I had the same reaction this week while reading “Our Christian Nation”, a 4,300-plus word essay published in early February in a Christian magazine by Republican Senator Josh Hawley.

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“Our Christian Nation” seems definitive about Hawley’s views on politics, economy and religion. You would not be surprised if he thinks the United States is at heart a “Christian nation” and that it ought to run as a “Christian society” and a “Christian economy”.

The senator from Missouri has been having a running battle with those he calls “the liberals” and “the left” – people who insist on the separation of church and state – ever since he tweeted the following quote to advocate Christian nationalism from the Fourth of July last year: “It cannot be emphasised 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.”

He mistakenly attributed it to Patrick Henry, one of the US founding fathers of the “Give me liberty or give me death” fame. Critics had a field day with the misattribution. Since then, Hawley has been doubling down, culminating with his lengthy essay in February.

And so he wrote: “America as a Christian nation – that’s a heretical notion by today’s lights. We are a secular country, the experts have insisted – demanded – for decades. But that was never true …

“The Bible has been the main source of our national ideals. From the age of the New England Puritans to the Great Awakening that prepared the ground for revolution, Scripture has moulded our common life from the first. Consider: Our ideal of the individual has Christian roots. So too does our constitutionalism …

“America as we know it cannot survive without biblical Christianity. The rights we cherish, the freedoms we enjoy, the ideals we love together – all are rooted in and sustained by the tradition of the Bible. Christianity is the electric current of our national life. Turn it off, and the light will fade. If we care about the future of our country, we must renew the influence of biblical faith in America.”

That sounds like Christian fundamentalism to me, and it’s not so different from Islamic fundamentalism. Society, economy and government – it’s all the same. They are all different aspects of the same totality, governed by the religious principles as taught by the Bible, or the Koran.

Hawley wrote thus: “No, a truly Christian politics must think architectonically. We must scrutinise the whole structure of our deteriorating social order by the light of the gospel and determine what must change to make it sound. When we do, we find this: ‘Social issues’ and economic issues cannot be divided. A Christian society requires a Christian economy … Why should we be hesitant to insist on this obvious truth?”

I would dearly love to know how the US Federal Reserve should run a Christian monetary policy, or Biblical quantitative easing. I suppose it’s possible. There is, after all, Islamic finance and its no-interest bonds. It’s a fascinating topic, religious finance.

Oh, and let’s not forget, there is also “Christian law”, just like sharia, or Islamic law. “Laws and public symbols are educators, whether they are acknowledged as such or not,” Hawley wrote. “For this reason, the Ten Commandments belong in courtrooms and courthouses and city halls, just as one can find Moses holding the Decalogue in marble at the Supreme Court of the United States.”

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What Hawley doesn’t mention is that in addition to Moses, Confucius and Solon are also present, chosen to represent three great civilisations and forming the central group of the pediment. Flanking them – to the left – are the symbolic figure bearing the means of enforcing the law. On their right is a group tempering justice with mercy, allegorically treated.

Now, I don’t want to belittle Hawley. He is clearly a smart guy. He studied history at Stanford, got a law degree from Yale and was one of the youngest US senators. I respect a politician who can write a coherent 4,000-word essay without the need for a ghost writer. Personally, I get lost after the first 2,000 words.

And frankly, I don’t really care if some Americans want to bring about a Christian fundamentalist state. Like most people around the world, I don’t think it’s any of my business. That’s quite unlike many Americans such as Hawley who think how other people and countries run their own affairs are their business, and that they can interfere, subvert or invade as they please according to some higher purpose of democracy or hidden Christianity.

But I share Hawley’s interest in Christian politics, especially St Augustine, ever since a Catholic priest baptised me as a child and gave my middle name after the saint. I never used it, of course.

In his essay, Hawley referenced Augustine’s City of God. “It is perhaps Christians, of all people, who most need reminding of society’s spiritual foundations.

“We have long been tempted to divide the world into ‘sacred’ and ‘secular,’ the City of God and the City of Man, with society and government written off as necessary evils. This mentality gives Christians a pass, an out, an excuse to do nothing when instead we have a duty, to our neighbours and our Lord, to work for a just society leavened by the gospel. That duty has never been more urgent.”

Now I don’t dare argue the US Constitution with the senator with a Yale law degree but I will argue St Augustine with him. I really don’t think the saint wanted to base the city of man on the city of God. That would have been an impossibility in his theological-political scheme. Rather he argues every earthly city (state) is a constant struggle between the two “cities”, between Christian and pagan, between belief and the lack of faith, between the elect and the damned. He followed the scriptures. As Jesus says, my kingdom is not of this world, and render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Likewise, the author of the Book of Revelation clearly stated that there were two Jerusalems – the physical one on earth and the heavenly one that was the fulfilment of all God’s promises.

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I think Augustine would have accepted the separation of church and state. Unlike modern totalitarians, he thought no church or state could ever claim to be a substitute for the city of God, as none could ever free itself from the struggle of God and man, holiness and debasement. Paradoxically, it is that painful Augustinian awareness of our original sin and innate corruption, that is, our inescapable fallen state, that may guard us against the temptation and corruption of earthly political power.

So it’s amusing to me that Hawley has just blasted Chinese “totalitarianism”. “You should know that helping totalitarian foreign powers undermine America does not meet that bar,” he wrote in an angry letter to McKinsey, the global consulting firm, referring to the company’s mission of creating positive and enduring change.

But forgive me, his own Christian fundamentalist politics sound far more “totalitarian” than Xi Jinping Thought. Inadvertently, Hawley subverted Augustinian logic by following the logic of the totalitarians.

Now, since Hawley studied history, he would have no doubt been aware of the significance of 410 for Augustine. That was the year of the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, and the background to the great saint’s masterpiece whose full polemical title is Of the City of God Against the Pagans. That was the decline and fall of the world’s superpower, and its destabilising impact on the rest of the known world, the debasement of its once universally recognised currency, and a society in chaos and conflicts, at war with itself and others, leading to its own downfall.

The US? No, I meant Rome.