WASHINGTON (RNS) — On formally accepting his put up, newly reelected Home Speaker Mike Johnson recited a prayer he attributed to Thomas Jefferson, saying the third president prayed it every single day.
Johnson had hardly completed his speech when the debunking started.
Journalists and others rapidly famous that the web site of Monticello — Jefferson’s historic house in Virginia, presently working beneath the Thomas Jefferson Basis — had a devoted web page declaring that the “Nationwide Prayer of Peace” just isn’t, in line with researchers, one thing Jefferson is understood to have ever recited publicly or privately.
“We now have no proof that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson,” the web site reads. “It seems within the 1928 United States Guide of Widespread Prayer, and was first recommended for inclusion in a report revealed in 1919.” The location classifies the attribution amongst “spurious quotations” linked to Jefferson.
How the prayer turned related to Jefferson, a deist who famously edited Gospel accounts of miracles out of his personal Bible with a blade, seems to be a yarn unto itself.
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California, a co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus — a bunch devoted to, amongst different issues, the separation of church and state — revealed a put up on X shortly after Johnson’s speech accusing the speaker of “mak(ing) stuff up.”
“The prayer that you simply learn within the Home Chamber at the moment was not written by Thomas Jefferson and your declare that he recited it ‘every single day’ is fake,” Huffman wrote.
In a separate interview with RNS on Tuesday (Jan. 7), Huffman stated different members of Congress have privately voiced frustration to him concerning the misattribution of the prayer, and at the least one personally thanked him for talking out.
“It created a stir,” Huffman stated, referring to the prayer.
Johnson, who stated he had provided the prayer earlier within the day at a bipartisan interfaith service, referred to the bulletin of the gathering when making the declare that Jefferson learn the prayer every single day. “I provided one that’s fairly acquainted to historians and doubtless many people,” Johnson stated throughout his speech.
His workplace didn’t reply to a number of requests for touch upon this story.
Seth Cotlar, a professor of American historical past at Willamette College, writing on the social media web site Bluesky, associated what he known as the “wild” historical past of the prayer, which has been repeatedly misattributed to Jefferson, together with in a single occasion by an individual who would at one level function head of the Jefferson Basis — the identical group that in the end debunked the attribution. However by the mid-Twentieth century, the misattribution was widespread in some conservative circles and, Cotlar stated, revealed as Jefferson’s in white nationalist publications.
“Political memes all the time have lives that work like a protracted recreation of historic phone,” Cotlar wrote.
Talking to RNS, Huffman stated the prayer was an instance of false quotes “curated by Christian nationalists, one in every of many meant to rewrite historical past and assist their political agenda of institutionalizing Christianity because the official faith and the dominant political pressure of the US.”
The prayer, he stated, is a part of “a sequence of relentless assaults on church-state separation and, fairly actually, fact.”
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat and co-founder of the Freethought Caucus, informed RNS he didn’t consider Johnson “knowingly” misattributed the quote, however argued it was nonetheless a product of a bigger “effort on the precise wing” to connect fashionable conservative non secular beliefs to the Founding Fathers.
“Our colleagues are continuously making an attempt to enlist Thomas Jefferson to the social gathering of theocracy,” stated Raskin, who taught constitutional legislation earlier than coming to Congress. “He, after all, was a champion of the Enlightenment who insisted upon the separation of church and state,” Raskin added, noting the phrase “separation of church and state” originated in a letter Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists in 1802.
Jefferson and his protege James Madison “took the place that the merger of church and state corrupts and degrades faith and prostitutes authorities — and distorts its operation,” Raskin stated.
Whereas Johnson seems to have chosen the prayer on his personal, at the least one in every of his claims concerning the orison might have had a extra speedy supply. In an electronic mail, the Rev. Margaret Kibben, the Home chaplain and a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister, informed RNS she takes “duty” for the outline of the prayer that appeared within the service bulletin (the prayer itself didn’t seem within the bulletin), which described Jefferson reciting it each day. Nevertheless, whereas she acknowledged there was a “query about provenance” concerning the prayer, she contended the wording within the bulletin — which begins “it’s stated” — leaves “room for each doubt and truth.”
Kibben, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, had simply begun work as Home chaplain days earlier than the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol spurred by faulty allegations of fraud surrounding the 2020 presidential election, and he or she provided pastoral care to lawmakers as they rushed to safe areas to flee rioters ransacking the constructing. That very same day, Johnson was among the many 147 members of Congress who objected to the 2020 election outcomes.
Kibben has additionally garnered headlines for providing prayers vital of lawmakers, akin to when, in 2021, she requested God to “forgive” for failing to unite round pandemic reduction laws.
Even so, Johnson and Kibben seem to have in the end developed a cordial working relationship, because the chaplain has with members of Congress on each side of the aisle: Johnson was noticed chatting with Kibben shortly earlier than the vote to reelect him as speaker, and the 2 may very well be seen on reside broadcast talking once more simply earlier than Johnson approached the rostrum to ship his victory speech.
