Josh Hawley criticized for posting fake Patrick Henry quote claiming US founded 'on the Gospel'
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has garnered backlash for posting a fake quote attributed to Patrick Henry claiming that America was founded “on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
On Independence Day, Hawley posted to Twitter a quote that has often been attributed to Patrick Henry, the Founding Father known for a speech in which he declared, “give me liberty or give me death.”
“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,” Hawley incorrectly quoted Henry as saying.
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As Twitter and multiple commenters noted, the quote originally appeared in a 1956 edition of a publication known as The Virginian and was written in a piece about Henry.
Seth Cotlar, professor of history at Willamette University in Oregon, posted a series of tweets noting how The Virginian was a pro-segregation publication that, in the same edition as the statement in question, included an article expressing concern over “race mixing.”
“Note the piece proceeding the one on Henry … which complains about how liberals have appropriated Jefferson as their own, when really he believed in white supremacy like they did,” Cotlar explained.
In an apparent response to the comments he received regarding the tweet, Hawley posted a series of tweets Wednesday, including quotes from other American historical figures purporting to show “the connection between the Bible and the American Founding.”
Thomas S. Kidd, who currently serves as a research professor in church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in a 2012 op-ed that the emergence of social media websites has helped foster more misquotations of famous people. Kidd, who wrote the piece when he served as a history professor at Baylor University, mentioned the same alleged Patrick Henry quote Hawley used.
"Again, this is a perplexing case because Henry certainly was a devout Christian, but the quotation itself is of relatively recent origin. The quotation apparently came from a magazine commentary on Henry's faith in 1956, which later writers took as a quotation from Henry himself," Kidd wrote.
"Popular Christian historian David Barton once regularly used this statement in his writings and speeches, but he came under such fierce criticism that he retracted it (and others) as an 'unconfirmed' source," Kidd added. "The quotation still appears regularly in Facebook and Twitter posts, and, remarkably, in presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich's 2011 book A Nation Like No Other (p. 76). And this from the only candidate with a history Ph.D.!"
The question of whether the United States was and/or is a “Christian nation” has been the subject of much debate, including how exactly to define what constitutes a “Christian nation.”
“I’m not saying that American society has not been heavily influenced and supported (for the better) by Judeo-Christian values and ethics. Only historical revisionists wishing to erase God from our culture would assert such a thing,” wrote Christian apologist Robin Schumacher in a column for The Christian Post last year.
“What I am saying is that, if you define a ‘Christian nation’ as one governed solely by New Testament principles, then there has never been a Christian nation. There have been, and are, plenty of countries with Christians living in them who influence their culture, but not one solely piloted by the precepts of the New Testament.”
However, Scott Hogenson contends in an op-ed published by The Daily Signal in 2022 that to argue that “the founding of the United States reflects biblical Christianity is to state the obvious.”
“The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution incorporated many fundamental precepts of the Reformation, and these precepts long have been recognized by American statesmen and jurists,” wrote Hogenson.
“Presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and many others long have recognized the role of the Bible and Christianity in the United States, both in terms of the nation’s founding and its continuation as a global beacon of liberty.”
