Earlier this month, Oklahoma’s Christian nationalist state superintendent of education Ryan Walters announced that he was creating an executive review committee to overhaul the state’s social studies curriculum and that it would be stocked with far-right activists and ideologues.
Among those appointed to the committee was Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, a longtime religious-right activist who has repeatedly misrepresented his academic credentials and whose scholarship is so shoddy that one of his books was pulled off the marked by his own publisher in 2012 after it concluded that “basic truths just were not there.”
Barton is notorious for misrepresenting history in order to bolster his right-wing political agenda and for continuing to repeat his false claims long after they have been debunked. Both of these tendencies were on display when Barton appeared on “The War Room” over the weekend.
“According to University of Houston, they did a 10 year study,” Barton said. “They collected the writings the Founding Fathers in the founding era—15,000 they used—and they found in those 3,154 direct quotes. They said, ‘All right, now let’s see who the Founding Fathers quoted.’ The number one source for their quotes was the Bible. Thirty four percent of all those political quotes came out of Bible verses, and the number one Bible book [was] the book of Deuteronomy.”
“So, this is not hyperbole,” Barton insisted.
While it might not be “hyperbole,” Barton’s statement is certainly misleading, as Right Wing Watch has pointed out time and again:
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.
Undaunted, Barton continued to spread claims that were debunked years ago.
“I was involved in 13 cases at the U.S. Supreme Court,” Barton stated later in the interview. “Even [former Supreme Court Justice] Stephen Breyer said, ‘We all know the due process rights of the Constitution came out of the Bible.”
“The right to confront your accusers comes out of John 8:10,” Barton insisted. “The right to compel witnesses in your behalf comes out of Proverbs 18:17. The right to speak in your own defense [comes out of] Acts 22:1. If you don’t know scriptures, you’re not going to understand how the Constitution works.”
Right Wing Watch first debunked this claim nearly a decade ago, pointing out that what Breyer actually said in his 1999 concurrence in Lilly v. Virginia was merely that “the right of an accused to meet his accusers face-to-face is mentioned in, among other things, the Bible, Shakespeare, and 16th and 17th century British statutes, cases, and treatises.”
The Court’s effort to tie the Clause so directly to the hearsay rule is of fairly recent vintage, compare Roberts, supra, with California v. Green, 399 U.S. 149, 155—156 (1970), while the Confrontation Clause itself has ancient origins that predate the hearsay rule, see Salinger v. United States, 272 U.S. 542, 548 (1926) (“The right of confrontation did not originate with the provision in the Sixth Amendment, but was a common-law right having recognized exceptions”). The right of an accused to meet his accusers face-to-face is mentioned in, among other things, the Bible, Shakespeare, and 16th and 17th century British statutes, cases, and treatises. See The Bible, Acts 25:16; W. Shakespeare, Richard II, act i, sc. 1; W. Shakespeare, Henry VIII, act ii, sc. 1; 30 C. Wright & K. Graham, Federal Practice and Procedure §6342, p. 227 (1997) (quoting statutes enacted under King Edward VI in 1552 and Queen Elizabeth I in 1558); cf. Case of Thomas Tong, Kelyng J. 17, 18, 84 Eng. Rep. 1061, 1062 (1662) (out-of-court confession may be used against the confessor, but not against his co-conspirators); M. Hale, History of the Common Law of England 163—164 (C. Gray ed. 1971); 3 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *373. As traditionally understood, the right was designed to prevent, for example, the kind of abuse that permitted the Crown to convict Sir Walter Raleigh of treason on the basis of the out-of-court confession of Lord Cobham, a co-conspirator. See 30 Wright & Graham, supra, §6342, at 258—269.
Needless to say, there is absolutely no historical evidence to support Barton’s claims that our due process rights came out of John, Acts, or Proverbs. More importantly, Barton has never even bothered to cite any historical record to support his claim, nor has he ever had any incentive to do so. And this is because Barton has built his career on exploiting the biblical and historical ignorance of his own audiences, knowing that they are unprepared to question his assertions and will get no traction even if attempt to do so.
Now that Barton has been tapped to overhaul the academic standards in Oklahoma, it is entirely possible that these sorts of bogus claims will work their way into the state’s social studies curriculum, indoctrinating future generations with a Barton-esque Christian nationalist worldview that is built on lies and intentional misinformation.
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