House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) celebrated his re-election as speaker on Friday by reading from a prayer that he falsely attributed to American founder Thomas Jefferson.
Salon's Amanda Marcotte wrote Tuesday that Johnson's inclusion of a fake Thomas Jefferson prayer is more than just hapless historical illiteracy, but is rather part of a concerted effort by right-wing Christians to rewrite the history of the United States.
"Replacing facts with phony history is a linchpin of the Christian nationalist movement," Marcotte contends at the start of her piece.
She then pieces together contextual clues to explain why Johnson's use of the phony Jefferson prayer was deliberate.
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"The biggest tell that Johnson was knowingly lying was how he introduced the prayer, saying it's 'quite familiar to historians,'" she contends. "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."
Marcotte then brings up Johnson's ties to David Barton, a notorious pseudo-historian whose purported historical writings on Thomas Jefferson have been exposed as utterly fraudulent.
According to Marcotte, Barton's supposed "scholarship" on the American founders is a thinly veiled effort to rewrite history to falsely claim that the United States was created as a Christian theocracy.
"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," she writes. "Instead, he concocts a fictional history where they wanted Christianity imposed by law on the nation."
"In this light," Marcotte continues. "Johnson's fake prayer reads less as a mistake and more as a diss to both Thomas Jefferson and all the liberals who share his views about religious freedom and democracy."