Speaker of the House Mike Johnson Falsely Attributes Prayer to Thomas Jefferson

The circus continues

UPDATE: See updates about the origin of the prayer at the end of the article.

There are two stories here. One is that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson narrowly kept his job today. My headline tells the second story I want to focus on. Listen to Mike Johnson in the House chamber after the vote.

(Mike Johnson, 1/3/25)

Bottom line: This was not Thomas Jefferson’s prayer. According to the fact-checkers at Monticello, there is no record he said or wrote it. It has been quoted without a source by Christian nationalists since at least the 1940s. It has been traced to the United States Book of Common Prayer in 1928 but not to Jefferson. The title of the prayer in that book is “For Our Country.” This is another Christian nationalist Jefferson Lie, such as I unpack in my podcast series Telling Jefferson Lies and my book Getting Jefferson Right.

Brian Kaylor, on his blog, has a detailed account of Johnson’s falsehoods regarding this prayer. I encourage you to go read his entire article. Here is a brief excerpt:

During the event, he [Johnson] read a prayer and decided to read it again during his acceptance remarks.

“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.

None of that is true.

Just after Johnson was elected speaker the first time, I posted a clip from David Barton’s Wallbuilders Live radio broadcast in which Speaker Mike Johnson praised Barton’s influence on Johnson’s work. In 2021, Johnson said:

I just want to say at the outset I’m grateful to WallBuilders and David and Rick and everybody involved. And I was introduced to David and his ministry a quarter century ago, and it has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do. So I’m just so grateful you guys continue to sow into this work and help equip the soldiers on the frontlines. And so thanks to all of you for being willing to serve in this critical time for the country.

This is the kind of history you get when Barton is your main man.

I don’t know if Johnson knows the prayer is bogus or not. He is the Speaker of the House so he should know better. It is a real problem that he takes his history lessons and therefore his policy lessons about such matters as separation of church and state from the Christian nationalist playbook. In different times, such a gaffe would probably be corrected and forgotten. However, now it means more and I hope the press confronts him. If we want to keep our rights, we need to speak up when they are threatened.

P.S. It looks like the source of this fiasco might be another faux-historian named William Federer. He is a lite version of Wallbuilders who also traffics in historical fiction. In his book, America’s God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations, Federer quotes this prayer and attributes it to Jefferson. You can look this up on Google books. He implies the prayer came from Jefferson’s 2nd Inaugural Address. Look up the address; the prayer isn’t in there.

P.P.S. In a book about the history of the Book of Common Prayer, we get some information about who did write the prayer falsely attributed to Jefferson. It is interesting that in times past the prayer was attributed to Washington. The image below comes from the 1995 book: Commentary on the American Prayer Book by Marion J. Hatchett.

Locke (1835-1919) was the Rector of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Bristol, Rhode Island for 52 years. As Marion Hatchett suggests in his 1995 book, the prayer was also falsely attributed to Washington. Perhaps, Christian nationalists in former days were satisfied to embellish Washington’s faith and leave Jefferson alone. In 1941, an Episcopal newsletter — The Witness — set the record straight about the authorship. It wasn’t Washington but Rev. Locke.

Here is the prayer from the 1928/1929 Book of Common Prayer. It matches what Johnson offered.