Right-wing political activist and Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton was recently featured, along with Mike Huckabee, in a DVD called “The Constitutional Christian,” in which he once again falsely claimed that “so many Bible verses [are] quoted in the Constitution.”
After repeating his argument that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are two parts of one document (they’re not), Barton insisted that our system of government will never work properly “if you try to put people in office who have no biblical understanding” because they will be unable to recognize the fact that the Constitution is explicitly based on Biblical principles and full of Bible verses.
“One of the things I love to do,” Barton said, “is I will pull out a bunch of constitutional clauses and stick it up in front of pastors and say, ‘What do you see? Constitution? No, they’re all Bible verses.’ There are so many Bible verses quoted in the Constitution, cited in the Constitution, but today we don’t even recognize that because we don’t think about looking at the Constitution as something that has religious tones to it.”
“It’s fun for me to show pastors, ‘Look at this verse out of Deuteronomy 17:15, now read [this clause in the Constitution.] It’s the same language,'” he continued. “That’s the nature of those who gave us that. You don’t get that kind of language in the Constitution unless you have biblically-thinking people or biblically-minded people writing that because they had to know it before they could put it in.”
As we have noted before, Barton’s claim that the Constitution is full of Bible verses is utter nonsense, as his own claim about Deuteronomy 17:15 proves:
You shall surely set him king over you, whom the LORD your God shall choose: one from among your brethren shall you set king over you: you may not set a stranger over you, who is not your brother.
Barton laughably insists that this verse is the “verbatim” source for Article II of the Constitution which says that “no person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President.”
