Josh Hawley asks you to pray with him — then give him money. What would Jesus say? | Opinion

As far as I know, Jesus never talked about texting.

To be fair, he walked the earth roughly 2,000 years ago. And while humanity was already capable of some pretty impressive feats by then — aqueducts are amazing — nobody had come up with the smartphone quite yet.

There were no emails, DMs or WhatsApp messages. So it’s understandable that the Son of God was silent on the matter.

Fortunately for us, Jesus did have a lot of good things to say that are still important today. Stuff about loving your neighbor. Praying for your enemies. (That’s a hard one.) Giving to the needy. Being merciful. That kind of stuff.

Me? I’m a big fan of Matthew 6.

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them,” Jesus says at the chapter’s outset. “If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Which is a pretty cool idea: Righteousness is about what’s in your heart — not about looking good for public consumption.

What does all this have to do with texting and smartphones? Let us turn now to the Gospel of Josh Hawley.

Missouri’s senior U.S. senator is campaigning for reelection this year. Which means he is also fundraising, to pay for all those commercials and advertisements you’re going to see over the next 10 months.

In 2024, fundraising means texting.

Which is why on Tuesday, according to the sometimes breathless progressive outlet Raw Story, Hawley’s campaign sent a message to his supporters: “It’s Josh Hawley. Do you have a second to pray with me?”

Folks who clicked on the link were indeed treated to the text of a prayer. “Lord give me wisdom, and wisdom to all those elected to serve,” he wrote, and concluded: “Bless America with revival!”

Then he turned to the real business at hand: Asking for money.

“We need to bring FAITH back into our government and I’m hoping you’ll stand with me,” he wrote. “Woke liberals have already started to attack me — your support means the world to me, can I count on you?”

Gross.

I have no wish to question the sincerity of Hawley’s faith. (For that matter, I want to acknowledge when he’s on the right side of things: He got Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to apologize Wednesday for facilitating online child exploitation, which was kind of impressive.) And I’m not interested in telling conservative Christians to hide their beliefs or practices in the public square.

But alarm bells should go off when a public official brandishes their religiosity for personal benefit. Which is exactly what the senator and his campaign team did here.

Why? Because for believers, prayer is a good thing in its own right.

Using an appeal to the God of the universe as the setup for a campaign cash grab is utterly cynical, a bait-and-switch means of appealing to and manipulating conservative Christians for the purpose of separating them from their hard-earned dollars. It’s something more out of “The Music Man” than “Godspell.”

You’ve got to wonder: What would Jesus think?

I suspect we know. “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites,” Jesus preaches later in Matthew 6, “for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.”

What is a campaign text, if not the 21st century version of a street corner?

Writing about this stuff isn’t simple. Hawley tends to portray criticism of his bad acts as an assault on the Christian faith itself. All that “woke liberals are attacking me” stuff. This isn’t that. True, I don’t always — or often — agree with my conservative Christian friends. But I do want them to be the best versions of themselves.

And I find it offensive when leaders like Hawley try to exploit them by using the language of religion as a sales pitch.

Then again, we all sin and fall short. “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount. Clearly, I’m doing quite a bit of judging here.

So pray for me. And pray for Josh Hawley. Just don’t give him your money.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.