now is to heal as much spiritual violence as possible. The horizon looks different, but the purpose feels familiar.

I believe we are still in a struggle between good and evil. I believe another world is possible. I believe God is present within us, calling us toward justice, mercy, and liberation. My faith does not make me hopeless. My faith is the reason I refuse to give up.

The Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Since we launched this thing in 2018, our goal has been simple: help anyone who’s interested understand something much of the media still struggles to explain: How religion shapes politics in America - especially conservative Christianity and its relationship to the American Right.

What started as a podcast by two professors has become a 4x weekly show and a podcast network. With three million annual downloads, Axis Mundi Media now reaches 100ks of listeners each year.

If the second Trump term has shown anything, it’s that religion is not a side story - it’s the decoder ring for understanding rising authoritarianism, election results, court decisions, education wars, media bias, and the erosion of democratic norms in real time.

And too often, the mainstream coverage still misses what’s really happening.

So we’re entering a new chapter.

We’re expanding Axis Mundi into a daily analysis platform—a place you can go not just to listen to SWAJ but an every day video, audio, and text hub for content on religion + politics.

Here’s a preview of what’s coming.

Supercast → Substack: Over the next few months, we’re moving our membership platform from Supercast to Substack.

Supercast was recently acquired by the Fox Corporation that produces podcasts for Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Bill O’Reilly. That means SWAJ’s subscription fees and subscriber data are now flowing to Fox. To state the obvious, we don’t want that.

By moving to Substack we can expand into an integrated written, audio, and video platform in one place.

What this means for you:

You’ll be invited to migrate your membership to Substack so you can:

• Listen to SWAJ on a premium ad-free feed

• Access the new Daily Brief

• Receive member briefings

• Join live events

We’ll walk you through this step-by-step.

The Axis Daily Brief (M-F)

A short, focused analysis of the most important developments in religion and politics. Not just what happened—but what it means, and what to watch next. This is our historic expansion into a daily platform—and it’s only possible because of members.

• Daily 10-minute video/audio/article on the most important religion/politics story of the day.

• Team of contributors: Brad Onishi, Dan Miller, Matthew Taylor, Thomas Lecaque, and more.

Tuesdays — The Axis Report (June 16) - 1:30pm ET

Bradley Onishi will be live every Tuesday at 1:30 pm ET to analyze the most important developments shaping religion and politics in the United States and around the globe.

As usual, we skip the cable-news hot takes and superficial social media clickbait in order to provide historical context, theological analysis, and rigorous reporting delivered in real time.

And wait, there’s more: MATTHEW D. TAYLOR will join Brad all summer!

Fridays — The Weekly Roundup Goes Live (June 12) - 1:30pm ET

The beloved Weekly Roundup with Brad Onishi and Dan Miller is becoming a live video show across YouTube and streaming platforms. Join every Friday in order to ask questions, watch the show live, and catch up on the most important religion/politics stories from the week.

As always, it will be available on YouTube and the SWAJ podcast feed after it airs. If you want to listen, you can do just like always.

__________________________________________________________________

Starting after Labor Day 2026:

Thursdays – Unholy Kingdoms - Live with Matthew D. Taylor

If we can raise the funds, we’re also planning to launch a major new live show/podcast from scholar Matthew D. Taylor designed specifically for this political moment.

Unholy Kingdoms is a weekly show responding directly to the headlines shaping America’s crisis of democracy, religion, and authoritarianism. Hosted by Dr. Matthew D. Taylor—scholar of American Christianity and author of The Violent Take It by Force and the forthcoming Defying Tyrants—the show brings deep expertise, theological insight, and investigative analysis to the biggest stories driving the national conversation.

Reign of Error Returns for Season 2

And there’s more.

At a moment when authoritarianism, Christian supremacy, and the assault on democratic institutions are accelerating in real time, once we raise the necessary funding Reign of Error will return to investigate the networks, ideologies, power brokers, and political movements reshaping American public life.

Season 2 will deepen Axis Mundi’s commitment to investigative journalism and insider analysis—not just explaining these movements after the fact, but tracing how power operates in real time.

____________________________________________________________

Axis Mundi is becoming more than a podcast network.

We are building the essential newsroom for understanding religion, democracy, extremism, and power in America today.

And with your support, we can build it together.

• Direct support: https://axismundi.supercast.com/donations/new

• Tax-deductible donations through our partnering 501c3: https://www.irmce.org/donate

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The conversation pushes past simple deepfakes to examine the darker political economy and Silicon Valley ideologies underlying the modern tech ecosystem. Meyer and the hosts unpack the rise of "slop"—voted Merriam-Webster’s word of the year—and how algorithmic distribution networks reward dehumanizing depictions of marginalized groups while turning tech leaders into gladiatorial icons. By exploring how figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel's Alex Karp, and Charlie Kirk use these tools, the episode exposes a shared tech-authoritarian vision. This ideology frames AI not as a tool for public good, but as an unregulated, masculine force engineered for white, Western dominance, proving that the struggle over generative AI is fundamentally a battle over who controls the future of reality.

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• Read: The Interview

• Podshots: This Week on SWAJ

• Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week

• Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media

• Reasons for Hope

• The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

• SWAJerati: What We Are Reading

• SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

• Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

• Read: The Interview (cont.)

Read: The Interview

The Aesthetics of Digital Fascism

A Conversation between Annika Brockschmidt and Roland Meier

Why the Right Loves AI Images

Annika Brockschmidt: Let’s jump straight in. Why do AI-generated images seem so pervasive on the right? Is there something inherent to the technology that lends itself to far-right causes?

Roland Meier: I would say so. Far-right actors recognized very early on how attractive AI images are for them, and I think for several reasons. One is that they are structurally nostalgic—they have a very specific relationship to the past. They repeat and reinforce dominant cultural patterns, including racial stereotypes, gender clichés, sexist stereotypes. That’s something that is quite attractive to far-right actors.

They have a kind of populist aesthetic that is very effective on social media. That’s not by coincidence—it’s really by design. So there are these three dimensions: the relationship to the past, the discriminatory structures built into the images, and this populist aesthetic. And far-right actors very early on saw how well these image generators suit their interests.

At the same time, progressive and left-wing actors have largely rejected generative AI. They see it as exploitative—it uses artistic content, exploits creative labor, and relies on massive amounts of data work in the Global South. It’s extractive in every sense. So there’s a divide: the more the right uses these tools, the more the left opposes them. And that dynamic feeds itself.

The Interview continues at the end of the post…

Podshots: What’s Happening on SWAJ

The Sunday Interview: Synthetic Hate: How AI Fuels the Far Right

Wednesday: It’s In the Code

Friday: The Weekly Roundup

Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week

Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media

• Starting June 12 the Weekly Roundup will be live! Details to come, but get prepared to join us on YouTube for the live show!

• Starting June 16 Brad will be live every Tuesday - and Matthew D. Taylor will be joining him for the summer!

We are working on a major expansion into the next chapter of Axis Mundi Media

The Problem

• Most mainstream outlets:

  • parachute into religion stories

  • flatten or ignore Christian nationalism

  • have no expertise in minority American religions

  • treat authoritarian religion as “culture war content”

  • miss the theological infrastructure

  • misunderstand religious ecosystems

  • fail to connect religion to democratic erosion

  Meanwhile:

  • authoritarian movements are media ecosystems

  • Christian nationalism is increasingly normalized

  • independent journalism is collapsing

  • algorithmic outrage dominates discourse

  And:

  • Religion departments are closing

  • There are fewer jobs for religion PhDs

  • There are fewer positions for religion journalists

  • Mainstream media is being bought and controlled by oligarchs in bed with the regime

  ---

  Axis Mundi’s Answer

  Axis Mundi provides:

  • rigorous analysis

  • insider knowledge

  • scholarly depth

  • fast-response commentary

  • historical context

  • accessible journalism

  • independent accountability

  • expertise across the diverse religious landscape in the US

  We are creating the newsroom mainstream media never built for covering religion and politics.

Reasons for Hope:

• US district judge Christopher Cooper just ruled that the Kennedy center cannot be renamed without an act of congress. He gave the Trump administration 14 days to remove all the new physical signage and references to “Trump Kennedy Center” from official materials.
  

• Hawaii’s New Law on Corporate Donations Is a Model for US States: Opinion: A new ban on corporate political donations in Hawaii shows that states can limit corporate powers, including the power to influence elections.

• Budapest Pride allowed to take place in 2026 The decision signals a shift in LGBTQ+ policy in the country since Prime Minister Péter Magyar took office.

  The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

The Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement - founded by Bradley Onishi in 2023

SWAJerati: What We Are Reading

Interview coming soon!

Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to protect their religious practices. With the constitutional separation of church and state, it fell to the American people to decide: would they sharpen religion’s formidable powers of division, or reimagine its creative possibilities?

In A God-Shaped Nation, Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. It is a story of defiance: Anne Hutchinson, preaching against Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise serving soft-shell crab to his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet; and Wovoka, a Paiute man who envisioned the Ghost Dance movement, which persisted in the face of violent government repression at Wounded Knee. It is also a story of community: Millerites waiting together in vain for Jesus’s return on a rainy October night in 1844; Chinese immigrants bringing Daoist and Buddhist gods to their California temples; Mormons pushing westward to build their “new Zion” in Utah. And in the last fifty years, it has been a story of muscular political power, as the religious right has sought to shape the present and paint the past in its own image.

At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever before. “It is in history that the very human work of religion happens,” Wilensky-Lanford shows us, “and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in-stone tenets can and do change.”

https://groveatlantic.com/book/a-god-shaped-nation/

SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

Andrea: It’s funny how the people in every category that I was told wasn’t real Christianity growing up are the only ones who are doing what I thought Christianity was. Mainline Protestants, queer Christians, the pope for god’s sake. I would be more likely to convert to Catholicism than to go back to an evangelical church…I’m happy that the pope’s expression of faith includes human dignity, that Talarico’s Christianity is built on queer inclusion and feminism and morality.

Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

Kevin B.

Matthew H.

Jay H.

Ross W.

Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.

Read: The Interview (cont.)

How AI Reinforces Bias

Brockschmidt: You mentioned that these images are discriminatory. Is that because of the data AI is trained on?

Meier: That’s definitely part of it. These models are trained on huge amounts of content scraped from the web—basically a messy archive of contemporary digital visual culture. And that culture is already full of bias: racist, sexist, and otherwise. But it’s not just that AI reproduces that bias—it amplifies it. I think of generative AI as a kind of reverse pattern recognition. Traditionally, machine learning was used to distinguish patterns—cats versus dogs, male versus female, and so on. Now you start with a label, a prompt, and the model generates an image that best matches that description. But “best match” means the most recognizable, the most legible version—and that tends to be the most stereotypical version. So it reinforces clichés. It produces what people already expect to see. It’s not just reflecting bias—it’s intensifying it.

The Rise of Slop

Brockschmidt: Let’s talk about “slop.” What does that term actually capture?

Meier: There’s a tendency to call everything generated by AI “slop,” and I’m not sure that’s entirely helpful. But the term originally referred to a certain kind of AI-generated content—content produced purely to generate engagement. It started especially on Facebook, where accounts would churn out AI images all day, optimized for clicks. These were boosted by bots and pushed into users’ feeds whether they were looking for them or not. A famous example is “Shrimp Jesus”—which sounds absurd, but that’s the point. It was a recombination of highly effective motifs. Religious imagery, especially Jesus, generated a lot of engagement—people would comment “amen,” for example—and that fueled further distribution.

There were also other genres—images of veterans, or kids making crafts, asking for validation. These formats were then mixed together. So you got Jesus with shrimp, Jesus with flight attendants, Jesus with snakes—absurd combinations, but all designed to trigger reactions.

Brockschmidt: So the logic is just recombination of what works.

Meier: The main thing about slop is that it is synthetic content—mass-produced, cheaply produced, optimized for engagement. And the platforms themselves provide the feedback loop. You see what works and what doesn’t, and you can instantly generate more of what performs well. With generative AI, you can scale content production in ways that were impossible before—dozens of videos or images per day at almost no cost. That’s what I would call the slop economy. It’s also shaped by platform moderation. When platforms restrict political or news content, this kind of absurd, “apolitical” content can flourish. So it’s really the combination of platform architecture and AI production that produces slop.

Nostalgia, Cruelty, and Power

Brockschmidt: When we look at right-wing AI imagery, we see nostalgia, masculinity, domination. What’s going on there?

Meier: I think you already described it very well. For me, there are two main tendencies: nostalgia and cruelty—and they’re often mixed. On the one hand, there are these nostalgic worlds of a past that never really existed. A past of male dominance, Christian supremacy, a world where men could fulfill their role as breadwinners. These images are everywhere. On the other hand, you have images of enemies—people depicted as threats, as faceless masses of migrants, as invaders. These images justify exclusion and violence.

And then there’s a third dimension: self-deification. Figures like Trump or Musk are depicted as gladiators, as Roman centurions, as superhero figures. But it’s never historically accurate—it’s a kind of mashup of historical imagery, video games, and pop culture. A kind of hypermasculine fantasy. So you have the ideal, the enemy, and the masculine figure who defends the ideal against the enemy.

Brockschmidt: Do these aesthetics differ between the U.S. and Europe?

Roland Meier: Yes, definitely. In the U.S., you have the mythology of the frontier—that’s very prominent. In Germany, that doesn’t resonate. Instead, you get idealized medieval towns—cobblestone streets, half-timbered houses, a kind of “Heidelberg” aesthetic. This connects to the idea of Stadtbild—the image of a city. In right-wing discourse, migrants are framed as a disruption of that image. And AI imagery visualizes that idea, creating idealized, homogeneous spaces. At the same time, there’s a transnational exchange. German far-right accounts sometimes copy American imagery—white Christian families, even with weapons, which is not traditionally a German thing. And in Europe, Islamophobia is central. You see dystopian images of the future—societies entirely populated by Muslims, framed as a nightmare scenario. It’s a direct visualization of the “great replacement” theory.

Brockschmidt: I’ve noticed a lot of imagery around traditional femininity—dirndls, rural life, idealized families. Is that part of the same pattern?

Meier: Yes, exactly. These are codes for traditional gender roles and family structures. Women are depicted as symbols of tradition, men as protectors or workers. There’s also nostalgia for industrial capitalism—images of white working-class men rebuilding the nation, especially in U.S. government messaging. It’s a vision of a past where economic and social hierarchies were stable.

Digital Fascism

Annika Brockschmidt: You use the term “digital fascism.” Why?

Roland Meier: I’m not the first to use it, but I think it captures something important. What we’re seeing is a process of normalization—what some call “fascisticization.” Fascist ideas and aesthetics are becoming more common, even within liberal democracies. What interests me is how this intersects with technology. Both the far right and certain tech elites share a vision of AI as a powerful force—something that should be unleashed. There’s this idea that AI is naturally a force of truth, and that attempts to address bias—diversity, equity, inclusion—are distortions. So they invert the critique of bias. At the same time, AI is framed as a tool to restore greatness—economically, geopolitically, ideologically. It becomes both a symbol and an instrument of dominance. And that mythologization of technology—turning it into something almost sacred or inevitable—is something we’ve seen in historical fascism as well.

Brockschmidt: Was there a moment that really stood out to you?

Roland Meier: Yes. One example that stayed with me was a Ghibli-style image of a Dominican woman being arrested. The original photo showed her in distress, and the AI version turned it into something cute, anime-like. That combination—of cutification and cruelty—was deeply unsettling. It turned an act of violence into a meme. And when people criticized it, the response was: “The memes will continue. The arrests will continue.” That, to me, captures what’s happening. Politics becomes meme production. The meme doesn’t just represent violence—it becomes part of it. It celebrates it, normalizes it, and turns it into something shareable. Later, similar images appeared—manipulated photos exaggerating emotion, turning people into objects of ridicule. It’s a performance of dominance through visual culture.

Digital Fascism

Brockschmidt: It all sounds like a feedback loop: images that reinforce beliefs, intensify emotions, and normalize extreme ideas. Digital fascism is not just about content—it’s about infrastructure. Perhaps the most striking thing you’ve shared is how unsubtle it all is. There’s no hidden meaning to decode. It’s all right there—immediate, exaggerated, and endlessly repeatable.

The Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Introduction

We’re continuing our look at Josh Hawley’s view of masculinity and the supposed masculine virtues that he claims will remake America. In the final chapter of his book, Hawley presents the last of six roles that he says men are called to play: king.

I suppose this isn’t surprising for someone who’s an avowed Christian nationalist and who is putting forward, by definition, a patriarchal vision of society. But there are some interesting things to note about the way he does this, especially the way he moves between two registers that have long defined conservative Christian political theology in the United States.

The first is a kind of “spiritual self-help” understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith. The second is (of course) a monarchical vision whereby the social order is overseen by, well, a king. We have to remember that Hawley is an advocate of the “unified executive” theory championed by Trump and his allies, which already leans in the direction of concentrated authority, even if it is not explicitly framed as monarchy.

I’ve also talked a lot about how Hawley reads the Bible. But as we come to this final chapter, it’s also worth stepping back and asking what the Bible is for him in the first place, because Josh Hawley’s Bible is… weird.

So here’s what I want to do in this episode. I want to look, in kind of quick-hit fashion, at some reasons why I say his Bible is “weird.” Then I want to look at the “self-help” nature of his spirituality. And in the next episode, which will be the last on this chapter, we’ll look at what I take to be the political dimensions of his focus on kingship.

Hawley’s Weird Bible

OK. We’ve talked a lot about what Hawley does with the Bible, and I don’t want to rehash all of that here. But we do need to say something about the supposed “Adam cycle” that he claims structures the entire Bible.

Again, this is the idea that God tasked Adam with being his representative on earth, making the world into a kind of temple fit for divine presence. Adam fails, and so after that failure, the Bible becomes essentially a series of stories about men God raises up to renew Adam’s original task—which is ultimately, in Hawley’s framing, the task of all men. In his reading, all the biblical figures he discusses are recapitulations of Adam, and these stories together form what he calls the “Adam cycle” in the Bible.

Now, I’ve already said the obvious: the Bible does not actually describe itself this way. Hawley is importing a structure that simply isn’t there. But when I say his Bible is weird today, I’m pointing to something more specific than just that interpretive move.

His exemplar in this final chapter is King Solomon. And I’ve got a lot to say about why that choice is, on its own terms, strange.

Hawley tells us that the “Adam stories” (again, the Bible doesn’t call them this) “culminate with another [king], Solomon” (p. 180). That is a very odd claim.

Let’s pause for a moment and see what is actually being asserted here. Hawley is saying that this “Adam cycle” that structures the Bible begins with Adam and ends with Solomon. Solomon. Not Moses, not David in any full theological sense, not the prophetic tradition, not exile and return, and certainly not Jesus—Solomon.

In other words, Hawley’s Bible, the core of it, the “canon within the canon” (to borrow a more traditional theological phrase), runs from Adam through Solomon. That means that the vast majority of the Bible is functionally irrelevant for the structural logic of Hawley’s system. It might contain useful material, moral insights, narrative interest, but the “real” arc is already basically complete if you just move from Genesis to 1 Kings.

And if you’re keeping score, there are two accounts of Solomon’s death in the Bible, the second in 2 Chronicles—which is already roughly a quarter of the way through the biblical text if you’re reading canonically.

So Hawley’s Bible is weird in a very literal sense: the Christian nationalist who presents himself as defending biblical authority appears to lose interest in most of the Bible fairly early on. And, again, he leaves out the figure whom a biblical author explicitly calls the “new Adam,” Jesus. We’ve talked about that omission before, but it becomes even more glaring when you see how tightly he constrains the entire biblical narrative into this Adam-to-Solomon arc.

Just weird.

Solomon is a Weird Choice

But the issues don’t stop there. Hawley’s selection of Solomon as the culminating figure in this “Adam cycle” is itself deeply odd.

As he notes, the Bible says that Solomon “excelled all the kings of the earth… in wisdom” (2 Chron. 9:22). Solomon is, in the received tradition, a paragon of wisdom, possibly the wisest human ruler who ever lived, at least according to the biblical narrative of divine gifting.

And Hawley leans heavily into that image.

But here’s what often gets left out in these modern invocations of Solomon as a model ruler: the Bible itself also presents a far more complicated, even damning, portrait of his reign.

Yes, Solomon amasses great wealth. Yes, he builds the Temple. Yes, he becomes the archetype of royal splendor and administrative capacity. But his domestic policies also set in motion the fragmentation of Israel.

His taxation regime is heavy. His building projects require forced labor. These policies deepen tensions between the northern and southern tribes. And after Solomon’s death, the kingdom splits into two: the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah. That division becomes a foundational political catastrophe in the biblical narrative, eventually leading to conquest and exile for both.

So we might reasonably ask: is this really the model king Hawley wants to center? The wisest man who, by the logic of the narrative itself, presides over the conditions that fracture his own kingdom?

“Wisest man who ever lived”? I hope not.

King is a Weird Choice

It’s worth stepping back even further and noticing something else strange in Hawley’s argument: the decision to make kingship itself the organizing political and moral category.

Hawley insists throughout the chapter that kingship is God’s model for masculinity and leadership. The king becomes the template for ordered authority, disciplined desire, and rightly structured hierarchy.

But what he does not fully reckon with is that the same biblical tradition he appeals to is deeply ambivalent about kingship itself.

In 1 Samuel, the demand for a king is treated as a rejection of divine rule. God is portrayed as displeased when Israel asks to be like other nations in appointing a monarch. The institution of kingship is, at its origin in the text, framed as a concession—and arguably a failure mode—not an ideal.

There are counter-readings, of course. Deuteronomy 17 can be read as anticipating kingship in a more regulated form, setting constraints on royal behavior. But that only complicates the picture further. The Bible is not presenting a simple, unified endorsement of monarchy as the divine political form.

And that matters, because Hawley’s argument depends on precisely that simplification: kingship as naturalized masculinity, and masculinity as divinely sanctioned authority.

But the text itself is much more conflicted than that.

Spiritual Self-Help

So Hawley’s Bible is weird.

But there is a second problem here that runs through the entire book and becomes especially visible in this chapter. And it has to do with what happens when you try to make a biblical model of kingship “relevant” to modern life.

One of the obvious problems with appealing to kingship as a moral framework is that most readers are not kings. We do not live in monarchies. We do not exercise sovereign authority. And even if we did, the historical and cultural distance between ancient Near Eastern monarchy and contemporary democratic life is vast.

So the question becomes: what exactly is this supposed to mean for anyone today?

Hawley’s answer is familiar. It is the standard move in a certain strain of evangelical interpretation: take an ancient, context-specific institution, strip it of its political specificity, and translate it into generalizable moral advice.

What you get is something that looks less like biblical interpretation and more like spiritual self-help.

This is what I call Hawley’s “sermonizing,” because it is the kind of interpretive move you hear in a certain register of evangelical preaching over and over again: the extraction of timeless principles from highly situated narratives, followed by their presentation as universal life wisdom.

Take Solomon, for example. Hawley tells us Solomon is a great king because he “attends to his character” and submits himself to God (p. 190). From there, he draws a conclusion for the reader: “That is how he will be able to bring blessing and order to others, when his own soul is ordered and blessed. Self-discipline is self-mastery, and self-mastery is strength, and a man’s strength, in the biblical view, can bless and empower others” (p. 190).

What is happening here is a shift from narrative description to therapeutic abstraction. We begin with kingship, power, and political order, and end with something that sounds like a motivational seminar about discipline and productivity.

“Self-mastery is strength.” “Order your inner life and you will influence others.” It is difficult to see what, if anything, in the biblical text requires that conclusion in those terms. And yet it is framed as “the biblical view.”

We see this again when Hawley cites Deuteronomy 17:17, which warns that a king “shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away” (p. 191). Most readers today are not managing royal harems, so the immediate relevance is not obvious. Hawley translates it into something like this: “Don’t indulge yourself. Don’t live for personal gratification. Don’t make satisfying desire your life’s aim.” It is a move from specificity to platitude.

Or again, when he addresses wealth: the king “shall not acquire for himself excessive silver and gold” (p. 191). Given Solomon’s own portrayal as extraordinarily wealthy, the tension is obvious. Hawley resolves it by abstracting: “Don’t make wealth your god. Don’t worship social status. Ambition is good and worthwhile, but money for the sake of money is an ultimately empty pursuit” (p. 192).

At this point, the biblical text has effectively become a vehicle for common sense moral advice. And that is the recurring pattern: ancient political theology transformed into contemporary therapeutic instruction.

The irony is that in the effort to make the Bible “relevant,” it often becomes indistinguishable from the very secular self-help discourse it is supposed to transcend. And where, one might ask, did the kingship go in all of this? Where did the specifically political and structural dimensions of authority disappear to? What remains are general virtues: discipline, moderation, ambition properly ordered. All good things, perhaps—but not especially “kingly,” and not especially distinctive either.

Conclusion

We’re done for today; I’ve got to stop here. But we are not done with Hawley because he is not going to stop at spiritual self-help. He is going to move, more explicitly, toward a Christian nationalist account of political authority—though in ways that are often subtle, softened, and presented as moral common sense rather than overt ideology.

And that is where we are going next.

-Dan Miller

The conversation dives deep into the ethics of cultural appropriation and extraction, questioning how affluent Westerners commodify sacred traditions while the minoritized communities who sustained them struggle to survive. From analyzing Alcoholics Anonymous as the original "spiritual but not religious" program to unpacking a 97-year-old monk's parable on why we fail to find enlightenment, Dr. Bucar and Brad challenge listeners to move beyond self-care and re-engage with true community and obligation. Whether you practice daily meditation, teach yoga, or are simply curious about the intersection of religion and consumerism, this episode is a vital look at what it actually takes to dig a deep spiritual well.

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• Read: The Interview

• Podshots: This Week on SWAJ

• Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week

• Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media

• Reasons for Hope

• The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

• SWAJerati: What We Are Reading

• SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

• Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

• Read: The Interview (cont.)

Read: The Interview

Beyond the Salad Bar

A Conversation with Liz Bucar

Onishi: Your new book is Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us. What was the genesis of the book? What problem did you want to address?

Bucar: This is my first trade book, and I was really trying to think about where religion was hiding in plain sight for people who say, “I don’t care about religion.” And I realized it’s underneath a lot of this wellness industry stuff. When I started writing, people were already starting to question that industry—like, “I don’t know if Gwyneth Paltrow is really my spirit animal.” So part of it was personal: what did wellness sell me that didn’t work? And part of it was analytical: how does a religious studies lens help us understand what’s going on? A lot of these practices are based on what I’d call bad theology—often Protestant theology—and they offer anemic understandings of human flourishing. It’s just too low of a bar. I want more. So the book is asking: what would “more” look like, especially for people like me who aren’t religiously affiliated?

Onishi: It seems like this is for people invested in wellness—mindfulness, yoga, diet—but who don’t understand the religious dimensions of what they’re doing.

Bucar: Yeah, that’s right. I walk through seven practices and ask what it would look like to put them back into more religious contexts. I thought the book would be for people who were anti-religion, but I’m actually finding it resonates with practitioners and people who are already religious but drawn to these practices and wondering why. We’re always looking for authenticity, like there’s some pure version of these rituals, but that’s not really what I’m after. I just want people to understand what’s there—what we’re missing when we do these things because Instagram told us to, or in a purely therapeutic setting.

The Interview continues at the end of the post…

Podshots: What’s Happening on SWAJ

The Sunday Interview: Beyond Wellness with Liz Bucar

Tuesday: Corruption, Surrender, and Family Values

Wednesday: It’s In the Code

Friday: The Weekly Roundup

Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week

Christian Trumpists Are a Minority: Brad Onishi on MSNow

Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media

Love Letters From Reverend Sex

Reasons for Hope:

• All remaining charges against the ‘Broadview Six’—a group of anti-Trump protesters charged with conspiracy—have been dismissed with prejudice and cannot be refiled. Furthermore, the prosecutors involved may be facing charges themselves.

• ICE agent Christian J. Castro is facing four counts of second-degree assault as well as one count of falsely reporting a crime after the Jan. 14 shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis in north Minneapolis. Castro claims Sosa-Celis assaulted him with a snow shovel before the shooting, but surveillance footage contradicts his account. Perhaps shockingly, the acting ICE director has admitted that the agents involved appear to have made “false statements.”

• A grove of Torrey pines, the rarest native pines in the USA, have been spared from a forest fire ravaging Santa Rosa Island. The trees can only be found on the island and Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve in San Diego.

The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

Brad Onishi just got home from a research trip on Island Hawai’i with the Capps Center on UCSB. The goal is to create a narrative podcast around the work of Halealoha. Read more here:

SWAJerati: What We Are Reading

SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

Theo: Oh, silly me, thinking Hawley would look to the Bible for a figure of a priest. Gandalf, really?

Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

Jay H.

Ross W.

Cindy B.

Ryan M.

Christopher L.

Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.

Read: The Interview (cont.)

Beyond the Salad Bar

A Conversation with Liz Bucar

Yoga and Devotion

Onishi: You’re not institutionally religious, but you’ve practiced yoga deeply, even becoming certified. How has that shaped your thinking?

Bucar: I wouldn’t have thought of yoga as religious at all. My mom learned it from PBS—it was totally separate from church. I started it like most people, for physical reasons. But when I immersed myself in it—daily practice, teacher training, studying its roots—it shifted everything. I started thinking about my yoga as devotional, which was the first time I could say that out loud. It also made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to teach it anymore because I didn’t want to be a guru or a religious authority. But it made my personal practice more meaningful. What it taught me is that these embodied practices aren’t separate from beliefs—they shape how you think and see the world. They cultivate virtue. And if you understand that, you can engage them more intentionally—or decide you don’t want to be changed in that way.

Onishi: You talk about the “spiritual salad bar” not serving us. What is that?

Bucar: Most people aren’t ordering off a religious menu anymore—they’re going to the salad bar and picking what they like. Yoga, mindfulness, tarot, whatever is trending. But we don’t really know what we’re putting on our plate. We don’t understand the ingredients, the risks, or what these practices are meant to do. I’m not saying we should stop mixing traditions—that’s just how American religion works now. But we should do it more responsibly, with more awareness. When you add back in community and ethics, these practices just work better.

Onishi: You went to a Buddhist monastery in West Virginia for a silent retreat. What did you take from that?

Bucar: Sitting meditation is not something I enjoy, so doing nine to eleven hours a day was physical torture. But being in that community and hearing the teachings was incredibly meaningful. The abbots explained that meditation is just one leg of a stool. Without ethics and community, it falls over. We’ve taken one leg and turned it into a whole industry. One monk told me this story about digging a well—people want enlightenment, but instead of digging one deep hole, they dig lots of shallow ones and then say it doesn’t work. That’s what we’re doing—jumping from practice to practice, chasing dopamine, avoiding discipline.

Dopamine vs. Discipline

Onishi: You write that popular spiritual practices function like “dopamine hits.” That feels like the heart of the book.

Bucar: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yoga gets a bad rap as spiritual bypassing, but often for good reason. It can become a way to disengage from the world—to calm down, to let go, while everything around us is falling apart. I want a spirituality that’s engaged, that helps me process my rage and use it, not just suppress it. I think religion has a PR problem, but spirituality does too. We’ve been sold this very light, individualized version—follow your gut, chase good vibes—but your gut is formed by systems. What we avoid is discipline and conviction, which are the parts of religion we don’t like but are often what actually work.

Higher Powers

Onishi: You also write about AA. Why include that?

Bucar: AA is the original “spiritual but not religious” practice, but it’s deeply rooted in Protestant Christianity. The language of God and higher power is everywhere. That can make it hard for people who’ve left religion. For me, this chapter was personal—my father was an alcoholic and rejected AA because of its religious language. I went to Al-Anon meetings and thought about what parts of it might still be meaningful. For me, the idea of a higher power doesn’t have to mean God—it can just mean I’m not God. That kind of de-centering is actually really powerful.

Onishi: Let me ask bluntly—do we even need spiritual practices? Can’t we just focus on health, fitness, longevity?

Bucar: That’s wellness, and that’s a very small part of human flourishing. Being human is about being ethical, being in community, being engaged in the world. We’re all isolated, but we forget that real community requires obligation—it’s not just people showing up for you, it’s you showing up for them. These practices, when understood deeply, help us ask bigger questions about what it means to live well, especially in a time when everything feels like it’s breaking.

Borrowing and Responsibility

Onishi: A lot of these practices come from marginalized communities. How do you think about that?

Bucar: That was the focus of my last book—what do we owe the communities we borrow from? This book is more about what comes next. Some practices aren’t meant for outsiders, and we should respect that. But where there is openness, it’s about finding the right teacher and community and not being extractive. Because when we extract practices, we can actually harm the communities they come from—defund them, deplete them, distort them.

Onishi: I think where I land is this tension—you want the fruits of these traditions without joining them. You want the benefits without the obligation.

Bucar: I think that’s fair. But a lot of people feel like institutions aren’t fit for purpose anymore. So what would we even join? I think we’re in a moment of reimagining something new. But I also agree—you can’t do this alone. You need community, teachers, relationships, even imperfect ones.

Onishi: I think that’s where I end up. If I’m going to take from these traditions, what’s my responsibility to the communities that sustain them? If I’m not willing to join or give back, should I be taking at all?

Bucar: That’s the question. And I don’t think there’s a simple answer. But I do think engaging these practices more deeply—understanding their roots, their risks, and their demands—is the beginning of figuring it out.

The Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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We’re entering the final chapter of Josh Hawley’s Manhood, ready—at last—to receive his concluding wisdom on the masculine virtues that, we’re told, will save America and help recover something like authentic American manhood. As a reminder, the final section of Hawley’s book is structured around six distinct roles that men are supposedly called to play, and it is by inhabiting these roles that men both recover and express their proper masculine virtue. And the final role on that list is a doozy: king. Now, I have plenty of thoughts about how Hawley imagines “kingship,” and we’ll get there, but because this is our last opportunity to really dig into one of his chapters, I want to zoom out for a moment and highlight a couple of broader strategies he uses throughout the book—strategies that connect with themes we’ve already encountered and that reveal something important about how conservative, biblicist Christians actually use the Bible and appeal to it.

“The Bible Says…”

Let’s start with a phrase you’ll recognize immediately if you’ve spent any time in these circles: “The Bible says…” or some variation like “the Bible teaches,” “the Bible tells us,” or “according to the Bible.” If you grew up around conservative, biblicist Christianity—the kind where people insist that everything they believe is grounded in scripture—you know this language intimately, and even if you didn’t, you’ve encountered it if you’ve spent any time engaging with those communities. It’s a kind of verbal shorthand that signals something deeper, and Hawley’s book is saturated with it. These phrases appear over and over again, quietly framing his claims and functioning as a kind of rhetorical cue to the reader that what follows is not merely Josh Hawley’s opinion, not an argument he is making, not an interpretation he is offering, but rather a simple report of “what the Bible says.” That move is doing a tremendous amount of work, and if we don’t slow down and decode it, we’ll miss just how much is being smuggled in under the surface.

A Claim to Authority

At the most basic level, this is a claim to authority, and within biblicist forms of Christianity, it is the highest claim one can make. If you didn’t grow up in these traditions, you might reasonably ask why anyone should care what the Bible says, but within these communities that question doesn’t really make sense, because the Bible is treated as the ultimate and final authority on all matters that matter. If “the Bible says it,” then that settles the issue, and no further argument is required. On the flip side, believers are expected to hold their views—especially on major moral, cultural, or political questions—because “the Bible says so,” which functions not only as a justification but as an endpoint to discussion. So when Hawley tells us that “the Bible teaches” something, he is not simply making a descriptive claim about a text; he is invoking the highest possible authority within his framework and attaching it to his own ideas. This is why, as we’ve seen before, he is so eager to launder his views about masculinity through scripture, taking ideas that originate with him and reading them back into the text so that they can return to the reader bearing the weight of divine authority. It is also why this move is designed to shut down debate before it begins—because if the Bible says it, then, in this framework, there is nothing left to argue about. You can see this logic crystallized in that old bumper sticker: “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it,” which captures perfectly the way authority is being claimed and deployed.

When the “Bible Card” Fails

What’s interesting, though, is what happens when this appeal to authority doesn’t land—when someone simply refuses to grant the Bible that status. In my own experience, I’ve had countless conversations where someone confidently plays the “Bible card,” assuring me that their position is simply “what the Bible says,” and when I respond with something like, “Okay, but what if I don’t care what the Bible says?” the conversation almost immediately stalls out. They repeat the claim—“but the Bible clearly says…”—and the response remains the same: “That’s fine, but it’s not an authority for me. Do you have another reason I should agree with you?” At that point, many people have nowhere to go, because if their entire argument rests on the authority of the Bible, and that authority is not accepted, then the argument collapses. And when that happens, the conversation often shifts away from reasoning and toward personal attack, with motives questioned and character impugned, a classic move into ad hominem territory. While this can be frustrating, it is also revealing, because it shows just how much of the confidence behind these claims rests not on evidence or argument but on a kind of dogmatic commitment to the authority of the text.

“I’m Not Interpreting—It Just Says That”

There’s another layer to this, however, and it’s a bit more subtle. Consider a familiar exchange: someone says, “Well, the Bible says…,” and another person responds, “That’s one interpretation, but another way to read it is…,” only to be met with the insistence, “No—I’m not interpreting it. I’m just telling you what it says. You’re the one twisting it.” What’s going on here is a deeply embedded assumption within biblicist Christianity that the meaning of the Bible is obvious, plain, and unambiguous, often referred to as the “plain meaning” of scripture. The implication is that faithful readers don’t interpret the text—they simply read it and report what is there—while interpretation is something that unfaithful or misguided people do when they distort or manipulate the text. This creates a powerful rhetorical asymmetry, because if your reading is simply “what the text says,” then any disagreement must be the result of someone else’s distortion, not a legitimate difference in interpretation. There are no competing readings, only faithful reading versus unfaithful twisting. The problem, of course, is that this distinction collapses under even minimal scrutiny, because all reading is interpretation.

Interpretation All the Way Down

Every act of reading involves interpretation, whether we are aware of it or not, and we know this from our everyday experience. We’ve all misunderstood someone’s tone in a text message, missed sarcasm, or had to ask, “Wait—what did you mean by that?” Most of the time, our interpretations are so habitual and effective that we don’t notice them, but the moment communication breaks down, interpretation becomes visible. The same is true—perhaps even more so—of complex, ancient texts like the Bible, which come to us across vast distances of time, language, and culture. So when someone insists, “I’m not interpreting the Bible, I’m just telling you what it says,” they are not stepping outside interpretation; they are offering one while attempting to shield it from critique by denying that it is an interpretation at all. That’s the basic version of this move, the junior varsity level, where the claim to non-interpretation is used to protect a particular reading from challenge.

Varsity-Level Moves

Hawley, however, operates at a more sophisticated level, combining this appeal to the “plain meaning” of scripture with another crucial fact: most people—even those who believe deeply in the Bible’s authority—do not actually read it closely or know it well. This allows him to repeatedly assert that “the Bible says” or “the Bible teaches” something without actually quoting the text, making claims about its meaning without showing his work. And this matters, because when you do go looking for the passages he is alluding to, they often don’t say anything like what he claims. His recurring argument that biblical figures are recapitulations of Adam and Adam’s calling is a good example; he presents this as something the Bible “teaches,” but the text itself does not make that claim in any straightforward way. What is happening here is that Hawley is offering a specific and highly contestable interpretation, but by presenting it as simply what the Bible says, he collapses the distinction between text and meaning and grants his interpretation an aura of unquestionable authority. For readers predisposed to trust biblical appeals and unlikely to check the references, this is an effective move, allowing a shallow or tendentious reading to pass as obvious truth.

What You Said vs. What You Meant

We can understand this dynamic by thinking about a common kind of disagreement in everyday life, where someone says, “You said…,” and you respond, “No, I didn’t—I said this,” only for them to reply, “Well, what you meant was….” That gap between what was said and what was meant is where interpretation lives, and it is where disagreements emerge. What Hawley is doing is taking his account of what he thinks the Bible means and presenting it as what the Bible says, collapsing that gap in order to foreclose debate and make his interpretation appear inevitable rather than arguable.

Why This Matters

At this point, it’s worth asking why this matters, why it’s worth spending this much time on what might seem like a rhetorical technicality, and the answer is that this move is not unique to Hawley at all. It is, in fact, a foundational feature of conservative Christian preaching and interpretation, something I have seen repeatedly in hundreds of sermons where complex, ideologically loaded readings were presented as nothing more than “what the Bible says.” It is also a key mechanism in high-control religious environments, where leaders assert authority by convincing others that their interpretations are simply the unambiguous voice of scripture and therefore not open to question. Hawley applies this strategy to masculinity and manhood, but the same mechanism is used across a wide range of issues, from politics to gender to economics to nationalism, and once you see it, you begin to recognize it everywhere.

A Test Case

If you’re still unsure whether this gap between what the text says and what it means really matters, consider a simple test case. Take the story in Matthew 19, where a wealthy man asks Jesus how to attain eternal life, and where the takeaway, on a straightforward reading, is stark: it is extraordinarily difficult—effectively impossible—for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. Now bring that passage to a conservative Christian in the United States, a society defined by unprecedented wealth and affluence, and ask what it means. You will almost never hear a straightforward affirmation of the text’s apparent message. Instead, you’ll encounter reinterpretations—the “eye of the needle” becomes a mythical gate in Jerusalem, the passage becomes about priorities rather than wealth itself, and the meaning shifts to accommodate contemporary commitments. In other words, the text says one thing, but its meaning is adjusted, and yet the claim remains that this adjusted meaning is simply “what the Bible says.”

Conclusion

So where does all of this leave us? Hawley, like many conservative Christians, presents himself as someone who is simply reporting what the Bible says, trading on the assumption that its meaning is clear, obvious, and unambiguous. But what he is actually doing is offering a specific interpretation, one shaped by his own commitments about masculinity, authority, and social order, and in many cases the meaning he draws from the text is far removed from what it actually says. The gap between what the Bible says and what it is made to mean is not incidental; it is a central mechanism through which high-control religion operates and maintains its authority, allowing interpretations to masquerade as facts and arguments to present themselves as inevitabilities. Hawley’s book is not unique in this regard, but it is a particularly clear illustration of how the process works, and in the next installment we’ll turn back to the substance of his argument and look more closely at what he claims the Bible says about “man as king.”

-Dan Miller

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Sunday’s nine-hour “Rededicate 250” event on the National Mall brought together politicians and religious leaders calling for America to be returned to God. In this episode, Brad Onishi breaks down key statements from figures like Robert Jeffress, Mike Johnson, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio, exposing how their claims rely on selective history, mythmaking, and a deeply misleading vision of the founding. From the Doctrine of Discovery to the legend of Washington at Valley Forge, the story being told isn’t just inaccurate—it’s strategic.

This episode argues that Christian nationalism is not about personal faith or patriotism, but about power: the belief that certain religious identities deserve greater authority in public life. By revisiting the Constitution, the founding era, and the principle of “we the people,” Brad shows what’s actually at stake—religious freedom, democratic equality, and the boundary between church and state. The question isn’t whether religion belongs in American life, but whether the government gets to decide whose religion counts.

This episode argues that Christian nationalism is not about personal faith or patriotism, but about power: the belief that certain religious identities deserve greater authority in public life. By revisiting the Constitution, the founding era, and the principle of “we the people,” Brad shows what’s actually at stake—religious freedom, democratic equality, and the boundary between church and state. The question isn’t whether religion belongs in American life, but whether the government gets to decide whose religion counts.

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