The Christian nationalist program “FlashPoint” has, since its inception, served as a platform for spreading wild conspiracy theories and Christian nationalist disinformation.That pattern continued when “FlashPoint” hosted an event in Oklahoma last week at which former Rep. Michele Bachmann delivered a speech overflowing with falsehoods about the supposedly Christian nature of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
While reminiscing about obtaining her law degree from Oral Roberts University, a right-wing evangelical university located in Oklahoma, Bachmann bragged that her professors required the students to learn about the founding of this nation using “primary source documents.”
“So they had us read what is it that the founders read? Who are the philosophers they read?” Bachmann said. “The number one document they referred to when they were trying to figure out what kind of a country we should be; guess what? The Bible!”
As Right Wing Watch has explained multiple times, this claim is a deliberate misrepresentation of a 1984 study conducted by professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston that sought to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in “the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805.” Lutz found 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. Once the sermon pamphlets were excluded, Lutz reported that 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.
Undeterred, Bachmann continued to spread obvious falsehoods.
“[The Founders] looked at all societies throughout all history,” she claimed. “They said, ‘We’ve got a unique chance in all the world to create a society. What should it look like? What should it be based on?’ They studied all societies and those forms of government, and they decided—when they had done all that—they needed to search the word of God. And so you can take the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence [and] you can literally tie it to a Bible verse; about every three or four words, it’s based upon another area of Scripture.”
This claim is, of course, also entirely false.
Both of Bachmann’s claims are either misleading or outright false, which seems to be a common theme as time and again, Christian nationalists spread blatant falsehoods in defense of their ideology, leading one to wonder why, if their position is true, do they have to keep lying to try and “prove” it. Clearly, they simply do not care about the truth as long as these myths remain useful in convincing Americans that the Christian nationalists’ political agenda is justified by our history.
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