The lies about the Lutz's study are created by accurately presenting the charts of the study's findings, but either omitting crucial parts of Lutz's explanations of these findings, as Eidsmoe did, or, like Barton, creating even more blatant lies by replacing Lutz's explanations with false conclusions about what the numbers in the charts indicate.

Chuck Norris gives two statistics in his version, claiming that 34% of the contents of the documents studied were direct citations from the Bible, and an even more astounding claim, that a whopping 94% of the documents of the period were based on the Bible. So, where do these numbers come from?

The 34% comes from the following chart in Lutz's study:

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...

So, three-quarters of that 34% total came from a sub-category of one of the categories of the documents in the study. That bumps the Bible down into the range of Classical influences for documents that weren't sermons, and moves the Enlightenment and Whig influences into the number one and two spots for all the other documents, as would be expected.

That explains the 34%, but what about Norris's even more far-fetched claim that 94% of the documents of the period were based on the Bible? Well, that one comes from one of David Barton's videos. I don't have the video here to refer to, but from what I recall, Barton somehow concluded from his own study that 60% of the documents of the period were based on the Bible, and then added the 34% from Lutz's study, or something to that effect, ending up with a total of 94%.

Before going any further, I want to show exactly how the Lutz study is presented in the actual NCBCPS curriculum because this differs a bit from what appears on the organization's website and in Norris's article. The curriculum itself does not include Barton's 94% claim, but does include some other inaccuracies, as well as the misrepresentation of another magazine article.

It should also be mentioned here that in the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) report on the original version of the NCBCPS curriculum, Dr. Mark Chancey did note that the Lutz study was misrepresented in that version, but, while making many of the changes recommended in the report, no meaningful change was made to this section when the curriculum was revised. One of the recommendations in the TFN report was to reduce the number of direct quotes from David Barton's books, so, while the section about the Lutz study in the original curriculum was copied verbatim from Original Intent, a few phrases were changed and rearranged in the revised curriculum. It still says the same thing.

The Lutz study is mentioned in two places in Unit 17 of the curriculum, "The Bible & American History."

The first is in the unit's second section, "A Source of Revolutionary Ideas."

Whatever their positions and opinions on the faith of the Founding Fathers, most scholars agree that the bible was nonetheless a foundational text in the framing of our nation. One frequently cited secular study has suggested that the Bible (and Deuteronomy in particular) was the source most often cited by America's founders with regard to their ideas about civil government, and that the full scope of the Bible's influences on these ideas merits further research and inquiry.

Interestingly, this paragraph describes the sentences immediately preceding and immediately following the above quote from the study in which Lutz explained that three-quarters of the biblical citations in the 34% total came from sermons. Lutz began that paragraph by noting that Deuteronomy was the most often cited book, and ended it by saying that the problem of how to count biblical references was not important to this particular study, the object of which was to sort out the influence of European thinkers, but that biblical sources had not been given the attention they deserved. It's remarkable how both of these thoughts from that paragraph of Lutz's article made it into Barton's and the NCBCPS's books, but not the sentences in between that explain the 34% figure for the biblical citations.

The second mention of the study is in the third section of unit 17, "Biblical Citations." (The title of this section was one of the changes in the revised curriculum that reduced the number of direct quotes from Barton's book. In the original version, it was called "The Primary Influence," the title used in Original Intent.)

As noted above, a frequently cited university study, (i.e., Donald S. Lutz, "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought," The American Political Science Review 78 (1984), pp. 189-197), concluded that the Founders cited the Bible four times more often than either Montesquieu or Blackstone, and twelve times more often than John Locke. In fact, the study of 15,000 original documents concluded that biblical references accounted for 34 percent of the direct quotes in the political writings of the Founding Era. (This is followed by the above chart.)

There are several inaccuracies in this statement regarding what, exactly, was studied. The first is the number of documents. It was not 15,000. It was 916. The study began with an initial review of 15,000 documents, only 2,200 of which contained explicit enough political content to be considered. Out of this 2,200, those with "the most significant and coherent theoretical content" were chosen, eventually resulting in a sampling of 916 documents. Obviously, if the total number of citations, which is listed in the chart used in the curriculum, was 3,154, the number of documents could not have been greater than 3,154, but apparently the authors of the curriculum didn't notice that. All that mattered was the 34% of biblical citations.

The curriculum also fails to explain what types of documents were included in the study. This was not a study of official documents or things such as legislative proceedings. Only writings"printed for public consumption," such as books, newspaper articles, pamphlets, etc., containing more than 2,000 words, were included. The curriculum is also wrong in saying that what were counted were all "direct quotes." Lutz's definition of a citation was "any footnote, direct quote, attributed paraphrasing, or use of a name in exemplifying a concept or position."

Of all the findings in Lutz's study ignored by Barton and the NCBCPS, however, none are as important as those found in the section of his article entitled "The Pattern of Citations from 1787 to 1788." As seen in the earlier chart, Lutz broke down the number of citations by decade. In addition to this, he singled out the writings from 1787 and 1788, and then further separated these writings into those written by Federalists and those by Anti-federalists