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.
