Right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk has become a full-blown Christian nationalist in recent years and, like so many other Christian nationalists, he relentlessly spreads disinformation in support of his radical worldview.
Kirk loves nothing more than to boldly assert that Founding Fathers relied on the book of Deuteronomy in creating our system of government, doing so once again during a TPUSA Faith event in North Carolina last month.
“Out of all the books both secular and religious that were quoted the most in the founding of the country, Deuteronomy was by far quoted the most,” Kirk claimed. “Deuteronomy talks about separation of powers, consent of the governed, an independent judiciary; the form of our government is directly inspired by Deuteronomy. And it makes sense because Moses is basically telling, ‘Hey Joshua, this is how you set up the government. You’re about to get into the land of milk and honey, you’re about to enter Canaan, this is how I recommend you set things up.'”
As Right Wing Watch has explained multiple times before, this particular bit of misinformation originated with religious-right pseudo-historian David Barton, who misrepresented a 1984 study conducted by professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston titled “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought” that sought to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in “the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805.”
The finding, Lutz reported, was that “there was no one European writer, or one tradition of writers, that dominated American political thought” during that era, but 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.
As Lutz explained:
Anyone familiar with the literature will know that most of these citations come from sermons reprinted as pamphlets; hundreds of sermons were reprinted during the era, amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published. These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations, making this nonsermon source of biblical citations roughly as important as the Classical or Common Law categories.
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 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.
Not only is the claim that the Bible was the most cited document during the founding era misleading, the very article upon which this claim relies completely debunks the Christian nationalist narrative that the Bible was a key source in crafting the Constitution by demonstrating that the Federalists, who drafted the document and supported its ratification, did not publicly cite the Bible once during the crucial time period.
Contrary to Kirk’s claim, our form of government was in no way inspired by Deuteronomy, so this is just the latest example of Kirk literally making things up to bolster his right-wing political agenda. And it is clear that Kirk is making these claims up because he tailors them to suit whatever point he is making at any given time, which is why he can in this case claim that our government’s separation of powers, consent of the governed, and an independent judiciary were all taken directly out of Deuteronomy, while at other times, he boldly asserts that the separation of powers and consent of the governed came “right out of Isaiah” while an “independent judiciary comes right out of Leviticus.”
Kirk will undoubtedly put these lies on display when he and other Christian nationalists launch their “Courage Tour” to mobilize conservative Christians to put former President Donald Trump back in the White House in the upcoming presidential election.
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