U.S. Senator Josh Hawley delivered the 2026 Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, charging the seminary community to lead the nation toward spiritual revival by engaging its deepest moral and cultural crises.
Drawing from 2 Samuel 24, in which the Lord commands King David to “go up” to the threshing floor of Araunah and raise an altar in the midst of a national plague, Hawley argued that American Christians face a similar moment of reckoning.
“What the United States needs above all as we approach our 250th birthday is revival,” Hawley said. “Not just good laws, not just good people in public life—above all, revival.”
Hawley framed his message around three imperatives from the text: to “go up,” to “raise up an altar,” and to “lay down” one’s life before the Lord.
‘Go Up’: The Church Must Not Stay Silent
Hawley challenged what he called the world’s long-standing demand that the church remain within its walls, arguing that decades of pressure to exclude religious reasoning from public life misrepresent the nation’s founding.
“The world tells the church to stay put,” he said.
Instead of neutrality towards politics and culture, Hawley insisted that Christians are called to engage every corner of public life.
Hawley cited Abraham Kuyper’s declaration that “there is not one square inch over all creation over which Christ Jesus is not Lord.”
‘Raise Up an Altar’: Claiming Ground for Christ
Drawing a parallel between Abraham’s altar-building across Canaan and the church’s present calling, Hawley identified four crises where Christians must plant their witness.
On abortion, he noted that despite celebrating the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, a brief he co-signed in the Senate, abortions in America have since risen, driven largely by chemical abortifacients available by mail. He announced Senate legislation to ban the abortion drug, urging Christians to remain committed to a culture of life.
On the family, Hawley warned against gender ideology’s assault on the biblical understanding of manhood and womanhood, drawing on his experience questioning Senate witnesses who refused to affirm basic biological realities.
“We need to be bold in saying there are two genders, male and female,” he said. “We must raise up an altar of truth over the families and children of this nation.”
On men, Hawley cited alarming trends in male depression, suicide, workforce withdrawal, and declining marriage rates, calling the church to offer a biblical vision of masculinity against both the culture’s denigration of manhood and the distorted models of the “manosphere.”
On economics, he argued that a culture of life requires what he called “a Christian economy,” one where families can flourish without both spouses working exhaustive hours.
“We need a country where a man can support himself and his family by the work of his hands,” he said. “That ought to be our north star as believers.”
‘Lay Down Your Lives’: The Need for Personal Revival
Hawley identified David’s insistence on a costly sacrifice as the heart of the passage and the heart of the church’s calling.
“We cannot bring to this nation the Lord Jesus Christ unless we know him ourselves,” he said.
He praised the Baptist tradition’s emphasis on genuine conversion as one of its greatest contributions to American history and offered a direct charge to the seminary community.
“The nation needs that fire in your life.”
Hawley situated America’s crisis within a covenantal arc, arguing the nation was founded not on ethnicity or abstract ideas but on the Puritan pledge to walk before God as a godly commonwealth. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, he urged that its renewal rests with those in the room.
“Help will not come from some other quarter,” Hawley said. “We need a revival that reminds America of who we are, and it needs to begin with us.”
Introducing Hawley for the lecture, President R. Albert Mohler, Jr. described the senator as one of the most faithful, effective, and thoughtful Christian statesmen of our age.
Hawley returned the honor in his address, praising Mohler’s decades of leadership at Southern and Boyce as “truly incredible” and describing him as “one of the great heroes of the faith in this nation.
Hawley’s address continued the McCall Lecture’s tradition of bringing leaders to Southern Seminary who call the next generation of ministers to courageous, faithful engagement with the church and the world.