Last month, I wrote a letter to the editor regarding an article the Hernando Sun ran entitled “Debates Over School Choice, Opening Prayer Headline Hernando County School Board Meeting” (June 5, 2026) They declined to run my letter (no hard feelings – their paper their choice), so I’m posting it here. I love our nation and its history and am passionate about it being taught truthfully and as completely as possible.

The complete letter to the editor is posted below in bold:

Besides being inherently dishonest, revisionist history is harmful to a healthy society. School Board member Mark Johnson needs to publicly recant the lie he perpetuated in a recent Hernando County School Board meeting. According to the Hernando Sun article on the meeting, Johnson  was “arguing that prayer has been a part of government meetings since America’s founding. He pointed out that delegates at the Continental Congress prayed before their meetings in 1787.” This is mythology that has been disproven by experts who studied minutes of those meetings and Mr. Johnson is irresponsible to spread it.

Before I go further, let me say I am not opposed to praying at public meetings. When I was on Brooksville City Council, I had the privilege for three years of opening most of our meetings in prayer. I took the job very seriously, reading the agenda and then praying about what I should pray over the meeting. I believe in prayer. I believe in our form of government. I believe in freedom of speech and religion.

What I don’t believe is that we should perpetuate untruths or speak publicly on matters we have not verified.

It is true that in 1787, Ben Franklin made a motion to open the meetings in prayer and Roger Sherman seconded it. It is also true that his motion never went to a vote and prayer was not instituted.

As a public official and someone in educational leadership in our community, Mr. Johnson has a responsibility to model what we expect from our teachers – education, not indoctrination. Since his statements were made in a public meeting, he needs to retract them in the same way.  If he presents primary sources that contradict the meeting minutes of the Continental Congress, I will take my own advice and publicly apologize.

Natalie Kahler

I do not know why Mr. Johnson said this or if he knew it wasn’t true. I’ve known him a long time and I have not experienced him to be a liar. He might simply have heard someone he trusted say this and then passed it along without verification. But the damage is done and he should do his best to undo it. I will even gift him a copy of a book by a Christian and Historian who thoroughly debunks this myth.

I want to be clear that I don’t speak from a position of arrogance and innocence. I’ve shared incorrect history before. Even after a decade of researching and writing about Chinsegut I’ve given wrong information in tours based on what I thought at the time. Later archaeological digs or research proved my initial beliefs wrong and I had to discard the old story and incorporate the new.

It’s what you do after you realize you were wrong that matters. Do you drill down, make excuses, or align yourself with the truth?

I aim to be someone humble enough to acknowledge my errors and align with the truth. Frankly, I used to be terrible about it but have worked to do better. Decades before he unsuccessfully recommended prayers in the Continental Congress meetings, in his 1758 Poor Richard’s Almanac, Ben Franklin wrote that “Half the truth is often a great lie.”¹

As we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday, let’s tell true stories that inspire, challenge and encourage and leave the false behind us.

1. https://usinfo.org/enus/government/overview/bf1758.html ↩︎