On multiple occasions, Gene Bailey and Greg Stephens have used their “Revival Radio” program on televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel network to spread the false claim that George Washington and Congress used the first presidential inauguration to make a covenant with God on behalf of the nation. That claim, which serves as the foundation of a recent book written by Copeland and Stephens, has been debunked on multiple occasions by Right Wing Watch.
Contrary to Copeland’s assertion, Congress never made any such covenant with God; not in its official capacity as a legislative body, nor during the “divine service” that followed Washington’s inauguration, which was presided over by Rev. Samuel Provoost, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, who merely read from The Book of Common Prayer.
Stephens and Bailey, of course, don’t actually care about the truth because the myth is useful in bolstering their Christian nationalist political agenda, which is why they repeated it once again during the latest episode of their program.
“[Washington] invoked God’s name and his blessing in his first leadership role as the president of the United States,” Stephens claimed. “He [did] on purpose invoke God’s name and his blessing for this land and he put his hand the Bible. That’s his very first act as president. The very first Speaker of the House when we get our Constitution will be a pastor. Our Founding Fathers were not winging it. These guys had a biblical worldview.”
“Right after he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath of office, he walks down to a church with everybody with him and he gets down on his knee and he says, ‘We will be your people and you will be our God,'” Stephens added. “So we aligned ourselves with the God of Israel at the very beginning.”
As we already noted, Stephens’ claim is false, but he was quickly outdone by his co-host, Gene Bailey.
“Nowadays, public schools don’t teach that [Washington] was such a man of faith,” Bailey complained. “In fact, he was so committed, he was a man of prayer and if you go back and read true history, you’ll find that’s exactly who he is. And here’s a quote: ‘The American cause would have come to a complete disaster except for one thing, the direct intervention of God to save us.'”
Washington, of course, never said this. The quote Bailey cited actually came from Andrew Allison, author of the book “The Real George Washington,” during a 2010 appearance on Glenn Beck’s program on Fox News.
We don’t know anything about Allison, but the fact that his book was edited by conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen doesn’t fill us with confidence regarding the credibility of his scholarship. Regardless, the quote Bailey cited originated with Allison, who was offering his interpretation of Washington’s beliefs, and was not something that Washington actually said.
So this is not “true history,” as Bailey claimed, but an outright lie.
As RWW has noted countless times before, the willingness to misrepresent history is a common theme among Christian nationalists who time and again spread blatant falsehoods in defense of their right-wing ideology, inevitably leading one to wonder why, if their position is true, do they have to keep lying to try and “prove” it?
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