Some people online used the original provenance of that Patrick Henry quote to say “aha, here’s proof that Hawley is an antisemitic white nationalist!” This kind of gotcha argumentation based on one data point plays well on social media, of course, but it’s terrible historical thinking. This is not how any of this works.
While the 1956 quote originated in a fascist subculture committed to a Christian Nationalist view of a future US in which non-whites and non-Christians would be either expelled or relegated to second class citizenship, that quote eventually got sucked into other “conservative” subcultures that did not necessarily reject so sharply and explicitly the post-WWII “consensus” that the US is a religiously-pluralistic, multi-racial democracy.
There are harder and softer versions of the sort of Christian Nationalism embodied in Hawley’s fake Patrick Henry quote. The harder vision is the explicitly exclusionary and bigoted version described above, but the softer version goes something like this. “The American political system presumes a citizenry that shares the basic human values articulated in the Ten Commandments and in the Golden Rule. Because Christianity teaches and encourages such values, Christianity has served as an important piece of what it’s meant to be American historically and continues to play that role in our culture and society.” One could criticize that softer version in all sorts of ways, but a contemporary American Christian who agrees with those statements wouldn’t necessarily say that therefore someone who is not Christian or someone who is not white lacks the qualities necessary to be “truly American.”1 This softer version of Christian nationalism is the type most (but certainly not all) Republican elected officials like Marco Rubio or Tim Scott or Nikki Haley or Mike Pence or (probably) Josh Hawley would claim to endorse.
But here’s the problem for folks like Hawley who use the sort of Christian Nationalist rhetoric we see in his fake Patrick Henry quote: regardless of what he intends to be saying when he talks like this, there is a significant number of self-described “conservatives” who will hear the harder version of it and assume that’s what Hawley is endorsing unless he makes it a point to say he’s not. The people in that harder Christian Nationalist camp are the inheritors of a deeply-rooted, long-running political subculture in the US that is opposed to multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism. This subcultural political tradition might also be referred to as America’s version of fascism, a political tradition that I would hope any political leader with a knowledge of history (Hawley was a Stanford History major) would do everything in their power NOT to amplify and stoke.