When House Speaker Mike Johnson opened the 119th Congress with a prayer spuriously attributed to the famously skeptical Thomas Jefferson, he showed how Christian nationalists often make up history.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is delighted to call attention to the almost immediate and widespread correction of this falsehood by many newspapers and blogs that have since corrected the record.
Before being sworn in as House speaker on Friday, Jan. 3, Johnson recited a “prayer for the nation” that he claimed was said every day by Jefferson in the White House and “every day thereafter until his death.” He repeated that claim at a bipartisan interfaith church service, according to the Washington Post, which on Jan. 4 headlined its story: “Johnson attributes prayer to Thomas Jefferson, but there’s no proof he said it.” Johnson insisted to members of Congress that the prayer is “quite familiar to historians and probably many of us.” The Post notes that historians know the bogus quote only because it keeps cropping up.
One of the first to debunk the false quote was Rep. Jared Huffman, the only “out” humanist in Congress and co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Freethought Caucus.
Huffman tweeted after Johnson’s false prayer: “Dear Speaker Johnson, Please don’t make stuff up. The prayer that you read in the House Chamber today was not written by Thomas Jefferson and your claim that he recited it ‘every day’ is false. Please use credible sources, not your discredited pal David Barton.”
Huffman added in a second tweet that he objected to the false quote as “part of the endless Christian nationalist campaign to remake Jefferson into a devout Christian when he was actually an enlightenment-era freethinker who thought religion should remain private and out of government.”
Monticello lists the so-called “National Prayer of Peace” among its list of “spurious quotations,” noting, “We have no evidence that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson,” adding that it appears in the 1928 United States Book of Common Prayer.
The institution points out that Jefferson as president rejected calls that he proclaim days of fasting and prayer, writing, “I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.”
FFRF would also add that Jefferson advised his nephew Peter Carr: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” He cut up the New Testament to reject supernatural and offensive views attributed to Jesus, making a 46-page New Testament extraction, and telling John Adams that the words said by Jesus were “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.” Even more ironic, it is Jefferson who coined a phrase dishonored by Christian nationalists describing the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between church and state.”
Soon, Yahoo and even Baptist News Global were noting that Johnson, a Southern Baptist, had wrongly attributed prayer to Thomas Jefferson, and newspapers around the country, in places such as Utah, are similarly correcting the misquotation.
Brian Kaylor, the editor of Missouri “Word&Way,” says, “Johnson has a history of using fake quotes to advance his belief that the U.S. should be a ‘Christian nation.’” The number of phony misattributions over time has prompted Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter to write the book “Getting Jefferson Right: Fact-Checking Claims about Thomas Jefferson.”
“The real takeaway is that prayer simply does not belong in Congress or at any governmental meeting in the United States,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. “We must keep repeating the historic fact that our government is founded on a godless and entirely secular Constitution, adopted at a constitutional convention where the framers never prayed. Case closed.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 40,000 members and several chapters across the country. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
