Josh Hawley tweets fake Founding Father quote claiming US was founded on Christianity

Missouri senator’s tweet sees community note attached noting false attribution

Senator Josh Hawley drew criticism from historians and teachers of US government over the July 4 holiday after he posted a tweet incorrectly ascribed to Patrick Henry which asserted that America was founded as a specifically Christian nation.

Aside from the fact that the Constitution explicitly lays out that America will never have an official state religion, Mr Hawley’s message falsely attributed a quote from a biography of Henry, one of America’s Founding Fathers, to the man himself.

Twitter, which continues to sink further into a mess of disinformation and bot spam under the ownership of Elon Musk, rectified the situation by slapping a short community note under the tweet, now viewed nearly two million times.

“Patrick Henry never said that. This is a line from a 1956 piece in The Virginian that was about Patrick Henry, not by him,” noted the correction.

But the incorrect assertion was picked up by many rank-and-file posters on the platform, including many with actual expertise in the realm of US colonial history.

It also drew in Mr Hawley’s longtime critics on the left, who despise the senator for his now-infamous show of support to crowds in the US Capitol just hours before those same crowds would turn into a riot and attack the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021.

Many who responded to the senator in the replies dubbed him an “insurrectionist” — a few even posted a widely-shared clip of him fleeing from protesters through the halls of the US Capitol as his fellow lawmakers hid in fear for their lives during the attack.

The Independent has reached out for comment from Mr Hawley’s office regarding the community note’s correction.