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.
In particular, they love to cite the myth about Benjamin Franklin urging those gathered for the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to turn to God in prayer for help in drafting the Constitution.
Last week, Indiana’s far-right Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith appeared on "The Truth & Liberty Show" to discuss "faith's influence on politics," during which he recited the Franklin myth, adding a few false embellishments of his own.
"In 1787, it was in the middle of the summer when we were carving out the Constitution," Beckwith said. "The guys weren't getting anywhere. Virginia didn't trust New York, New York didn't trust Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania didn't trust anyone and so they weren't able to craft this Constitution."
"They sent delegates to kind of work on some sort of unified governing document and they couldn't do it because they didn't trust anybody," he continued. "And so Ben Franklin gets up about a month after being in this battle and he says, 'Guys, we forgot to pray' and he gives this amazing statement. He says, 'If a sparrow can't fall without God knowing, how do we expect to build an empire without his aid?' And he says, 'We should call a member of clergy every day to open these proceedings with prayer.'"
"So, the next day they got together and Jacob Duché was called," Beckwith claimed. "He was a member of the clergy. He came in and he prayed. And it wasn't just a 2-minute prayer; it was a three-hour prayer service and these guys were down on their knees and because of that you started to see the footings of the Constitution take hold and within a few weeks after that they begin to see what we now know as one of the greatest governing documents this world has ever seen—maybe second only to the Bible. And it was because Benjamin Franklin got up and called for prayer and that's why we open every day in Congress, every day at state legislative level and in local governments, we open with prayer because Ben Franklin said we can't do this unless God helps us."
Beckwith's claims are entirely false, as Right Wing Watch explained multiple times before:
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention chose not to heed Franklin’s call to prayer and adjourned without taking any action on his suggestion. As historian Richard Beeman recounts in his book, "Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution": "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!'"
Obviously, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention did not spend hours on their knees in prayer the day after they rejected Franklin's suggestion and that is because Beckwith was conflating Franklin's unsuccessful call to prayer during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 with a prayer delivered by Pastor Duché to open the First Continental Congress in 1774. (FWIW, Duché turned out to be a loyalist who opposed independence from England.)
Of course, the actual facts don't really matter much to Beckwith and the other Christian nationalist activists who spread these myths because misrepresenting American history serves primarily to promote their modern-day right-wing political agenda.
