When it comes to the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, we can tell a lie—and we have been, ever since before the musket-fire stopped. We tell lies of exclusion, of exaggeration, of complete fabrication. Scholars tell them to our young people in textbooks; politicians tell them to adults in an unending stream of rhetoric. Such mythologizing is not surprising. Especially when it comes to origin myths, we humans love stories with clear heroes and villains and neat endings. But as two new books published for Independence Day show, it is dangerous. If we get lazy about our historical facts, we risk accepting at face value the interpretations of those facts we’re being fed.

According to Ray Raphael's Founding Myths, a collection of primary-source documents assembled to counter the too-simple stories found in elementary and secondary school textbooks, we have the American Revolution wrong literally from beginning to end—mistakes that reveal a lot about American attitudes toward radicalism and military intervention. We think of the beginning as the “shot heard round the world” at the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775. However, Massachusetts farmers had already shaken off British rule in a popular uprising in 1774. Raphael contends that because we could find no individual face to attach to that earlier rebellion, we leave it out. (We love to distrust a leaderless movement. See: Occupy Wall Street.)

The Revolutionary War’s traditional finale at the Battle of Yorktown is likewise arbitrary: In the 18 months after Yorktown, 365 people were killed, more than at Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, and Quebec combined. But extending the end date, Raphael argues, would require explaining the Western battles against Native Americans, and young America’s awkward role as a proxy between Europe's two great powers, England and France. (Americans, he writes, “have always done their best to avoid European entanglements.” We certainly tried to stay out of World War II until it arrived on our doorstep at Pearl Harbor.) The very existence of this book attests to the perennial appeal of such mythology: It’s a tenth-anniversary reissue.

Where Founding Myths is meant as a broad corrective to the historical record, Matthew Stewart's Nature’s God: The Heretical Foundations of the American Republic bets all its chips on a founding myth that, studies by the Public Religion Research Institute have shown, more than half of Tea Party members believe: that our Founding Fathers were religious men, and that America is therefore a “Christian nation.” Actually, writes Stewart, in deism, the philosophical school of Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams, values and rights are granted to individuals not by the whims of a supernatural, transcendent authority, but by the natural, immanent laws of the universe. “We are and always have been the source of our own authority ... we govern ourselves not through acts of faith but through acts of understanding.” To think otherwise opens up a path to fascism and dictatorship. “If we should find ourselves beholden to some other imagined authority, this can only mean that we have constructed the conditions of our own servitude.”

Many founding documents are, to be sure, dressed up in Christian language. The opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence, for one: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people… to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them.” But just who is this “Nature’s God”? That is, to what degree did the Founding Fathers consider themselves loyal to the version of Christianity that prevailed in America at their time? Not much, Stewart concluded after a decade of research. Deism, he argues persuasively, “is in fact functionally indistinguishable from what we would now call 'pantheism'; and pantheism is really just a pretty word for atheism.” Them’s fighting words.