“34% of the Founders’ quotes came directly from the Bible.”

VerdictMisleading

The 34 percent figure comes from a real 1984 study, but it measures citations in a sample of 916 published political writings from 1760 to 1805, and about three-fourths of the Bible citations came from sermons reprinted as pamphlets. The study’s author found almost no Bible citations in the debate over the Constitution itself. The inflated “94 percent” version has no basis in the study.Last checked October 2026

The claim, stated fairly

The claim usually comes with a footnote, which is part of why it’s persuasive. WallBuilders, the organization founded by David Barton, puts it this way in “Lesson 4” of its current American history lesson series: researchers “isolated 3,154 direct quotations,” and “thirty-four percent of the documented quotes were taken from the Bible,” which was “almost four times higher than the second most-quoted source” (WallBuilders, Lesson 4).

Other versions add a detail. Author William J. Federer writes that the Bible, “especially the book of Deuteronomy, contributed 34 percent” of “all quotations used by our Founding Fathers” (Federer, American Minute). At a Turning Point USA Faith event in February 2024, Charlie Kirk told the audience “Deuteronomy was by far quoted the most” and that “the form of our government is directly inspired from Deuteronomy,” as quoted by Baptist News Global.

And some versions grow. In 2018, congressional candidate Cynthia Dunbar told a church audience that “94 percent of the quotes of the Founding Fathers contemporaneous to our founding” came “either directly or indirectly from the holy scripture” (Right Wing Watch, March 9, 2018).

The intuition behind all of these is sound. Revolutionary America was soaked in scripture. Ministers preached on politics, and educated Americans could quote the Bible from memory. A number that seems to measure that, with a citation to a major political science journal, feels like confirmation. So the question is narrow: what did the study actually count?

Where the number comes from

The source is Donald S. Lutz, then a political scientist at the University of Houston, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (March 1984): 189–197 (Cambridge Core). The article itself sits behind a paywall. The passages below are quoted as reproduced, with page numbers, by researchers Warren Throckmorton and Chris Rodda; where both reproduce a passage, their texts agree.

Lutz described a project he began about a decade earlier with political scientist Charles S. Hyneman, his co-editor on a 1983 anthology of founding-era political writing. They started by “reviewing an estimated 15,000 items,” then read closely “some 2,200 items with explicitly political content.” Their final sample was smaller: “The resulting sample has 916 items,” containing “3,154 references to 224 different individuals” (p. 191, as quoted by Throckmorton).

Three features of that design matter.

It counted published writing only. “Excluded was anything that remained private and so did not enter public consciousness, such as letters and notes” (p. 191, as quoted by Throckmorton). Private letters, including most of what the famous Founders wrote, were left out. The sample is political pamphlets, newspaper essays, books and printed sermons by Americans of the period, whoever wrote them.

A “citation” was broad. Lutz defined it as “any footnote, direct quote, attributed paraphrasing, or use of a name in exemplifying a concept or position” (p. 191, as quoted by Rodda). Mentioning Moses by name counts. So does a footnote. “Direct quotations,” the WallBuilders phrase, describes something narrower than what Lutz counted.

It couldn’t tell agreement from disagreement. Lutz was candid about this. “Influence” was “used here in a broad sense,” and the method “cannot distinguish among citations that represent the borrowing of an idea” and other uses, including opposing it (p. 191, as quoted by Throckmorton).

What the 34 percent actually measures

Within that sample, the Bible was the most-cited source: about 34 percent of citations, ahead of Enlightenment writers (about 22 percent) and Whig political writers (about 18 percent), as Chris Rodda reports Lutz’s table. Throckmorton and Mark David Hall cite the same 34 and 22 percent figures (Throckmorton, 2026).

Lutz then explained where those Bible citations came from: “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,” he added, “amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published,” and “These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations” (p. 192, as quoted by both Rodda and Throckmorton).

The Deuteronomy detail is real too. Lutz asked “what book was most frequently cited by Americans during the founding era,” and answered: “the answer somewhat surprisingly is: the Book of Deuteronomy” (p. 192, as quoted by Throckmorton). That finding is about citation counts in sermons and pamphlets. Lutz’s article doesn’t say the form of American government came from Deuteronomy.

Then there is the finding that rarely travels with the number. Lutz looked separately at writings from 1787 and 1788, the years the Constitution was debated and ratified:

“The Bible’s prominence disappears, which is not surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has 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.” (p. 194, as quoted by Rodda; Kyle Mantyla reproduces the same passage)

In other words, in the one stretch of the study most directly about the Constitution, the writers defending it didn’t cite the Bible at all, according to Throckmorton and Rodda, who both read Lutz’s table for those years, and its opponents cited it only occasionally.

So “34% of the Founders’ quotes came directly from the Bible” changes three things at once. “Citations” become “quotes.” A sample of published writing, whose Bible citations came mostly from sermons, becomes “the Founders.” And a figure for 1760 to 1805 as a whole gets applied to the founding documents, where Lutz found the Bible’s share collapsed.

How 34 became 94

The 94 percent figure has a traceable origin. In his 1990 video America’s Godly Heritage, David Barton said researchers found that 94 percent “of the quotes of the founders were based on the Bible,” as transcribed by both Chris Rodda and historian Gregg Frazer (Frazer’s critique is reproduced by Throckmorton, December 4, 2014). Barton reached 94 by adding the study’s 34 percent to another 60 percent he attributed to writers who had themselves drawn on the Bible.

Lutz’s study contains no 60 percent figure. Federer’s page states the step plainly, “These other sources drew 60 percent of their quotations from the Bible,” and gives no source for it. Rodda, who reconstructed the arithmetic, concluded that the extra 60 percent came from counting every citation of any writer in the study who referenced the Bible anywhere in his works as an “indirect” Bible citation, whether or not the passage being cited had anything to do with scripture. Frazer’s verdict was blunter: “Barton made those up.”

To WallBuilders’ credit, its current teaching material uses the 34 percent figure; the 94 percent figure doesn’t appear in it. The larger number keeps circulating anyway, as Dunbar’s 2018 speech shows.

Engaging the counterargument

“Even at 34 percent, the Bible was the single most-cited source. That matters.”

It does, and Lutz said so himself: “From Table 1 we can see that the biblical tradition is most prominent among the citations” (p. 192, as quoted by Rodda). Even after setting the reprinted sermons aside, he judged the remaining biblical citations “roughly as important as the Classical or Common Law categories.” Lutz’s later book, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (LSU Press, 1988), traces American constitutionalism partly to “radical Protestant interpretations of the Judeo-Christian tradition” and to colonial compacts such as the Mayflower Compact (publisher’s description). He took religion seriously as a source.

Political scientist Mark David Hall, who argues for a substantially Christian founding, puts the finding plainly: “the Founders referenced the Bible more than all Enlightenment authors combined” (Heritage Foundation lecture, 2011). On Lutz’s 34-to-22 split, that’s accurate.

We concede all of this. The 34 percent figure is a genuine finding about the vocabulary of public argument in revolutionary America, and it’s a reasonable corrective to accounts that treat the era as purely secular.

Still, a citation count is a measure of vocabulary, and most of this vocabulary came from preaching. Daniel Dreisbach of American University, a leading scholar of the Bible’s place in the founding and no skeptic of its importance, put it this way in a 2017 talk: “simply counting and documenting the founders’ many references to the Bible tells us little except that the Bible was a familiar and useful literary resource for this generation,” and “you can still concede that point and doubt that it had a significant substantive influence” (C.S. Lewis Institute transcript). Whether scripture shaped particular institutions is a question about content, answered by reading the debates and the documents. On that question, Lutz’s own 1787–88 numbers point away from the claim. And his overall conclusion, stated in the article’s abstract, was that “there was no one European writer, or one tradition of writers, that dominated American political thought” (Cambridge Core).

“Whatever the percentage, the Founders were steeped in scripture.”

Many were. How devout the leading Founders actually were is a separate question with a mixed answer, covered on our page about whether the Founders were devout Christians. What the Constitution’s text itself says about religion is covered in “The Constitution was always understood as a Christian document”. The narrow point here is that this statistic, read accurately, can’t carry either argument.

The takeaway

The 34 percent figure is real. It describes citations, broadly defined, in 916 published writings from 1760 to 1805; about three-fourths of the Bible citations sit in reprinted sermons, and the Bible’s share nearly vanishes in the Constitution debate. It isn’t a measure of “the Founders’ quotes,” and it says nothing about Deuteronomy shaping the form of American government. The 94 percent version adds a number the study never produced. If a statistic needs to be changed this much to make its point, the original is worth reading.

Related claims

Sources

The study

The claim, in its proponents’ words

Analysis

Further reading

Spotted an error? Tell us.