Mike Johnson delivers fake prayer

Somehow this is perfect:

This morning I participated with many of you early this morning in the 119th Congress interfaith prayer service. It was held at St. Peter’s Catholic Church. Many of you were there.

It was an ecumenical service, in a bipartisan service, which was great. My good friend Hakeem Jeffries, began by reading with the Old Testament. He read out of Deuteronomy 10.

Then I was asked to provide a prayer for the nation. I offered one that is quite familiar to historians and probably many of us. It said right here in the program, it says right under my name, ‘it is said each day of his eight years of the presidency, and every day thereafter until his death, President Thomas Jefferson recited this prayer.’

I wanted to share it with you here at the end of my remarks. Not as a prayer per se right now, but really as 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.

Let me just read you that prayer. It it goes like this, Thomas Jefferson’s prayer for the nation It’s entitled:

Almighty God who has given us this good land for our heritage. We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves, that people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will bless our land with honorable ministry, sound learning and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord and confusion, from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties and fashion into one united people, the multitude brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues endow with thy spirit of wisdom, those whom in thy name, we entrust the authority of government. That there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the Earth. In times of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail, of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

That was Thomas Jefferson’s prayer.

Anybody who knows anything about Jefferson will at least suspect that it’s extremely unlikely that Jefferson, given his beliefs, would ever have uttered any such thing, let alone on every day of his presidency.

And it turns out that the attribution to Jefferson is completely spurious. This is an invented quotation, that first popped up more than a century after Jefferson’s presidency.

Completely spurious is a phrase that historians will find indispensable when discussing this very special time in our national trajectory.