As Right Wing Watch has noted multiple times in the past, one of the defining characteristics of Christian nationalist activists is a willingness to misrepresent history, as time after time they spread debunked myths and blatant falsehoods in defense of their right-wing ideology.
More often than not, the misinformation they spread originated with pseudo-historian David Barton, who is highly regarded by powerful figures like House Speaker Mike Johnson and other members of Congress despite the fact that the "history" he presents is notoriously untrustworthy.
One can see the effects of Barton's shoddy history when the false claims he makes are picked up by other Christian nationalist activists who inevitably further misrepresent them because of their own basic historical ignorance. Such was the case when Christian nationalist Trump cultist Lance Wallnau recently appeared on a program hosted by "respected prophet" Cindy Jacobs and her husband Mike, founders of Generals International.
"If people have looked at the United States of America from early on—[Alexis] de Tocqueville did this—and he says, 'Well, where do they get their concepts?' claimed Mike Jacobs. "If you statistically analyze where were the concepts [found] that caused the founding of the United States, the most commonly quoted thing was the Bible."
"It's not just an opinion," replied Wallnau. "The University of Houston did a study of all the literature of 4,000 documents from the Founders, they came out with two sources predominantly quoted. The two sources was A) the Bible; second, it was Deuteronomy within the Bible. It was literally the book of Deuteronomy was quoted 60% of the time."
Nothing about the claims made by Jacobs or Wallnau is accurate, other than the fact that a professor named Donald Lutz from the University of Houston once conducted a study to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in "the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805."
First of all, Alexis de Tocqueville had nothing to do with any of this. Secondly, the claim that the Bible, and specifically the book of Deuteronomy, was the most quoted source is a flagrant misrepresentation of Lutz's findings, as Right Wing Watch has explained multiple times.
In 1984, professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston published a study in The American Political Science Review titled "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought." The purpose of the study was to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in "the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805."
The finding, Lutz reported, was that "there was no one European writer, or one tradition of writers, that dominated American political thought" during that era, but that the Bible was cited most frequently solely because many of the pamphlets included in the research were sermons that had been reprinted for mass distribution.
As Lutz explained:
Anyone familiar with the literature will know that most of these citations come from sermons reprinted as pamphlets; hundreds of sermons were reprinted during the era, amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published. These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations, making this nonsermon source of biblical citations roughly as important as the Classical or Common Law categories.
As Lutz noted, once the sermon pamphlets were excluded, quotes from the Bible appeared no more frequently in the political writings of the era than citations of the classical or common law.
More importantly, Lutz also noted that when the focus was solely on the public political writings from 1787 to 1788, when the U.S. Constitution was written and ratified, "the Bible's prominence disappears" almost completely.
Tables 4 and 5 illustrate the pattern of citations surrounding the debate on the U.S. Constitution. The items from which the citations for these two tables are drawn come close to exhausting the literature written by both sides. The Bible's prominence disappears, which is not surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible had little to say. The Anti-Federalists do drag it in with respect to basic principles of government, but the Federalists' inclination to Enlightenment rationalism is most evident here in their failure to consider the Bible relevant.
Lutz did not study the writings of the Founders, but rather public writings from all sources during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period. While Lutz found that Deuteronomy was the most cited Biblical book among the writings studied, that was because a large portion of the documents examined consisted of sermons. When those documents were excluded, the Bible was quoted no more frequently than any other source. Furthermore, the Bible was not quoted at all in the documents from the years when the Constitution was being written and ratified.
Jacobs and Wallnau don't know the basic facts about this study because they are presumably just repeating the misleading claims made by the likes of David Barton and then distorting them even further because of their own ignorance.
