# Josh Hawley — "the Pelagian heresy" > [!quote] "Our Pelagian public philosophy says liberty is all about choosing your own ends. That turns out to be a philosophy for the privileged and for the few. For everybody else, for those who cannot build an identity around what they buy, for those whose life is anchored in family, and home, and nation, for those who actually want to participate in our democracy, today's Pelagianism robs them of the liberty that is rightfully theirs. And we cannot afford to let it happen any longer. The age of Pelagius must end." > — Josh Hawley, commencement address at The King's College, New York City, May 11, 2019 In the same address, Hawley explicitly linked the Supreme Court to the heresy: > [!quote] "Perhaps the most eloquent contemporary statement of Pelagian freedom appears in an opinion from the United States Supreme Court, in a passage written by former Justice Anthony Kennedy. ... 'At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.' It's the Pelagian vision. Liberty is the right to choose your own meaning, define your own values, emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self." > — Josh Hawley, "The Age of Pelagius," adapted in Christianity Today, June 2019 ## Context [[Josh Hawley]] delivered this address to the graduating class of The King's College in New York City on May 11, 2019. He later adapted it into an essay titled "The Age of Pelagius" published in Christianity Today. The speech came two months before his keynote at the inaugural [[National Conservatism]] Conference in Washington DC (July 18, 2019), where he deployed overlapping themes about the "cosmopolitan consensus" without the explicit heresiological framing — see [[Josh Hawley - cosmopolitan elite]]. Hawley's biographical profile matters here. He is a Yale Law graduate who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and worked as an attorney at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty before serving as Missouri Attorney General and winning his Senate seat. He is not a preacher freelancing theology — he is a sitting US senator with elite legal credentials deliberately deploying 5th-century doctrinal categories to frame contemporary political opponents. The speech draws on the Pelagius-Augustine dispute, in which Pelagius argued that human beings possess the free will to achieve their own salvation without divine grace, and Augustine insisted on the necessity of grace and the reality of original sin. Pelagianism was condemned as heresy at the Council of Carthage (418 AD) and the Council of Ephesus (431 AD). Hawley's move is to map this theological dispute onto modern liberalism: the liberal emphasis on individual autonomy, self-definition, and freedom of choice is, in his telling, a recapitulation of Pelagius's error. The cosmopolitan elite who champion these values are not merely wrong about policy — they are repeating a heresy condemned by the Church 1,600 years ago. The speech names Justice Anthony Kennedy's famous passage in *Casey v. Planned Parenthood* (1992) — "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence" — as the purest modern expression of this heresy. ## Why this matters A sitting US senator explicitly diagnosing his political opponents' worldview as a 5th-century [[Christian Nationalism]] heresy. This is the "politics as holy war" frame at its most intellectualized: the disagreement is not about policy but about theological error. Where [[Pat Buchanan]] used populist religious language and Jerry Falwell used televangelist apocalypticism, Hawley deploys academic theology to reach the same destination — liberalism is not wrong, it is *heretical*. This makes compromise not just inadvisable but sinful. The speech connects several threads tracked in this vault. It shares DNA with [[Dominionism]] and the [[Spiritual Warfare]] frame: if the political order is grounded in theological truth, then secular liberalism is not a competing political philosophy but a spiritual rebellion. It updates the [[Paleoconservatism]] of Buchanan for a new generation of [[New Right]] intellectuals who orbit the National Conservatism Conference alongside figures like Yoram Hazony and the editors of *First Things*. And it provides the theological scaffolding for the populist economic critique Hawley articulates in his NatCon speech — the cosmopolitan elite are not just economically exploitative, they are spiritually disordered. Katherine Stewart's January 2021 New York Times column "The Roots of Josh Hawley's Rage" connected this theological worldview to Hawley's role in challenging the 2020 election results, arguing that his "starkly binary" vision is "incompatible with constitutional democracy." The Baptist News Global analysis by Matt Dodrill made a sharper point: Hawley's own political paternalism — a spiritual elite training the collective will of a nation — is itself more Pelagian than Augustinian. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [Christianity Today — "The Age of Pelagius"](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2019/06/age-of-pelagius-joshua-hawley/), adapted from the May 11, 2019 commencement address at The King's College, NYC. - **Reporting:** [The Federalist — "How American Elites Threaten Our Common Liberty"](https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/14/hawley-american-elites-threaten-common-liberty/) (sympathetic coverage with extensive verbatim excerpts). - **Analysis:** [Baptist News Global — "What does Pelagius have to do with Josh Hawley and white nationalism?"](https://baptistnews.com/article/what-does-pelagius-have-to-do-with-josh-hawley-and-white-nationalism/) (Matt Dodrill, Jan 2021). - **Status:** Verbatim from the senator's own published text and C-SPAN recording. ## Related quotes - [[Josh Hawley - cosmopolitan elite]] — the companion NatCon keynote from the same summer, deploying the populist-economic version of the same argument without the heresiological framing. - [[Pat Buchanan - religious war for the soul of America]] — the 1992 prototype for framing politics as spiritual combat. - [[Mike Johnson - go pick up a Bible]] — another sitting officeholder explicitly grounding governance in Scripture. - [[Josh Hawley - epidemic of men]] — Hawley's later extension of this worldview into gender politics and the "masculinity crisis." ## Part of collections - Featured in [[Politics as Holy War]] — the intellectual-theological entry in the Manichaean-politics arc.