Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton dedicated his “WallBuilders Live” radio program today to repeating his debunked claims that multiple clauses in Constitution were based “almost verbatim” on passages from the Bible.
Barton’s argument hinges largely on a 1984 study that he routinely misrepresents in order to claim that “the Bible was the most frequently cited source in the Founding era” and that the Founding Fathers regularly cited the works of Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke, who were all Christians, which he falsely points to as evidence that the Constitution was based on the Bible.
Barton also claims that whenever the Founding Fathers cited the works of “atheist writer” David Hume, they did so only to “show how ridiculous his ideas were,” which he says shows that the Constitution “came primarily from three Enlightenment writers that were Christian Enlightenment guys, [whereas] the first time a secular Enlightenment guy [Hume] was cited, [it] was just to beat up on his bad ideas.”
That is why, Barton states, so much of the language in the Constitution bears a “one-to-one correlation” to the Bible.
“You’ll find almost verbatim wording in many clauses of the Constitution to passages in the Bible,” Barton said. “It’s a one-to-one correlation on the wording.”
Barton says that those who can’t see this obvious “one-to-one correlation” clearly “haven’t even read the Constitution and if you have, you haven’t read the Bible, otherwise you would see the language that makes it from the Bible into the Constitution.”
As we have pointed out numerous times before, Barton’s claim that passages from the Constitution are “almost verbatim” quotes from the Bible is utter nonsense.
