On the Fourth of July last year, Sen. Josh Hawley stumbled into a mess of his own making. The Missouri Republican — who majored in history at Stanford before getting a law degree from Yale — honored Independence Day by publishing a tweet that quoted Patrick Henry claiming that the United States was “founded … on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Henry, however, never said any such thing: Hawley was actually quoting a report from a white nationalist publication that ran in 1956 — more than a century and a half after the Founding Father’s death.

With this recent history in mind, it was striking to see the far-right GOP senator make a similar mistake almost exactly a year later. HuffPost reported:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is under fire after a speech Monday night in which he advocated “Christian nationalism” for the good of the nation. The Missouri Republican was speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., when he attempted to put a positive spin on “Christian nationalism,” a far-right ideology that promotes the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and that policy should be decided using a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.

The Republican lawmaker wasn’t exactly subtle in his messaging.

“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation. And so I am,” Hawley said at the conference’s gala dinner. “Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do.”

The senator’s points were obviously related, but it’s worth scrutinizing the claims separately — because Hawley made two related but distinct mistakes.

The first is the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation.” This is, to be sure, a popular idea within the GOP’s theocratic wing, but it’s also offensive, ahistorical nonsense.

The United States is based on a secular Constitution, which in turn created a secular government. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 that our First Amendment built “a wall of separation between church and state.” In 1797, John Adams agreed: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Americans unsure what to believe have a straightforward choice: They can listen to Hawley, or they can read the Constitution and honor the declarations of actual Founding Fathers. This doesn’t seem like an especially tough call.

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Just as outrageous is the sentiment behind the rhetoric: Those who espouse the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation” appear eager to tell everyone else, “You’ll be tolerated, but you’re still The Other, relegated to second-class status.” It’s a sentiment at odds with our highest ideals, though Hawley doesn’t seem to care.

But then there was the rest of the quote, in which the senator boasted about “advocating Christian nationalism.”

The New York Times’ David French wrote a good piece on the radical philosophy earlier this year, explaining that Christian nationalism is rooted in the belief “that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.”

It’s an approach that starts with a radical premise — adherents of one faith tradition must enjoy exalted status in the United States — before advancing to insist that American Christians must rule, dictate and govern in ways they see fit.

To see and hear a prominent Republican senator publicly espouse such radicalism is chilling.