WASHINGTON — H.W. Crocker III thinks Western civilization is in trouble.

He supports conservative Christian moral values and has decried the rise of a new, secular America where a growing number of people answer “none” to surveys asking which religion they practice. He’s lauded the Confederacy and its soldiers and generals in books like the “Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War” and “Robert E. Lee on Leadership.”

And, this year, he picked up a new job: communications consultant for Sen. Josh Hawley’s Senate campaign.

Hawley’s campaign paid Crocker $55,000 for communications consulting between May and November, according to campaign finance records.

While it’s unclear how large a role Crocker played in the campaign, the decision to bring him in comes as Hawley appears to be at the forefront in pushing a socially conservative political message driven by religion — particularly Christianity.

Hawley is at work on a book that calls for a religious revival in America, tentatively titled “The Awakenings: The Religious Revivals that Made America — and Why We Need Another.”

It comes as the Missouri Republican has spent the past year honing a message that the Republican Party should focus on promoting the working class while defending faith, family and God — a bet that leaning into Christian beliefs is a winning strategy for Republicans, casting the party as the country’s moral compass while the left drives America into hedonism.

With President-elect Donald Trump winning a second term and Republicans in control of Congress, Hawley’s push will find a receptive audience. He has a key ally in the White House, Vice President-elect JD Vance, who can help push Hawley’s agenda, particularly when it comes to promoting social and economic policies aimed at the working-class voters who make up the Republican Party’s base.

Already, the ideology has started to gain more influence in Missouri. A state lawmaker has filed a bill to put the Ten Commandments in public schools. A Kansas City-area pastor who says there is no difference between church and state was elected to a state Senate seat.

It has some Kansas City-area religious leaders concerned, like the Rev. Stephen Jones with the First Baptist Church in Kansas City.

“They will not help Christianity,” Jones said. “They will hurt it. They’ll domesticate it, I guess it is the right word to use. They’ll domesticate the message of Christianity and take away the elegance of its truth. And I don’t want that to happen.”

At the Capitol, Hawley responded “no comment” when asked what role Crocker served on the campaign and whether Crocker was serving as a speechwriter — as he once did for California Gov. Pete Wilson in the 1990s. Hawley’s campaign has previously said Hawley writes his own speeches.

Over the past month, since winning reelection, Hawley has refused to talk to The Star on any subject without providing any explanation, saying he will not comment “now or in the future.”

Crocker did not respond to an email sent to a publicly listed email address.

Embracing the Confederacy

In August 2023, amid a national conversation about American masculinity and the struggles young men appear to be facing, Crocker offered up a solution: Young men should follow the example of Confederate soldiers.

His essay, which referenced his book “Robert E. Lee on Leadership,” focused heavily on the religion of Confederate soldiers, framing the debate over whether to take down statues memorializing the Confederacy as an effort to remove tributes to Christian men.

“The torn-down statues celebrated Christian men: men who put duty above self, who prayed, who believed in self-sacrifice, righteousness, service, and heroism (and recognized it in others), who trusted in God and relished life as a gift,” Crocker wrote, saying they stood in contrast with young men and women who he deemed “the most anxious, depressed, shallow, irreligious, unpatriotic, and immoral generation in American history.”

His portrayal of Confederate soldiers dates back to the Civil War, when white Southerners claimed their army was a Christian army, while the Union was composed of atheists, socialists and immigrants, despite the fact that many Christians fought for the Union and pushed for the abolition of slavery.

That narrative particularly took hold after the Civil War, as the “Lost Cause” — the myth that the war was not about slavery, but was instead about preserving the Southern way of life as Southern Democrats maintained a commitment to white supremacy — spread across the country.

Its influence could be found in the monuments and statues dedicated to the Confederacy, which were even erected in states like Missouri — a slave state that never left the Union, but whose people served in the armies of both the Union and Confederacy.

Kansas City had its own battle over Confederate statues in 2020, as city leaders tried to remove monuments that could be associated with racism. But there is still a monument to Confederate soldiers at Forest Hill & Calvary Cemetery, looming over a historically Black neighborhood, even though Missouri remained in the Union through the war.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the Civil War and American South, said the Lost Cause still holds an appeal for a wide swath of Americans, particularly people who are skeptical of a strong federal government. He said it can be seen as one of the final moments before the federal government took on more significant power, allowing the Confederacy to be portrayed as a road that wasn’t taken.

Brundage said Lee became such a potent figure in the Southern mythology because there was a large public record of his faith in letters to friends and family, because he expressed uncertainty about slavery in some letters and because he was the subject of a biography that portrayed him as a saint-like figure.

But Brundage noted that Lee also fought for the states attempting to preserve the institution of slavery and expressed racism in many of his letters.

“In the current environment, removing a statue of Robert E. Lee then becomes a signifier of an attack on Christian evangelical tradition, an attack on people who are in favor of limited government, an attack on anyone who doesn’t embrace the notion of reconciliation and compensation,” Brundage said. “So that that’s why I think it remains a potent symbol.”

Sharing Christian nationalism

Crocker began working on Hawley’s campaign in May, according to campaign finance records. That means he was on the campaign’s payroll when Hawley gave a speech embracing Christian nationalism at the National Conservatism Conference in July.

“The Left’s primary purpose is to attack our spiritual unity, our common loves. They want to destroy the affections that link us one to another and substitute a set of altogether different ideals,” Hawley said in the speech.

“The Left preaches its own gospel, a creed of intersectionality, of deliverance from tradition, from family, from biological sex — and of course, from God. They regard the faith of our fathers as a fetter to be broken. They deem our common moral inheritance as cause for repentance.”

Crocker made a similar argument in an essay about the importance of faith in The Catholic Thing in May 2024, arguing that the political left has sought to promote selfishness instead of working toward the common good.

“Such liberalism has, of course, brought us the ‘Nones’ – the rising tide of young people who profess no religion because they accept no reference points outside themselves,” Crocker wrote. “To them, faith and reason, history and philosophy, tradition and gratitude, are all irrelevant. All that matters is ‘me.’”

It’s unclear what role, if any, Crocker played in the crafting of the speech. Communications consultants are common in political campaigns — some write speeches, while others research and write white papers to help with policy proposals and others just shape the general message of a campaign.

Hawley has long relied on the political consulting firm OnMessage for his campaigns, using it as a one-stop shop for things like fundraising, developing ads and building a larger political strategy.

Former Hawley Chief of Staff Kyle Plotkin is currently a partner at OnMessage and was a key consultant for Hawley on the campaign. Plotkin did not respond to a voicemail asking about Crocker’s role in the campaign.

But while there are instances where Crocker could have shaped Hawley’s message, there are clear instances where Crocker is more of an ideological hard-liner than Hawley.

Both men oppose abortion, but Hawley has said he doesn’t support banning abortion in the case of rape or incest. Crocker has argued abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. He once compared abortion to child sacrifice, saying that modern society has become so fixated on self-identity that it’s willing to allow people to sacrifice children in order to preserve their sense of self.

“Child sacrifice is hardly a new thing. Sacrificing children to idols is typical of pagan societies. Today’s idolatry of choice is making idols of ourselves,” he wrote. “Christianity abolished child sacrifice and the old idolatry. If we are to abolish child sacrifice again, we will need Christianity to triumph over the new idolatry.”

The speech embracing Christian nationalism caused concern among some Kansas City pastors and politicians. Jones, the Baptist pastor in Kansas City, said he’s concerned that politicians could corrupt the Christian message, causing it to be bogged down by partisan politics.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat and Methodist pastor, said he has made a point in his political career to separate his own religious beliefs from his role as an elected official — saying he once signed a bill approving riverboat gambling in Kansas City even though the Methodist Church opposed it.

“The power of religion is illimitable,” Cleaver said. “And if a person believes what he or she is doing is God ordained, there are very few things they would not do. You can do a lot of bad stuff in the name of God.”

Did Crocker and Hawley connect?

While Crocker has worked as a speechwriter, most of his career has been spent in publishing. Along with his own writing — Crocker has written comic novels about George Armstrong Custer and the histories of the Catholic Church, the American Military, the British Empire and the Confederacy — he worked as an editor at Regnery Publishing.

Regnery is also Hawley’s publisher — a business relationship formed when Simon & Schuster canceled the publication of his book “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” citing Hawley’s role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

It is unclear whether Crocker and Hawley crossed paths through Regnery. A spokesperson for Regnery said Crocker is no longer an editor there, though he is scheduled to publish “Don’t Tread on Me” a history of the American military, in January 2024.

But while there’s a clear connection in the publishing world, the work Crocker did for Hawley’s campaign would likely not include work on Hawley’s book.

Hawley is legally allowed to use campaign funds on a ghostwriter, said Joseph Birkenstock, a lawyer who practices political law. But once those campaign funds are used, he’s not allowed to make a personal profit off the book — any profits would have to go to the campaign.

“If you’ve used campaign funds to create it, you can’t turn around and make personal use of it,” Birkenstock said. “The legal principle that this is up against is the idea that you can’t make personal use of campaign funds. You can’t pay rent on your house, you can’t buy yourself a car.”

Hawley has already received up to $127,500 for the book after entering a royalty agreement in 2023, according to Senate Financial Disclosure forms.

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