The Freedom From Religion Foundation is criticizing the ignorant and inaccurate comments made today during the National Day of Prayer observance at the U.S. Capitol falsely portraying the United States as a nation based on “God.”
During the event, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed the rights of Americans come from “God Himself,” described the Declaration of Independence as “our national statement of faith” and insisted that “we are a praying nation.” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner similarly declared: “Prayer is very powerful because Almighty God is powerful. That truth has gotten our great nation through mountaintops and valleys for the past 250 years. Our Founding Fathers were men of faith who understood that God is the cornerstone of our republic.”
Whether or not the framers of the Constitution were “men of faith” is irrelevant, says FFRF, because they adopted a Constitution deliberately containing no reference to a deity, much less Christianity or Jesus. The only reference to religion in the Constitution’s original text is the prohibition on religious tests for public office. The First Amendment further guarantees that government must remain neutral on matters of religion.
FFRF notes that the National Day of Prayer is a Cold War-era relic that Congress adopted in 1952 at the behest of evangelist Bill Graham. Government-sponsored prayer not only violates our core principle of state/church separation but marginalizes the growing number of nonreligious Americans, sending the inappropriate message that true Americans must be religious.
FFRF further rejects the claim that prayer is what carried the nation through its greatest challenges.
“Prayer did not abolish slavery, secure women’s rights, defeat segregation or expand civil liberties,” FFRF Co-President Dan Barker points out. “Human beings did that through activism, reason, democratic institutions and constitutional protections. Progress has come from people taking action, not from politicians crediting supernatural intervention.”
FFRF warns that Christian nationalist revisionism poses a direct threat to both religious freedom and secular democracy.
“We will continue fighting these myths in the courts, in statehouses, in Congress and in the public square,” Barker says. “The United States does not belong to one religion, and no amount of Christian nationalist disinformation can change the secular foundation of our Constitution.”
FFRF will persistently defend the right of every American — believer or nonbeliever — to be free from government-dictated prayer and religion and from any other efforts to turn this country into a “Christian nation.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
