Tuesday Evening, January 7, 2025

MIKEY WEINSTEIN INTERVIEWED 

BY “THE GOOD MEN PROJECT” ON

MRFF’S TWO DECADES OF RELENTLESS

“ACTIVISM FOR A SECULAR MILITARY” 

With over 3 million visitors a month, The Good Men Project,

founded by Tom Matlack in 2009, first as a book, then a film, and

now a website, describes itself as an “international conversation

about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century.”

Mikey Weinstein once again joins that conversation

in an illuminating interview about MRFF’s

“Activism for a Secular Military.”

Also in this Dispatch ...

MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda

smacks down MAGA House Speaker Mike Johnson in:

“Mike Johnson turns decades-old Jefferson prayer lie

into whole new Jefferson prayer lie!”

THE GOOD MEN PROJECT

INTERVIEWS MIKEY WEINSTEIN

Mikey Weinstein on Activism for a Secular Military

By: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Excerpt from Mikey Weinstein’s interview responses (emphasis added):

“... This sailor’s Navajo faith is about 10,000 years old, yet he was mercilessly evangelized. We disciplined and reassigned the chief petty officer to another part of the ship. About a week later, we received a message via Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation. It was from the parents of that 19-year-old sailor.

“The message still gives me chills. It was brief, just a few words. But it became our mantra: ‘Please tell Mr. Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation thank you for being the voices we are not allowed to speak with.’ I think about that every day, multiple times.

“Most of our clients are Protestants, followed by Roman Catholics. Only 5% of our nearly 91,000 clients are non-Christians. We have over 1,100 staff at the foundation, both paid and volunteer, similar to many civil rights organizations. Our representatives cover most U.S. military installations worldwide, with a network of about 1,000 people. Roughly 84% of our staff are Christians themselves. So this narrative from the religious right, claiming that ‘Mikey and his people eat good Christians for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with snacks in between,’ is complete nonsense. However, it does create a security issue for us. We live with cameras, infrared surveillance, and everything else for protection.”

Mikey Weinstein’s earlier interview by

“The Good Men Project” on the

threat of “Project 2025”

MRFF OP-ED

ON DAILY KOS

Mike Johnson turns decades-old

Jefferson prayer lie into whole

new Jefferson prayer lie!

By: MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda

Sunday, January 5, 2025

So, by now most people have read or heard about how Mike Johnson, in his remarks after barely eking out a victory to continue his tenure as Speaker of the House in the 119th Congress, attributed a very Christian prayer, in Jesus’ name, to Thomas Jefferson.



A whole bunch of news outlets have reported that this prayer was never uttered by Jefferson, citing a page on the Monticello website that says it has “no evidence that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson.”

But that’s only half the story. Johnson didn’t just quote this prayer and attribute it to Jefferson; he turned a decades-old bit of Christian nationalist history revisionism into a whole new lie — claiming that Jefferson not only wrote this prayer, as in the traditional Christian nationalist lie about it, but that Jefferson recited it every day throughout his presidency and the rest of his life!

So, let’s start with the traditional version of this Jefferson prayer lie, which I wrote about in my 2006 book Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, Vol. 1. 

The traditional version of the lie is that Jefferson said this prayer on March 4, 1805, the date of his second inauguration.

While this Jefferson prayer lie can be found in many Christian nationalist books, I cited the version from William Federer’s 1999 book America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations, a book chock-full of fake quotes and other revisionist history frequently used by Christian nationalist legislators, who repeat these fake quotes and pieces of bogus history without even checking to see if Federer’s endnotes for them are real.

Who is William Federer? Well, he’s a Senior Fellow at the D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship, a Capitol Hill-based Christian nationalist organization whose goal is “to raise up the next generation of Christian Statesmen to serve in the mission field of government and public policy.” (emphasis added)

Here’s what I wrote in my book about Federer’s version of the Jefferson prayer lie:

According to William Federer, in his book America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations:

“President Thomas Jefferson, March 4, 1805, offered A National Prayer for Peace:



‘Almighty God, Who has given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech Thee that we may always prove ourselves a 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 earth.

‘In time of prosperity fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in Thee to fail; all of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.’”

Federer gives two sources for this prayer. The first is the 1944 book The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. All that appears on the page of this book cited by Federer, however, is Jefferson’s second Inaugural Address, given on March 4, 1805, the same date used by Federer for the prayer. Federer’s second source is a newsletter published by the Plymouth Rock Foundation, one of many Christian reconstructionist organizations that masquerade as historical societies.

The real source of the prayer is the 1928 edition of the United States version of the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, published over a century after Jefferson’s death. This prayer, titled “For Our Country,” was a new addition in the 1928 edition. It does not appear in the 1789 edition, which was the edition in use in 1804, or the next edition, published in 1892. Since appearing in Federer’s book, however, the prayer has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson on hundreds of Christian American history websites. On a few websites, this same prayer is attributed to George Washington.

Now, here’s the transcription and video of Mike Johnson’s new and improved version of the Jefferson prayer lie, in which Jefferson said this prayer that he didn’t write every day from the day he didn’t write it until his death:

“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 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 a 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 earth. In time of prosperity fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in Thee to fail; all of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.’ That was Thomas Jefferson's prayer.”

While most newer people here probably know me only as the research director at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), those who have been around a long time might remember that I got my start fighting the Christian nationalists by debunking their history lies, particularly those from the king of the Christian nationalist history revisionists, David Barton, (who, by the way, is the source of much of the fake history in William Federer’s book). It was my debunking of Barton’s lies, particularly one piece that I wrote back in 2007, that serendipitously led directly to my working for MRFF, where I still am almost 18 years later. (I told the whole story of how this happened in a post I wrote back in 2022.)

To end on a somewhat amusing note in this deadly serious fight, back in May of 2012, coincidentally almost to the day of my five year anniversary working for MRFF, David Barton, on his Wallbuilders radio show, took issue with a string of victories that MRFF had recently had on Air Force bases, sarcastically dubbing MRFF’s founder and president Mikey Weinstein “the new Secretary of the Air Force.”

In response, Mikey made this priceless little video thanking Barton for MRFF getting me as its research director and asking for Barton’s address so he could send him a fruit basket:

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