EXCLUSIVE — Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) knows his Bible. Having spoken with him a number of times in recent years, I’ve grown accustomed to the senator casually dropping Bible verses in ordinary conversation.
On the phone the other day, Scott responded to my question, “How’s things in D.C.?” by saying, “We’re blessed and highly favored. But the truth is, it’s sunny but partly cloudy,” echoing Psalm 84’s “blessed and greatly favored” and the Angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary in Luke’s Gospel as “highly favored one.”
Scott lives and breathes scripture. He speaks about his upbringing in a poor, single-parent household and his journey to the Senate in explicitly Christian terms. He met his wife through church — they recently celebrated their first anniversary, which he described to me as “a fulfillment of Proverbs 18:22 — “He who finds a wife finds a good thing.”
It’s only fitting that Scott’s new book, One Nation Always Under God: Profiles in Christian Courage, due out in August, highlights figures who, in his words, give form to the “tapestry of Christianity and faith that has peppered and seasoned this nation” since its founding.
Crucially, Scott sees the Christian faith not as a private matter, but as the driving force behind America’s prosperity and moral leadership. Getting to know America apart from its Christian inspiration is like getting to know Scott apart from his faith — it’s possible, but it misses the heart.
“We must look at our nation through the prism of a Judeo-Christian foundation,” Scott said. “Because that is the bedrock of the most prosperous society on the planet, defined not only by what we have but by what we give. We are the most generous nation on earth. And why? Because we have this notion that all men are created equal and we are given inalienable rights by God. They don’t come from government. Only from God do we find that all are created equal, as well as the responsibility to stand up for those who can’t stand for themselves.”
Scott’s faith-driven vision doesn’t stop at rhetoric — it shapes his work in the Senate, where he sees conservative economic policy as a way to live out Biblical principles. Scott, who became Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in January, understands economic policy through an explicitly Christian lens and sees the Trump administration’s economic agenda as a fulfillment of this worldview. While there is wide divergence on economic policy among Christians in America — Evangelicals tend toward conservative economic views, for instance, while Catholics and black Protestant churches tend to embrace stronger social safety nets, union rights, and minimum wage increases — Scott believes the policies guiding the Trump administration closely reflect the call in Matthew 25 to serve the least of these without diminishing the dignity of work. He thinks his party needs to be making this case more explicitly.
“We had a tax code that punished wealth and punished opportunity,” Scott said. “But now we give breaks to single moms working for tips at a restaurant. We now encourage police officers to work overtime without having full taxation. We tell senior couples that they’re going to have $12,000 in additional deductions on their Social Security benefits. We say to the person buying a car that we’re going to make their interest on that car deductible. And we solidified and made permanent the tax cuts from the first Trump administration, along with allowing for depreciation to be permanent. Those are fabulous parts of our agenda. And we should be shouting it from the rooftops.”
Scott’s role as Chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee makes highlighting the most popular aspects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is an important task for him between now and the 2026 midterm elections. Democrats have promised to make the Medicaid reform in the OBBB central to their midterm efforts. Following the law’s passage, famed Democratic strategist James Carville called Medicaid reform a “mass extinction event.” But Scott believes his party should unapologetically make the Christian case for fiscal sanity. He encourages conservatives to reclaim the moral high ground on economics, especially as related to the soaring national debt.
“For the national debt, you have to go to Proverbs 22:7, that the borrower is a slave to the lender. And then we need to ask ourselves, who are we borrowing money from?” Scott said. “If we have an adversarial relationship with China, and yet we continue to ask them to float our bonds, that’s probably not in our best interests. Romans 13:8 tells us to owe nothing to a man but love. America ought to have these conversations in church and find out if we can say with full confidence that we owe no man nothing, or if we owe them too much.”
The new Medicaid work requirements present an opportunity to fix the perception problem with the OBBB Act, in Scott’s view. Overall public support for the bill is underwater — a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 60% said they believed cuts to Medicaid are primarily about “taking health care away from people who need it.” But 68% of those same respondents support the bill’s work requirements, including 66% of independents and even 51% of Democrats.
The reason for the discrepancy? Scott believes it has to do with another Biblical principle: the nation’s longstanding embrace of the dignity of work.
“I think there’s dignity in work,” he said. “What we did in Medicaid is very consistent with the Biblical principle that if you can do for yourself, you should. So we put in place work requirements that, say, if you are able-bodied, you don’t have a disability, you don’t have a child at home, you should look for a job, volunteer, be in school. How this change is “anti-Biblical” as some critics say, I don’t know. Frankly, Bill Clinton had a higher standard than we do. Clinton said 100 hours a month. Ours says 80 hours a month.”
Scott doesn’t think Republicans have a monopoly on the Christian faith, however, and he was eager to mention Democratic colleagues in the Senate with whom he regularly prays and studies the Bible. This included Sen. Chris Coons (D-MD), who Scott believes has a sincere relationship with Jesus despite disagreements over how best to turn Biblical principles into policy.
“This might not be popular to say, but the truth of the matter is that Christ is so far beyond politics it’s not even funny,” Scott said. “And anyone who suggests that only Democrats or Republicans are really Christian, that’s just inconsistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
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Scott’s belief that faith comes far before politics is part of the reason he decided to write One Nation Always Under God.
“The profiles of Christian courage captured in my book reinforce the fact that it is our faith that gives us the reason to be the city on the hill,” he said.