Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth

by Mark David Hall

By the 1760s and 1770s, American patriots cited Locke with some regularity to support American resistance to Great Britain. Yet, as Donald S. Lutz has shown, the Bible was referenced far more often than his works. In his extraordinary study of American political literature published between 1760 and 1805, Lutz found that 22 percent of the citations referenced Enlightenment thinkers (a list that includes Montesquieu, Locke, Pufendorf, Hume, Hobbes, and Beccaria, among others). By contrast, 34 percent of all citations were to the Bible. Only 2.9 percent of the citations to individual authors were to Locke. For our purposes, it is important to note that Lutz undercounted references to the Bible because he excluded from his sample political sermons that do not cite secular authors. If he had included these sermons, references to the Bible would have absolutely dwarfed any other grouping of texts.32