evidence: In June 2022, we received reader mail that asked us to look into the veracity of a quote by one of the Founding Fathers. According to various memes and posts that appeared on Facebook since at least 2011, former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson once said, "Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights." However, the truth was that this quote was misattributed in the memes and posts to Jefferson and had, in reality, been written by someone else. [...] According to Narkive.com, a newsgroup archive website, this quote originated not with Jefferson, but instead with author Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. Narkive.com directed us to an old page of Jefferson quotes that was once hosted by the website for the University of Virginia. The page was archived in the year 1999 by the Wayback Machine on Archive.org. It contained the same quote in its introduction, which was credited at the bottom of the website to Coates. [...] Much more can be studied in Jefferson's other writings on religion, including on Monticello.org, a website that is operated by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. For this fact check, however, we've concentrated mainly on the fact that the "religious institutions" quote in question came not from Jefferson, but rather Coates.