One cannot say for certain that Rep. Mike Johnson was deliberately lying during his acceptance speech to return as Speaker of the House. He read what he claimed was a prayer recited by President Thomas Jefferson "each day of his eight years of the presidency and every day thereafter until his death." It is always technically possible that the Louisiana Republican is so profoundly ignorant of history that he didn't know that statement is preposterous on its face. As the Thomas Jefferson Foundation notes on its website, Jefferson doubted "the efficacy of prayer." They add that "Jefferson rejected the notion of the Trinity and Jesus’ divinity. He rejected Biblical miracles, the resurrection, the atonement, and original sin." He saw Jesus as a secular philosopher and wasn't a "Christian" in the way most people understand the term.
Perhaps Johnson is unaware of this, but it is worth remembering that Johnson has previously proven to be an enthusiastic liar, usually displaying his telltale smirk when he's about to let loose with one of his whoppers. Last week, for instance, he backed Donald Trump's lies that the U.S.-born terrorist who attacked New Orleans was to be blamed on the "wide open border." Johnson wasn't just one of 147 Republicans who tried to steal the election on January 6, 2021, by refusing to certify it. He was a leader in the effort to use false claims of a "stolen" election, heading the amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court, demanding they use these lies as an excuse to throw out the election results. So it's entirely plausible that the fake "Jefferson prayer" was searched for on Google before copy-pasted into the teleprompter. When one searches for the prayer, however, at the top of the results is the debunking offered by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which notes that the text appeared to have been written decades after Jefferson's death.
However, the biggest tell that Johnson was knowingly lying was how he introduced the prayer, saying it's “quite familiar to historians." Why mention historians if you didn't consult a single one? Johnson was likely trolling, snidely mocking historians, who would soon correct his "mistake" in mainstream and social media. Whatever deliberation Johnson used in his mendacity, however, what matters is that by using a fake "Jefferson prayer," he was nodding to and advancing one of the primary tactics of Christian nationalists: rewriting history to favor right-wing lies over truth.
Johnson is tight with David Barton, a Christian nationalist advocate who masquerades as a "historian" and has spent decades passing off lies as "history" to advance his false claim that America was never intended to be a secular nation. Barton's lies are so egregious that his 2012 book about Jefferson was pulled by his publisher. This did not curtail his enthusiasm for disinformation one bit. He's also a big believer that "demons" are everywhere, invisibly pulling the strings wherever progressivism or secularism are advanced or protected.
Barton's main contribution to the Christian right — helping transform it into Christian nationalism — was instilling the idea that facts do not matter, and "history" can be whatever conservatives want it to be. This tendency accelerated and became normative in the Republican Party under Trump, whose non-stop lying offered even more permission to right-wingers to tell themselves dishonesty is no sin if it serves their cause. Writing for UC Berkeley research in 2022, media specialist Edward Lempinen explained that Christian right leaders routinely preach now that they are in an "all-or-nothing struggle for existence, where the end justifies the means."
Democrats have become so demonized in this view, Berkeley political scientist Paul Pierson added, Christian conservatives believe they "can’t coexist with these other folks because they’re coming for you, and they’re coming for your family." Trump's pick to run the Office of Budget and Management, Russell Vought, has spent years arguing Christianity is under existential threat, and the only way to protect itself is through taking over government to turn secular democracy into something closer to a Christian theocracy. This paranoid fantasy of Christian persecution creates an umbrella justification for any terrible behavior, so long as it advances this theocratic goal, including breaking the law, stealing elections, violence, and, of course, lying.
Christian nationalists rationalize their will to dominance on false claims that they are the "true" Americans and the rest of us — liberal Christians, non-believers, non-Christians — are interlopers. That's why fake history is central to their project. Barton, for instance, focuses mainly on falsifying evidence that the founders didn't "really" believe all that stuff about the separation of church and state they wrote directly into the Constitution and defended in the Federalist Papers. Instead, he concocts a fictional history where they wanted Christianity imposed by law on the nation.
But this project of Christian nationalists rewriting history has expanded well beyond false or misleading quotes from the founders about religious liberty. Of special interest is propping up phony histories that paint American slavery in an honorable light, justify white supremacy, and lie about the lives of civil rights leaders. There are also efforts to erase the history of feminism, falsely portraying suffragist leaders as hostile to a woman's right to bodily autonomy. It's probably just a matter of time before they start claiming the riot at Stonewall was in opposition to LGBTQ rights.
Moms for Liberty was founded, in large part, to push fake history into American classrooms. With their lobbying and the cooperation of Republicans like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, they placed texts in public schools that falsely portrayed slavery as a benevolent institution, akin to a jobs training program rather than lifelong forced labor. They removed biographies of civil rights heroes like Rosa Parks, whitewashed the genocide of native people in the U.S., and erased damning facts about the life of Christopher Columbus from classrooms.
Lying about long-ago history may seem like an easier lift since the people being lied about are dead and can't defend the truth. But, as Heather "Digby" Parton wrote yesterday at Salon, conservatives have grown so accustomed to rewriting history that they even deny a history the entire country witnessed with its own eyes four years ago: the insurrection of Jan. 6.
The whole country watched the riot unfold in real time. There were hours and hours more of video that emerged in subsequent days. Witnesses from Trump's own inner circle testified about his state of mind and how he behaved that day. And there have been hundreds of court cases decided by juries finding that people who participated in the event were guilty of crimes. Yet the New York Times published a depressing article over the weekend examining how Trump and his minions have managed to completely turn Jan. 6 upside down in his supporters' minds. They've convinced them that the rioters not only did nothing wrong that day, but they are now supposedly being held as political prisoners and hostages. They say there wasn't much damage to the Capitol, Mike Pence wasn't really in danger, the whole thing is overblown and it's the Jan. 6 committee that should be jailed rather than those who beat cops nearly to death on the steps of the Capitol that day.
As Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield wrote in the Atlantic for the Jan. 6 anniversary, "The function of this bad information was not to persuade non-Trump supporters to feel differently about the insurrection," but to "reinforce the beliefs that the MAGA faithful already held." That they can rewrite the story of something we all saw live on television suggests to me that this is less a sincere delusion and more an act of collective lying. This would have been harder for average American conservatives to participate in years ago, I suspect, but times have changed. Years of watching Trump lie shamelessly without consequence has convinced them it's cool for them to do it, too. And having Christian leaders from every corner lie about history puts a moral veneer on it as if lying is a holy act rather than a sin.
In this light, Johnson's fake prayer reads less as a mistake and more as a diss to both Thomas Jefferson and all the liberals who share his views about religious freedom and democracy. In the interest of historical accuracy, it must be noted that Jefferson was a bad person, who didn't just own slaves but repeatedly raped at least one of them, Sally Hemmings. But Jefferson is an important historical figure because he was a preeminent advocate for enlightenment values like freedom, democracy, and reason — all values that Johnson rejects, preferring a religious authoritarianism that eschews reality-based information.
Johnson's not a stupid man. I suspect he's well aware that Jefferson would be appalled to see a religious fanatic who tried to overturn an election in charge of the House of Representatives. But Johnson is fully aware he's alive and Jefferson is dead. Spitting on the founder's grave is an unsubtle way to celebrate the triumph of Christian nationalism over two centuries of liberal democracy.
