As the nation honors the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Christian nationalists have been out in full force, seeking to exploit the celebrations to promote a variety of debunked myths and blatant falsehoods in support of their right-wing political ideology.
This was on display during a recent podcast hosted by former Republican National Committee faith outreach director Chad Connelly. Connelly now runs an organization called Faith Wins that travels across the nation delivering presentations in churches aimed at mobilizing conservative Christian voters ahead of upcoming elections. The featured speaker at many of these events is Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, who is frequently the source of the seemingly endless supply of myths and historical misrepresentations upon which other Christian nationalist activists like Connelly rely.
During his recent podcast, Connelly managed to uncork a series of Barton-created falsehoods in one four-minute period.
"Y'all know this because you studied the Bible," Connelly declared. "Exodus 18;21; it's when Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, recognized Moses is overwhelmed, trying to do all the judging for the people. And that's when Jethro said, 'Look, Moses, you're wearing yourself out. You need to select able men, men of truth, hating covetousness, select and appoint them to be leaders of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens.' You as a pastor, did you know that in James Madison's Notes on the Constitution, he recorded that scripture on how they ought to have a republican—not big R, republican, meaning representative—elected representative form of government in America. That scripture is inside enshrined in the United States Constitution."
As Right Wing Watch has pointed out numerous times, this is a claim that was simply made up by Barton and one for which he has never provided a shred of evidence. Connelly's claim that James Madison explicitly cited the Bible passage as the inspiration for our elected form of government is likewise false.
Connelly, of course, was not done.
"Separation of powers, by the way, came from Isaiah 33:22: 'The Lord is our king. The Lord is our judge. The Lord is our lawgiver," he continued. "Hmm. That sounds like an executive, a judicial, and a legislative branch."
This claim too is something entirely made up by Barton for which there is no historical evidence.
"Exodus 18:21 and Isaiah 33:22; you ought to be teaching your people those scriptures and how they're the cornerstone of the Judeo-Christian history in America, and nobody knows it," Connelly asserted, before turning his attention to Christian nationalists' favorite study from University of Houston professor Donald Lutz.
"They did a study ... they analyzed 15,000 writings of the Founders," Connelly said. "They took diaries, they took notes, they took direct first-person access—you know, not quoted by somebody else, but actual sourcing, original sourcing—they found that fully 34% of all the quotes the Founders gave in that Constitutional Convention from June 1787 to September 1787, 34 percent, one third, came from the Bible. Nobody knows that. In other words, the number one thing that the Founders quoted when they built the American Constitution was the word of God."
Lutz's study found nothing of the sort. What it did was examine a sampling of "the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805," many of which turned out to be reprinted sermons which were the source of nearly all of the biblical citations identified.
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 did 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.
Connelly's claim that the study found that the Founders repeatedly cited "the word of God" during the Constitutional Convention is utterly false. And once again, this is a claim that was completely made up by Barton and has now become so widespread that right-wing Christian nationalist activists blindly repeat it without any concern regarding its accuracy.
As evidence of the pervasiveness of Barton's myth-making, Indiana's Lt. Gov Micah Beckwith preached at a church on Sunday where he too repeated many of these same false claims.
