The Freedom From Religion Foundation is urging Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to correct the record after he again attributed a fabricated quotation to the Founding Fathers in his Independence Day message.

In a July 4 post from his official Senate X account, Schumer wrote:

“The founding fathers called America God’s noble experiment. I believe in all three words to this day: we are one nation under God, we have clung to noble ideas for longer than any other nation, and we are an experiment always changing, trying to make ourselves better.”

Historians have found no evidence that any Founder ever called the United States “God’s noble experiment.”

“The Founders gave us something far more remarkable than ‘God’s noble experiment,’” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “They created the world’s first secular constitutional republic — one grounded not in divine authority, but in ‘We the People.’ That achievement deserves to be celebrated honestly, not obscured by invented religious mythology.”

In a letter sent Tuesday, FFRF notes that despite repeating the claim for more than two decades in speeches about judicial nominations, voting rights, Supreme Court confirmations and democracy itself, no contemporary source for the quotation has been identified.

“Historical accuracy matters, particularly when public officials invoke the Founders to explain our constitutional system,” FFRF’s Co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker added.

Yale historian Joanne Freeman recently observed that among the more than 100,000 documents contained in the National Archives’ Founders Online database, “No one uses the phrase ‘God’s noble experiment.’ No one.”

Adam Keiper, executive editor of The Bulwark, identified only one apparent use of the phrase “God’s noble experiment” outside of Chuck Schumer’s remarks: a 1939 review of Ray Billington’s “The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860” by a Hillsdale College historian.

FFRF warns that Schumer’s repeated use of the fabricated quotation inadvertently lends credibility to the same false historical narratives long promoted by Christian nationalist activists seeking to portray the United States as a nation founded for Christianity.

“False quotations about the Founders have become a hallmark of the Christian nationalist movement,” Gaylor and Barker write. “Figures such as David Barton have spent decades promoting fabricated or distorted historical claims in an effort to portray the United States as a nation founded to privilege Christianity.”

“For that reason, it is especially troubling to see the Senate Minority Leader repeating a quotation that appears to have no historical basis,” they continued. “Your repetition of this fabricated quotation risks legitimizing precisely the disinformation they have worked to disseminate.”

FFRF has a strong reminder for Schumer.

“The United States was founded by Enlightenment thinkers who deliberately established the world’s first secular constitutional republic,” the letter explains. “If the Framers had intended to create a Christian nation, they knew exactly how to do so. Instead, they adopted a Constitution that vests sovereignty in ‘We the People’ rather than a divine being, prohibits religious tests for public office in Article VI, and, through the First Amendment, bars government from establishing religion while protecting every individual’s freedom of conscience.”

The letter also cites George Washington’s explanation that the Constitution intentionally omitted religious references because “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction,” as well as the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, unanimously approved by the Senate and signed by President John Adams, which declares that “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

“At a time when Christian nationalists are aggressively rewriting our nation’s history to portray the United States as founded for Christianity, public officials have a special responsibility to rely on authentic history, not invented quotations,” FFRF concludes. “Americans deserve historical accuracy from their elected leaders.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.

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