Late in 2022, religious-right pseudo-historian David Barton trotted out a brand new historic and biblical misrepresentation designed to help his Christian nationalist political agenda. Whereas talking at a Reality & Liberty Coalition convention in Colorado in September, Barton claimed that Patrick Henry’s well-known “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Demise” speech and a letter written by President George Washington to a synagogue in Rhode Island each contained a number of biblical quotations which are at the moment largely unrecognized by trendy audiences.

In making this assertion, Barton was bolstering his argument that Individuals of the founding period have been so deeply educated in regards to the Bible that they referenced it repeatedly of their writings and speeches, thus supposedly proving that the Founding Fathers supposed to create an explicitly Christian nation.

“Right now we’re usually advised, on no, the Structure is a secular doc, it’s a godless doc,” Barton recurrently insists. “When folks inform me that, I do know that they’re biblically illiterate, they don’t acknowledge Bible verses.”

As with so lots of the claims made by Barton, he offered no sources or documentation in help of his claims about Henry’s speech or Washington’s letter, however we occurred to stumble throughout related arguments in “Studying the Bible with the Founding Fathers” by American College legislation professor Daniel Dreisbach.

In his guide, Dreisbach—who appeared on Barton’s “WallBuilders Reside” radio program earlier this 12 months, regardless of the hosts’ penchant for false historical past—defined how the Founding Fathers used the Bible in quite a lot of methods, amongst them “to boost the facility and weight of rhetoric.” Whereas Dreisbach notes that the founders did often immediately cite the Bible, additionally they regularly used what he referred to as “bible-like language, that’s, phrases, phrases imagery, or cadences that resemble, imitate, or evoke the language” of the Bible.

In making this case, Dreisbach cited Henry’s speech and Washington’s letter, the identical two sources utilized by Barton. Once we tried to confirm Barton’s unique declare that Henry and Washington had each “quoted” a number of Bible verses, we largely got here up empty as a result of the Bible passages that Barton listed appeared to seem nowhere in both Henry’s speech or Washington’s letter.

The explanation for that’s as a result of lots of the Bible verses listed by Barton weren’t “quoted” by Henry or Washington however fairly merely gave the impression of biblical speech, in keeping with Dreisbach.

Within the case of Washington’s letter, practically the entire Bible verses cited by Barton additionally seem in Dreisbach’s guide, the distinction being that Dreisbach notes that Washington’s language merely generally resembles that discovered within the Bible, whereas Barton falsely asserted that they’re direct quotes from the Bible.

Right here is the slide that Barton confirmed itemizing the Bible verses allegedly quoted by Washington.

Screenshot from presentation

And right here is the paragraph from Dreisbach’s guide through which he mentioned Washington’s use of biblical-sounding language in his letter.

As we reported in September, there have been verifiable Bible quotations in each Henry’s speech and Washington’s letter, however nowhere close to the quantity that Barton claimed. We have been unable to confirm the vast majority of verses cited by Barton just because they have been by no means really quoted by Henry in his well-known “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Demise” speech or Washington in his letter to a Rhode Island synagogue. Reasonably, Barton appears to have taken the data from Dreisbach’s guide and, as is so usually the case, misrepresented it.

As now we have famous a number of instances earlier than, Barton’s profession has been constructed largely on exploiting the biblical and historic ignorance of his personal audiences to feed them a false narrative relating to the founding of this nation that serves primarily to advertise his personal modern-day Christian nationalist political agenda.

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