More about the Prayer Attributed to Jefferson—or Was That Washington?

The February 2025 issue of Church & State has an article by Brian Kaylor about the prayer that House Speaker Mike Johnson falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson last month.

Kaylor also wrote about the prayer at his website, Word&Way.

To provide a more complete account of the prayer than I could offer in January, I’ll summarize Kaylor’s articles.

The Rev. George Lyman Locke of Bristol, Rhode Island, composed the text in 1882, calling it a prayer “for our country.” Colleagues in the Episcopal church pushed to have it included in the American Book of Common Prayer, particularly at the 1916 general convention.

At that same convention, another delegate suggested that the church should instead use or adapt part of George Washington’s circular letter to the state governors on 8 June 1783:

I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection that he would incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination & obedience to Government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow Citizens of the United States at large and particularly for their brethren who have served in the field—and finally that he would most graciously be pleas’d to dispose us all to do Justice, to love mercy and to demean ourselves, with that Charity, humility & pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion & without an humble immitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.

After a delay of three years (there was a war, after all), the Episcopal bishops recommended adopting Locke’s prayer “for our country” instead of Washington’s. Locke’s words were finally added to the American Book of Common Prayer in 1928, after his death.

However, Kaylor found that in 1921 three newspapers in Louisiana printed Locke’s text while attributing it to Washington—evidently conflating the two proposals. And that attribution spread for years. Not everyone repeating the lines invoked Washington’s name—Franklin D. Roosevelt called it only “an old prayer” in 1940—but many did.

The next chapter of the story began during the Cold War, a period of increased public piety as the U.S. of A. sought to draw a distinction between itself and the Communist bloc. In 1956 an Episcopal pastor in Virginia, the Rev. Herbert Donovan, credited the prayer to Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Foundation picked that up. Within a couple of decades Jefferson got credit more often than Washington.

Furthermore, people started to say that Jefferson read or recited that prayer every day. Kaylor theorizes that idea started because Jefferson owned a 1796 edition of the Book of Common Prayer which was stolen from a vault at the University of Virginia in 1973. Since the prayer appears in the modern Book of Common Prayer, some people decided Jefferson read it, too. Those people didn’t realize how the Episcopal church changes with the times, like all institutions.

Kaylor also notes that while people in or playing to the religious right have been most vocal about attributing the prayer to Jefferson, religious people in the center and left have repeated that credit, too. There’s broad appeal in believing that the most famous Founders thought just like us.