When it comes to prominent Republican officials getting caught peddling fake historical quotes, Sen. Rand Paul tends to be in a league of his own. The Kentucky Republican has, after all, been caught pushing fake quotes from Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
Paul, however, is not without company. On the Fourth of July in 2023, for example, Sen. Josh Hawley promoted a fake quote from Patrick Henry. (When he got caught, the Missouri Republican boasted that the “the libs” were “major triggered” by his willingness to amplify misinformation.)
Late last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the club. The Washington Post reported:
Shortly before Mike Johnson was sworn in as House speaker on Friday, he stood in front of the incoming members of Congress and offered what he said was “a prayer for the nation” that was said every day Thomas Jefferson was in the White House and “and every day thereafter until his death.” Johnson attributed that detail to a program distributed at a bipartisan interfaith church service where he spoke earlier that day. Johnson told the lawmakers, it is “quite familiar to historians and probably many of us.”
As it turns out, however, if the Jefferson prayer is “quite familiar to historians,” it’s probably because historians keep trying to tell people that the prayer has been falsely attributed to Jefferson for far too long.
To be sure, the Louisiana Republican delivered his remarks with great confidence, quoting the Jefferson prayer at length, as if the quote were real. There is, however, no evidence suggesting Jefferson ever uttered the prayer.
Indeed, this mistake is so common that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has a dedicated online page — published long before the House speaker’s comments from Friday — that sets the record straight.
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. ... 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.”
But stepping back, the problem is not just that some GOP officials keep peddling fake quotes from the Founding Fathers. The problem is also why they keep doing this.
The common thread tying together most of these fake quotes is the idea that the nation’s founders were eager to combine religion and politics. The historical record proves otherwise. As historian Kevin Kruse explained in a terrific 2023 piece:
[I]t’s better, I think, to brush aside these politicians and partisans who cherry-pick their way through the founding era and simply remind them that in the Constitution of the United States — you know, the document that actually founded this country and established its rules and norms — none of their wish casting for a “Christian nation” finds any support at all.
Quite right. I’ve long believed that this effectively ends any debate: The Constitution is a secular document that created a secular government. Period. Full stop.
For opponents of church-state separation, this nagging detail must be terribly frustrating, but reality is stubborn. Either the nation’s founders created a secular constitutional system that guarantees religious liberty for all, or they meant to base our constitutional system of government on Christianity but somehow forgot.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.