94 percent of America's founding era documents mention the Bible

Angus McPresley

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Lauren Green of Fox news, commenting on the Kathy Griffin "suck it, Jesus" Emmy acceptance speech, reports:

Ninety-four percent of America's founding era documents mention the Bible; 34 percent quote the Bible directly.
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While her commentary on the whole is pretty easy to refute (pray tell me, Lauren, where the Bible even mentions free speech), I must say I've never heard this statistic before. Any idea where it might derive from?
 
unless the contention is that "In the year of our lord" is mentioning the bible, I find those numbers hard to believe. It would appear to me to be pulled from someone's rear end.

Constitution: No mention of God or religion, except of course in the amendment regarding "congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of..."
Declaration of Independence: No moention of religion, sans a vague reference to a "creator"
Articles of Confederation: No mention of the bible I can find.

Any other documents I am missing? I seem to recall one state congressional document that wished everyone a merry christmas, but iirc it was a resolution passed simply to wish people a merry christmas.
 
What is this claim actually saying, it appears to be a claim about the founding documents of the USA (Declaration of independence, constitution and amendments and so on), if it isn’t. It doesn’t say “founding documents” its says “founding era[/i] documents” (my bold). I’ll take the founding era to be 1765-1783 (although the exact dates aren’t important).

The claim is that in those 18 years, 90% of all documents contained a reference to the bible- bills of sail, contracts, personal letters, laws, minuets of meetings etc. etc. have been demonstrated to reference the bible?

That’s’ a pretty extraordinary claim, and even if it is true, it’s pretty meaningless.
 
Looks like DOC is writing for Fox News. I would love to know where the author came up with that figure, though.

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Ninety-four percent of America's founding era documents mention the Bible; 34 percent quote the Bible directly.
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Thanks! That's just what I needed to get me going this morning. I'm a little grumpy but that perked me up.
 
Political Christians are both stupid and dishonest. That goes double for the ones on Fox "News".
 
Isn't the Constitution the only one the really really really matters?

Are they referring to State founding documents maybe?
 
All founding era documents? Shopping lists? Shipping manifests? Letters home to Mama? Beer recipes? Federalist Papers? Holy cow, those founding era folks were cookoo for Jesus!
 
The fun part of this story is that it features Chuck Norris.*

The 34% is cherry-picked from a 1984 study by Donald Lutz, as this site points out. Details:
From this chart it really does appear that 34% of the citations in the documents studied came from the Bible. That's because they did. And, without Lutz's explanation of this figure, this chart seems to support the assertion that the Bible, more than any other source, influenced the political thought of the founders. So, the religious right history revisionists simply omit the following explanation of the chart provided by Lutz.
...From Table 1 we can see that the biblical tradition is most prominent among the citations. 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...
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The 94% appears to be a rectal extraction.


*Sorry, not that Chuck Norris.
​

​
 
Ducky said:
unless the contention is that "In the year of our lord" is mentioning the bible, I find those numbers hard to believe. It would appear to me to be pulled from someone's rear end.

Constitution: No mention of God or religion, except of course in the amendment regarding "congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of..."
Declaration of Independence: No moention of religion, sans a vague reference to a "creator"
Articles of Confederation: No mention of the bible I can find.

Any other documents I am missing? I seem to recall one state congressional document that wished everyone a merry christmas, but iirc it was a resolution passed simply to wish people a merry christmas.
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Wasn't the language of "Creator," as in "Endowed by their Creator," in that context explicetely deist, and self-conciously divorced from established Churches and traditional Christianity?
 
Ah, another example of "lying for Jesus."

I wonder how long before DOC starts citing this as gospel (pun intended)...

If I could just go off on a rant here for a moment...


RANT!
Why are fundamentalists so insecure about their beliefs that they need to lie about it?

Creationism.
The "US is built on Christian values" revisionist BS.
Fabricated/distorted stories about Christian students having their bibles taken by public schools and similar crap.

You don't see this kind of crap from religious moderates. Somehow, those of us who are simply content to believe don't feel the need to reinforce our beliefs (or push them on others) with a steady stream of bullcrap.
 
Angus McPresley said:
Lauren Green of Fox news, commenting on the Kathy Griffin "suck it, Jesus" Emmy acceptance speech, reports:



While her commentary on the whole is pretty easy to refute (pray tell me, Lauren, where the Bible even mentions free speech), I must say I've never heard this statistic before. Any idea where it might derive from?
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91.756543% of statistics are completely made up.*


*I remember debating a family member about abortion and she started quoting statistics that seemed completely off to me. I asked simply for a source of that information. I was told, "Well, common sense says it has to be arround that number." In fact, she was convinced that all statistics weren't actually based on anything but conjecture and opinion, and that she was completely allowed to make up numbers as best fit. I have a feeling that this view isn't her's alone.
 
This is a style of lie that I'm familiar with. I am, for example, a GULF WAR ERA VETERAN!! Of course Desert Shield/Storm took place while I was in high school, I didn't enlist until 1994, and I barely managed to leave my home state in four years... but I can imply that I was hooking and jabbing in the hot LZ, out of ammo, broken bayonet, and the entire Iraqi Republican Guard over the next dune. :)
 
I wonder what percentage of bible quotes are used in books/documents by those who were the founding fathers of the confederacy/ pro slavery in the nineteenth century?
Or the KKK, apartide, on and on and on.
 
joobz said:
91.756543% of statistics are completely made up.*


*I remember debating a family member about abortion and she started quoting statistics that seemed completely off to me. I asked simply for a source of that information. I was told, "Well, common sense says it has to be arround that number." In fact, she was convinced that all statistics weren't actually based on anything but conjecture and opinion, and that she was completely allowed to make up numbers as best fit. I have a feeling that this view isn't her's alone.
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It's a branch of Creation Math, known as Soliptistics.
 
It's yet another attempt to support the "Christian Nation" myth.

What we're supposed to believe from this so-called fact is that the founding fathers were inspired by Christianity when forming this nation.

Except that it isn't necessarily documents written by the founding fathers themselves. Just documents written during that period in our history. As others have pointed out, it could be anything from newspaper articles to letters to mom to shopping lists.

And, of course, what she doesn't say is that if 95% of the documents from that era said "the Bible is a complete and utter lie," it would still count as "mentioning the Bible."

I like the statement someone else (I forget who, sorry) made in another thread: "You could show that Thomas Jefferson ritually crucified himself every Easter and it still wouldn't prove he thought mixing government and religion was a good idea."
 
Just as a guess, I'd say that a goodly amount of posts here mention the Bible, directly or indirectly. It's the society, really. The Bible has had an enormous influence on Western civilization, so it's not really suprizing that a good percentage of writings of any sort (minus fully technical) would reference it. It's our common mythology. Even if you weren't raised in it, you probably know most of the stories.

Now, to the factual part of 90+%, that's an exercise in button sorting. I say that wasshername can provide us with a rigiorous study of all the documents written circa 1782.
 
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