WASHINGTON (RNS) — On officially accepting his post, newly reelected House Speaker Mike Johnson recited a prayer he attributed to Thomas Jefferson, saying the third president prayed it every day.
Johnson had hardly finished his speech when the debunking began.
Journalists and others quickly noted that the website of Monticello — Jefferson’s historic home in Virginia, currently operating underneath the Thomas Jefferson Foundation — had a dedicated page declaring that the “National Prayer of Peace” is not, according to researchers, something Jefferson is known to have ever recited publicly or privately.
“We have no evidence that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson,” the website reads. “It appears in the 1928 United States Book of Common Prayer, and was first suggested for inclusion in a report published in 1919.” The site classifies the attribution among “spurious quotations” linked to Jefferson.
How the prayer became associated with Jefferson, a deist who famously edited Gospel accounts of miracles out of his own Bible with a blade, turns out to be a yarn unto itself.
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California, a co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus — a group dedicated to, among other things, the separation of church and state — published a post on X shortly after Johnson’s speech accusing the speaker of “mak(ing) stuff up.”
“The prayer that you read in the House Chamber today was not written by Thomas Jefferson and your claim that he recited it ‘every day’ is false,” Huffman wrote.
In a separate interview with RNS on Tuesday (Jan. 7), Huffman said other members of Congre …