Immediately following a segment on his radio program yesterday in which Bryan Fischer declared that it is his goal to “create the most biblically and constitutionally literate listening audience” in America, he told his audience that the Bible was the single greatest influence on the framing of the Constitution.

Unsurprisingly, this claim originated with David Barton, the right-wing pseudo-historian who first spread the false claim that a 1984 study by Donald Lutz and Charles Hyneman called “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought” had found that the Constitution was largely based upon the Bible, according to a review of documents published during the founding era.

Fischer mindlessly repeated this claim on his program, asserting that “the book of Deuteronomy was the primary source of the standards that were incorporated in Western law and Western jurisprudence” and insisting that “the Constitution rested on the foundation of the Bible and biblical truth.”

As we have pointed out before, these claims rest on a complete misrepresentation of what the study actually found and they have been repeatedly debunked, so much so that Joel McDurmon of the ultra-right-wing organization American Vision was forced to write a piece entitled “To my Christian America friends: Please, stop citing the Lutz study!“