The problem with David Barton’s false statements and pseudo-history is not simply that it receives support from leaders like Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann,Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich; it is that his claims get picked up by other Religious Right speakers and, in doing so, get twisted even beyond Barton’s original bogus claims.
Case in point: today we came across these recent remarks delivered by Jerry Boykin where he claimed that “there is no question that there was divine inspiration” behind the writing of the Constitution, which is why “the Bible is referenced four times more than any other document in our Constitution”:
Of course, the Bible is not referenced at all in the Constitution … but you will not be surprised to learn that Boykin’s claim finds its inspiration in Barton’s “America’s Godly Heritage” (skip ahead to the 4:00 mark) though Barton simply claims that the Bible was cited by the Founding Fathers four times more than they cited figures like Montesquieu and Blackstone.
Yet even Barton’s original claim was itself problematic and Boykin has only made it worse by falsely claiming that the Constitution directly references the Bible multiple times, when it obviously does nothing of the sort.
