There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one—that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion. It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by "religionists", but by Christians—not on religion, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

This has been cited at some sites as being in a speech to the House of Burgesses in May 1765, but the date and quote are both spurious. Patrick Henry never said anything like it; it was written in the 1950s. The writer David Barton misread a book and became in The Myth of Separation (1988) the first person to claim Henry wrote it. On internal evidence alone it could not have been written in the 18th century, for it is anachronistic to have Henry speaking of the colony of Virginia in 1765 as a "nation" that afforded "peoples of other faiths" the "freedom of worship." In fact this statement first appeared in the April 1956 issue of The Virginian in a piece partially about, not by, Patrick Henry, as the next sentence clearly shows: "In the spoken and written words of our noble founders and forefathers, we find symbolic expressions of their Christian faith. The above quotation from the will of Patrick Henry is a notable example." (The "above quotation from the will" which is cited, is also