Mike Johnson Recited Fake Christian Nationalist Prayer

January 4, 2025 Christianists, Republicans

The Baptist-led site Word & Way reports:

Mike Johnson of Louisiana was reelected today (Jan. 3) to lead the U.S. House of Representatives. During his acceptance remarks a bit later, he read what he called a prayer from Thomas Jefferson. But Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation call it a “spurious quotation,” adding it’s unlikely Jefferson actually wrote or delivered it. Johnson has a history of using fake quotes to advance his belief that the U.S. should be a “Christian nation.”

“I offered one that is quite familiar to historians and probably many of us,” he said about the prayer, which he noted the program described as one Jefferson recited every day during his presidency and each day afterward until he died.

“I wanted to share it with you here at the end of my remarks not as a prayer per se right now but as really a reminder of what our third president and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence thought was so important that it should be a daily recitation,” Johnson added.

From the official historical Monticello site:

We have no evidence that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson. It appears in the 1928 United States Book of Common Prayer, and was first suggested for inclusion in a report published in 1919.

Interestingly, although we can find no evidence that this prayer has a presidential source, it was used by a subsequent president in a public speech. Several months after his 1930 Thanksgiving Day Address as Governor of New York, it was pointed out that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech bore a striking resemblance to the very same prayer discussed above.

Ultimately, it seems unlikely that Jefferson would have composed or delivered a public prayer of this sort. He considered religion a private matter, and when asked to recommend a national day of fasting and prayer, replied, “I consider the government of the US. as interdicted by the constitution from intermedling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.”

As usual, fake historian David Barton is behind this.

Right Wing Watch has relentlessly exposed Barton’s countless lies about about the Founding Fathers, perhaps most notably his claim that the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence are taken virtually verbatim from scripture.



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