Christian Nationalists Celebrate Independence Day By Spreading Myths And Lies

Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | July 12, 2024 1:54 pm

One of the defining characteristics of Christian nationalism is the willingness of its adherents to spread myths and false history about the Founding Fathers in an effort to bolster the movement’s modern-day political agenda. This tendency was on full display last week as multiple Christian nationalist politicians, commentators, and activists spread a series of demonstrable falsehoods during various media appearances celebrating the Independence Day holiday.

For instance, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is now running for governor, appeared on the “Washington Watch” program last week, where he asserted that when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 reached a stalemate, they went to church and “prayed for wisdom from God to finish the Constitution.”

That never happened, as Right Wing Watch has explained before:

[George] Washington did not adjourn the convention so that the delegates could spend “three days going to church and praying together.” [Benjamin] Franklin delivered his speech on June 28, 1787, a Thursday. According to “Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution” by historian Richard Beeman, the convention continued to meet on Friday, Saturday, and the following Monday before taking a break to celebrate the Independence Day holiday. Even during this break, members of the Grand Committee, which was created to try to hammer out a compromise over apportion representatives in the new national legislature, continued their work.

When pastor Jack Hibbs appeared on One America News, he claimed that Benjamin Franklin had called for Congress to begin every day with prayer.

That is entirely untrue and a misrepresentation of a recommendation made by Franklin during the Constitutional Convention, a recommendation which, as RWW has pointed out repeatedly, was rejected by the other delegates:

At the conclusion of the day’s session in which the delegates rejected his suggestion, [Franklin] scrawled a note on the bottom of the speech he had written expressing his incredulity: “The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayer unnecessary!”

MAGA pastor Jackson Lahmeyer delivered an Independence Day sermon that, once again, was full of disinformation and false quotes.

According to the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library at Mount Vernon, there is no record of Washington ever saying, as Lahmeyer claimed, that “it is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”

Furthermore, Lahmeyer quoted John Adams as having said that “the destiny of America is to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to all men everywhere. We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus! I have examined all religions, and the result is that the Bible is the best book in the world.” While the final part of this quote regarding the Bible does appear in a letter Adams wrote in 1813, the other statements do not appear in that letter or anywhere else.

During an episode of their “Revival Radio TV” program on televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel, hosts Gene Bailey and Greg Stephens claimed that President George Washington and Congress made a covenant with God during the first presidential inauguration.

“The first recorded act of Congress was to make covenant with God,” Stephens asserted.

This too is entirely false, as RWW explained in 2023 when Copeland himself made this claim:

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.

Pastor George Pearsons, who is Copeland’s son-in-law and pastor at Copeland’s church, delivered a sermon in which he claimed that Roger Sherman, one of the few men to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, had proclaimed that “the volume that we consulted more than any another was the Bible.”

“Don’t let them lie to you! Don’t let them give you disinformation about all of this,” bellowed Pearsons.

The source of this quote actually originated in a volume of the Niles’ Weekly Register from 1837 and simply cited an unnamed biographer of Sherman who wrote that “the volume which he consulted more than any other was the Bible. It was his custom, at the commencement of every session of Congress, to purchase a copy of the Scriptures, to peruse it daily, and to present it to one of his children on his return.”

While Sherman may have personally consulted the Bible regularly, that is a far cry from the impression that Pearsons attempted to create by misrepresenting the quote to insist that “the Bible was consulted for the founding of the United States of America.”

Finally, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, who in many ways is the original source for many of the myths and falsehoods listed above, appeared on a World Prayer Network program where he made multiple false claims, insisting that “the number one cited source for the ideas on which we built the Constitution was the Bible.”

RWW has debunked this claim multiple times:

This claim is a deliberate misrepresentation of a 1984 study conducted by professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston that sought to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in “the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805.” Lutz found that  the Bible was cited most frequently solely because many of the pamphlets included in the research were sermons that had been reprinted for mass distribution. Once the sermon pamphlets were excluded, Lutz reported that quotes from the Bible appeared no more frequently in the political writings of the era than citations of the classical or common law.

More importantly, Lutz also noted that when the focus was solely on the public political writings from 1787 to 1788, when the U.S. Constitution was written and ratified, “the Bible’s prominence disappears” almost completely.

As for Barton’s claim that “the language on capital punishment in the Constitution” is the same as “the language on capital punishment in Deuteronomy,” this is s likewise false since there is literally no mention of capital punishment in the Constitution.

As RWW has noted 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?

Clearly, these activists simply do not care about the truth because perpetuating these myths is useful for convincing Americans that their Christian nationalist political agenda is deeply rooted in our history.

Every day, Right Wing Watch exposes extremism to help the public, activists, and journalists understand the strategies and tactics of anti-democratic forces—and respond to an increasingly aggressive and authoritarian far-right movement. The threat is growing, but our resources are not. Any size contribution will help us continue our work and become more effective at disrupting the ideologies, people, and organizations that threaten our freedom and democracy. Please make an investment in Right Wing Watch’s defense of the values we share.

Tags: David Barton Gene Bailey George Pearsons Greg Stephens Jack Hibbs Jackson Lahmeyer Mark Robinson Christian Nationalism

You Might Also Like