The Most Misread Paper in Christian Nationalism

The most-cited proof that America was founded as a Christian nation traces back to a single paper written in 1984. It turns out the author of that paper said the opposite.

There is a claim circulating in Christian nationalist circles that has been repeated so many times by so many prominent people that it has achieved the status of received fact. It's been touted by people like Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, Mike Johnson, and Kirk Cameron, who apparently continues to hold bizarre opinions.

The claim is that the Bible was the most-cited document by the Founding Fathers.

If true, it would give theological cover to a political project that desperately needs it. If the founders were drawing primarily from Scripture, then the argument for a Christian nation is a matter of history.

It is also, upon closer inspection, not what the data actually shows.

The claim traces back to a single 1984 paper published in The American Political Science Review by Professor Donald S. Lutz, titled "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought." Bible scholar Dr. Dan McClellan and co-host Dan Beecher walked through this paper in detail on a recent episode of their Data Over Dogma podcast, and what they found should give pause to anyone who has repeated this claim confidently at a dinner table or from a pulpit.

Lutz did find that the Bible accounted for 34% of citations in the political writings from 1760 to 1805. The Enlightenment-era authors came in at 22%, Whig literature at 18%, and common law at 11%. On the surface, the Bible wins in a rout.

But Lutz himself included a qualification in the paper that the people repeating this claim have apparently never read.

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.

Sermons. Reprinted as pamphlets. Not Jefferson. Not Madison. Not Hamilton. Preachers who gave sermons and then distributed them as the social media of their day.

McClellan pointed out on the podcast that once you remove those reprinted sermons from the dataset, the Bible's share of citations drops to roughly 10%, placing it between third and fifth in the overall rankings. 

Then there is the moment that should end the argument entirely. Lutz narrowed his focus to 1787 and 1788, the years when the Constitution was actually being written and ratified. When he looked at the Federalists, the people who drafted the Constitution, their citation rate for the Bible was 0%. The Anti-Federalists cited it 9% of the time. As Lutz himself wrote, summarizing the pattern he found in those constitutional-era documents, "the Bible's prominence disappears."

Zero percent. The people who built the frame of the government, which they claim was built on Scripture, did not quote Scripture to build it.

This doesn't mean the founders were secular libertarians running some kind of godless experiment. Most of them were shaped by Protestant culture, just as most of us have been shaped by the cultural waters we swim in. Many of them believed in God, referenced Providence, and understood morality through a broadly religious lens. Acknowledging that the Bible was culturally influential is not dishonest. But there is a significant distance between "culturally influential" and "the most cited source," and an even greater distance between that and "therefore we are a Christian nation."

John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, which stated plainly that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Thomas Jefferson cut the miracles out of his Bible with a literal pair of scissors because he found Jesus compelling as a philosopher but was unpersuaded by the supernatural elements. James Madison, arguably the most pious of the major founders, was also one of the most insistent advocates for strict separation of church and state, precisely because he had seen what happened when those two things got tangled together.

These were not atheists. They were also not theocrats. The portrait is more complicated than either side usually admits.

The claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, cemented by this misread of Lutz, functions as a permission slip. It says: "This country belongs to us. Our values should be your law. Our reading of Scripture should govern your choices."

And that logic has a very specific set of targets right now.

When Pete Hegseth says, "protecting our borders from criminals who steal from us, assault our loved ones, and poison our citizens is not political, it's biblical," he is doing something strategic. He is borrowing the authority of Scripture to sanctify a policy. The historical claim that the founders did this too is meant to normalize it, to make it feel continuous with something ancient and established.

But the founders who wrote the Constitution did not do this.

I find it worth noting that Jesus Himself had very little interest in Rome's governance and zero interest in baptizing it. When pressed on the question of political allegiance, He answered with a coin trick and a request to think harder: "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God" (Matthew 22:21). 

The people of God have always been at their best not when they controlled the empire but when they lived in contrast to it. When they cared for people the empire had written off. When they told a different story about who matters and why. That story does not need the Founding Fathers as its footnote. It is older than the Constitution and far more demanding.

As Greg Boyd says in his book, The Myth of a Christian Nation:

While all the versions of the kingdom of the world acquire and exercise power over others, the kingdom of God, incarnated and modeled in the person of Jesus Christ, advances only by exercising power under others.

The founders who built the frame of our government did not quote the Bible to do it. The people claiming they did have not read the paper they are citing. And the Jesus they are invoking spent his entire ministry doing what he did with that coin: refusing to let the powerful define the terms, and then changing the subject to something that mattered more.

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