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.
-Amanda Marcotte Salon.com
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