Josh Hawley has a history degree from Stanford, where he wrote a thesis on the righteousness of Theodore Roosevelt, graduated with honors, and was remembered as “a serious scholar of the Constitution.” It’s reasonable, then, to assume that he is familiar with the basic premises of the American experiment. Yet Hawley is also a Republican politician in the era that has seen his party mount a determined assault on the honest teaching of American history about everything from race to foreign policy. So the relentlessly ambitious senator from Missouri has chosen to toss aside his learning in favor of a right-wing ideological fantasy and the political rewards that he hopes will extend from it.

That’s the best explanation for the misinformation that Hawley disseminated on July 4, when he tried to turn the 247th anniversary of American independence into a fact-free celebration of Christian nationalism.

Hawley’s 1.4 million Twitter followers were offered up a supposed pronouncement from one of the most outspoken advocates of American independence, Patrick Henry: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.”

The problem is that Patrick Henry never uttered those words. . ."