As Right Wing Watch has noted multiple times in the past, one of the defining characteristics of Christian nationalist activists is a willingness to misrepresent history, as time after time they spread debunked myths and blatant falsehoods in defense of their right-wing ideology.
Last month, Christian nationalist activist and author Jerry Newcombe appeared on the Victory Channel, where he trotted out one of the religious-right's favorite myths about Benjamin Franklin calling for prayer during the Constitutional Convention.
"Our nation has gone astray and we need to go back to these founding principles that the Founders gave us," Newcombe said. "For example, you look at the whole issue of religion in public and should there be religious expression in the public arena. Goodness, just take the Constitutional Convention. In the Constitutional Convention, when things were slow going, after a while one of the least religious of them stood up—Benjamin Franklin—and he gave an impassioned speech along the lines of, 'Gentlemen, we need to pray.' And a variation of his request for prayer was granted."
Christian nationalists love to cite this incident, but conveniently always forget to mention that Franklin's fellow convention delegates rejected his suggestion.
Contrary to Newcome's claim that "a variation of his request for prayer was granted," Franklin's call for prayer was put aside and subsequently ignored, as Right Wing Watch has pointed out several times before:
Green, like Barton and everyone else who cites this speech, conveniently fails to mention that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly chose not to heed Franklin’s call to prayer and adjourned without taking any action on his suggestion. In fact, on the bottom of the handwritten version of the speech Franklin delivered that day is a note acknowledging that “the convention, except three or four persons, thought prayer unnecessary!”
Furthermore, Washington did not adjourn the convention so that the delegates could spend "three days going to church and praying together." 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.
Thus, not only did delegates ignore Franklin's call to prayer, but they certainly did not then break for three days to engage in collective worship, as Green baselessly claimed. Furthermore, the Constitutional Convention began in late May of 1787 and didn't produce a finished document until mid-September. Given that Franklin delivered this particular speech just one month into convention, it cannot even plausibly be argued that the delegates "were able to solve" all their conflicts after supposedly breaking for three days of prayer in July since it still took them several more months to complete their work.
Every time Christian nationalists promotes this sort of myth, it only serves to undermine their contention that the United States was founded as distinctly and explicitly Christian nation. After all, if that position is true, why do they have to keep lying to try and “prove” it?
The reality is that these activists do not actually care about the truth because they know that perpetuating these myths is useful for convincing Americans that their Christian nationalist political agenda is rooted in our national history.
