Any MAGA political or religious leader who advances divisive garbage demonizing people with different politics should be ashamed of themselves and told to sit down.
Why Mike Johnson's fake "Jefferson prayer" matters
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.
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.
Why Mike Johnson's fake "Jefferson prayer" matters
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.
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.
