People For the American Way Foundation
Posted on April 26, 2011
Crossposted HERE
David Barton: Texas idiocy is the poisoned gift that keeps on giving.
Newt Gingrich promises to seek his advice and counsel for the 2012 presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee calls him America’s greatest historian, says he should be writing the curriculum for American students, and in fact suggested that all Americans should be “forced at gunpoint” to listen to his broadcasts. Michelle Bachmann calls him “a treasure for our nation” and invited him to teach one of her Tea Party Caucus classes on the Constitution for members of Congress. State legislators from around the country invite him to share his “wisdom” with them. Glenn Beck calls him “the most important man in America.” Who is this guy?
This guy is David Barton, a Republican Party activist and a fast-talking, self-promoting, self-taught, self-proclaimed historian who is miseducating millions of Americans about U.S. history and the Constitution.
said that Barton’s research “provides the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today — bringing God back into the public square.” Indeed, Time Magazine named him one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelical Christians in 2005.
Barton broadened his audience when Fox News’ Glenn Beck became a fan. Last year, Beck invited Barton to appear regularly on his “Founders’ Fridays” broadcasts, sending Barton’s books up the bestseller lists. And when Beck brought his messianic road show to Washington, D.C. in August 2010, Barton shared the stage with him. At America’s Divine Destiny, the kick-off event on the eve of Beck’s Lincoln Memorial rally, Barton waved copies of old books and sermons and argued that the nation’s founding documents were essentially cribbed from colonial-era sermons.
While Barton is best known for his claims about the religious intentions of the nation’s founders, he has become a full-service pundit for the far-right in Tea Party America. He pushes predictable positions on abortion, gay rights, and the judiciary. But he is also attacking environmentalists working to combat climate change. And he is a key figure for conservative strategists who would love to forge an even stronger political merger between the Tea Party and Religious Right movements between now and the 2012 elections. Barton’s contribution: claiming that a radically limited role for the federal government was God’s idea, and that Jesus and the Bible are opposed to progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, collective bargaining, and “socialist union kind of stuff.”
Why Barton Matters
Scholars have criticized Barton for presenting facts out of context or in misleading ways, but that hasn’t stopped him from promoting his theories through books, television, and, yes, the textbooks that will teach the next generation of Americans. He promotes conspiracy theories about elites hiding the truth from average Americans in order to undermine the nation from within. Last summer, he declared that liberal and media attacks on the Tea Party were just like attacks on Jesus. In February, Barton spoke at the Connect 2011 Pastors Conference, where he said that Christians needed to control the culture and media so that “guys that have a secular viewpoint cannot survive.” Said Barton, “If the press lacks moral discrimination, it’s because we haven’t been pushing our people to chop that kind of news off.”
Those are the kind of accusations long favored by the Religious Right, and they are destructive. Claims that political opponents are evil and are actively trying to destroy Americans’ freedoms poison the public arena, make constructive civic discourse nearly impossible, and have the potential to incite acts of violence.
Elected officials who endorse Barton give his claims credibility they do not deserve. He in turn gives cover and a veneer of legitimacy to right-wing politicians interested in putting their notions of a nation created by and for Christians into public policy. Both Barton and his backers are undermining understanding of, and respect for, vital American values and constitutional principles like separation of church and state and equal treatment under the law.
Barton 101
Barton is a largely self-educated historian whose academic credentials are a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oral Roberts University and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Pensacola Christian College. His WallBuilders enterprise, through which he publishes books and videos and travels the country to promote his ideas and campaign for Republican officials, includes both nonprofit and for-profit arms.
profile of Barton in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram concisely summarized his goals this way: “Barton is working toward an America where students invoke the name of Jesus in morning prayers, where the Ten Commandments occupy a place on state Capitol grounds, where so-called activist judges are impeached for their decisions.”
Barton says the Christian America he wants to create is not a theocracy, but it would clearly be an America in which religious minorities would have to settle for schools and other governmental institutions promoting Barton’s version of Christianity in every realm of life. As Barton has told Focus on the Family:
The Bible clearly teaches that the way people view their own history affects the way they behave. God wants us to know our history and learn its lessons. At WallBuilders, we present American history, and we do so with a Providential perspective. In short, history not only shows God’s workings and plans but it also demonstrates the effectiveness of biblical principles when applied to church, education, government, economics, family, entertainment, military or any other aspect of life.
Barton argues that the Bible and 150 years of sermons by colonial preachers inspired the nation’s founders. The constitutional form of government, he says, was based on a biblical model: early Hebrew government was a “federative republic,” with God having identified the three branches of government, and with councils of elders functioning like the Senate.
Barton has been deeply involved in recent battles over the content of textbooks in Texas and the nation. The Texas State Board of Education notoriously redesigned the state’s social studies curriculum to have it conform more closely to a right-wing view of American history, even though somechanges sought by Religious Right activists like Barton were inaccurate and dismissive of the civil rights movement. The Religious Right activist who had chaired the Board of Education named Barton an “expert” and backed efforts by Barton and preacher Peter Marshall to purge figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez from the curriculum. Barton’s involvement with the textbook controversy also provided evidence of the naked partisanship behind much of his work: he demanded that because the founders hated and feared democracy, and created a republic instead, that textbooks should not refer to “democratic values” but “republican” ones.
Sloppy Scholarship
misquotes and misleadingly portrays historical figures and documents. Here is a sampling of Barton’s critics:
- said Barton “can be very convincing to an uninitiated audience. He’s intelligent. He’s well-spoken. But a lot of what he presents is a distortion of the truth.”
- John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, has criticized Barton and Peter Marshall, who worked with Barton to influence Texas textbooks: “I’m an evangelical Christian, and I think David Barton and Peter Marshall are completely out to lunch. They are not experts on social studies and history. Neither of them are trained in history. They are preachers who use the past and history as a means of promoting a political agenda in the present.”
- critique of Barton’s teachings on church-state issuesthat Barton’s work is “laced with exaggerations, half-truths and misstatements of fact. As more individuals, congregations and elected officials are influenced by Barton’s claims, the threat of his campaign becomes more real…”Baptist blogger Don Byrd said “having Barton lecture the House of Representatives on religious liberty issues and the Constitution is a bit like having the fox lecture the hens on proper coop construction.”
- Former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter wrote in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that Barton’s “pseudoscholarship would hardly be worth discussing, let alone disproving, were it not for the fact that it is taken so very seriously by so many people.”
- Mark Lilla, a scholar who has taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, has publicly criticized the “schlock history written by religious propagandists like David Barton, the author of the bizarre pastiche The Myth of Separation, who use selective quotations out of context to suggest that the framers were inspired believers who thought they were founding a Christian nation.”
- Historian Richard V. Pierard of Indiana State University has called Barton’s claims that the Founding Fathers were mostly evangelical Christians “ridiculous” since the term was not used at the time, contending that “to try to take a later definition and impose it on these people is a historical anachronism.”
Barton is undeterred by such criticism. Instead, he insists that he is revealing to Americans the inspiring truth about their country that has been hidden by academic and media elites, who have conspired to keep Americans in the dark about the religious intentions of the nation’s founders.
In his interviews and television appearances, Barton talks fast, like a man who has so many stories to tell he doesn’t know where to start or stop. Unfortunately, a lot of the stories Barton has told about the founders and American history simply aren’t true.
Chris Rodda of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation refuting one of Barton’s favorite claims — that Congress printed an official Bible for use in schools in 1782 (you can see Barton making that claim on one of his Capitol tours here)and that Jefferson added the phrase “in the Year of our Lord Christ” to official documents.
mischaracterized that letter, claiming (wrongly) that Jefferson described a “one-way” concept of church-state separation more to Barton’s liking. Like father, like son.
While Barton is seemingly undeterred by the evidence he knows most of his supporters will never see, Barton has not been able to simply ignore all questioning of his errors and misstatements. He edited and renamed one book (The Myth of Separation became Original Intent) after critics pointed out false material. He has publicly admitted that a dozen supposed quotations about the nation’s origin and purpose that he and others have attributed to founding fathers simply can’t be verified. But those quotations continue to be used by others.
Good Timing for Bad History
Barton’s long years of promoting a vision of a non-secular American government created by and for Christians prepared him well for the current political moment, in which right-wing pundits, leaders of the Tea Party movement, and increasingly, the Republican Party, are turning the idea of a divinely ordained “American exceptionalism” into a political weapon against President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and liberals in general.
In the hands of Barton and his ideological compatriots, American exceptionalism is more than the idea that America plays a unique role in the world. They insist on a version of American exceptionalism that is grounded in divine inspiration of the founders and a divine blessing on the country. Barton says America’s unique commitment to individual rights is grounded in colonial pastors’ belief in individual salvation. If it weren’t for that divine origin, America would be more collectivist, like France, he argues
Barton also insists that the U.S. Constitution was not meant to be a secular document. The First Amendment prohibits an establishment of religion and the Constitution includes an explicit ban on religious tests for public office, and its authors did not include any assertion of divine origin or blessing, but Barton has a theory. At the end of the text of the Constitution, its authors write that the Constitution’s crafting was “Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.” Barton claims that this passing reference to the Declaration of Independence incorporates that document and its reference to rights endowed by a Creator into the U.S. Constitution, making the Constitution a religious document that reflects and requires a national acknowledgment of God’s hand in our founding, history, and prosperity.
Barton’s Bible = Tea Party Platform
Barton is one of many Religious Right figures who are challenging socially libertarian strains within the Tea Party movement and arguing that one cannot legitimately be an economic conservative without also being a social conservative. And he is working hard to give the Tea Party movement, its view of the Constitution, and its anti-tax and anti-welfare economic policies a divine stamp of approval.
On a conference call with pastors in the wake of the November 2010 elections, Barton asserted that the Bible “absolutely” condemns the estate tax as “most immoral,” and said Jesus taught against the capital gains tax and opposed the minimum wage. Barton went even further, declaring that taxation is theft and in particular that the Bible condemns progressive taxation, which he insists is “inherently un-biblical and unfair.” He echoed those themes during a three-part broadcast on limited government in January 2011, saying “Money does not belong to the government, it belongs to individuals, and to steal money from individuals through whatever government spending program is taking private property and you’re not supposed to do that.”
In Making the Constitution Obsolete: Understanding What is Happening to America’s Economic and Cultural Heritage, a DVD marketed by the American Family Association, Barton repeats his claims for biblical opposition to progressive taxes. “ Biblically, Jesus says the sun shines on the just, the unjust, the rain falls on the wicked, the righteous, God treats everybody exactly the same, whether you’re rich or poor you pay a ten percent tithe…everyone’s treated the same, so you don’t have any kind of a class warfare, you have equality under the law.” Says Barton, “The concept of justice goes out with the progressive income tax which is why the Bible is opposed to it.”
Barton claims a biblical basis for other Tea Party notions such as a call for a return to the gold standard (floating exchange rates reflect moral relativism applied to economic policy) and opposition to welfare programs (he says the earliest American colonies survived only by enforcing the biblical injunction that if a man will not work he will not eat). The Federal Reserve System, he says, violates biblical principles of competition and transparency. He argues that the kind of government social programs undertaken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt were wrong from a biblical standpoint, because the Bible says taking care of the poor is the job of the church and the individual, not the government.
And he promotes a Tea Partier’s radical view of the Constitution, key constitutional amendments, and limitations on federal authority to address issues facing the nation.“ Congress can do 18 things and that’s all,” he says. He decries the way that post-Civil War amendments have been used to alter the relationship between state and national governments. On the DVD Making the Constitution Obsolete he decries the “perversion of the 14th Amendment” by the courts, meaning their application to any issue other than slavery. He says the south was wrong on slavery but right on states’ rights. He complains that the courts have “abused the process” and thus “completely revolutionized America.”
Barton on Politics:GOP = God’s Own Party
Barton is an unabashed partisan. He was vice-chair of the Texas Republican Party from 1997-2006 and has recently helped Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Religious Right favorite, peddle his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington.
On the other hand, Barton understands that in politics you don’t often get perfect candidates. When it comes to elective politics, Barton argues for incrementalism rather than ideological purity or third party politics. He tells voters that it makes sense to support a candidate you agree with 70 percent of the time if the alternative is someone you agree with only 20 percent. Barton claims biblical authority for this principle by quoting God telling the Israelites in Deuteronomy that he would not give them the Promised Land all at once.
traveled across the nation to help George W. Bush’s re-election bid:
Barton also campaigned for the McCain/Palin ticket in 2008. That year, he cited four factors he considers when deciding how to vote in presidential elections in a Fire Away Friday conversation sold by the American Family Association as a DVD entitled Christianity and Politics: Do they Mix?:
- What are you going to do on judges?
- What are you going to do on right to life?
- Acknowledgement of God. If we keep religion at church and out of the public arena we’re going to miss blessings that come from the acknowledgment of God
Because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had voted wrongly, in Barton’s eyes, on all those factors, and McCain had voted correctly, Barton said he wasn’t bothering to listen to any speeches because he knew who to vote for.
Before the 2010 elections, Barton said: “If we stand before God and He says ‘why did you vote for a leader who’s attempting to redefine my institution of marriage and who wills the unborn children that I knew before they were in the womb?’ If He asks us that and our answer is ‘Because that leader was good on jobs and the economy,’ He’s not going to accept that.” After the many conservative victories in the 2010 elections, Barton praised the number of Americans involved in Religious Right-organized prayer and fasting efforts leading up to the elections. “Historically it’s irrefutable” that those efforts had an impact on the election, he said. “There’s no way from a biblical or historical standpoint you can do that and not see God intervene or move.”
Barton on Environmentalism: Green = Evil
Barton is closely associated with a movement among conservative evangelicals to resist the rise of environmental activism in church communities and to portray the environmental movement as not only un-Christian but actively anti-Christian. He is among the many Religious Right leaders who signed the 2009 Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which asserts:
The Declaration claims that efforts to reduce carbon dioxide would be economically devastating, particularly to poorer nations, and that such policies therefore fail to “comply with the Biblical requirement of protecting the poor from harm and oppression.”
Barton was invited to testify before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2007. In that testimony, he promoted the Cornwall Alliance, a Religious Right group opposing action on climate change. An excerpt from the “Cornwall Declaration” follows:
But Cornwall and Barton go well beyond criticism of the science on man-caused climate change. Barton is actively involved in the “Resisting the Green Dragon” project, which attacks efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change, and which portrays environmentalism as “deadly to human prosperity, deadly to human life, deadly to human freedom, and deadly to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Barton appeared on Glenn Beck’s October 15, 2010 television show along with Cornwall Alliance founder and spokesman Calvin Beisner. The show was largely devoted to attacking “And Let There Be … Stuff?” a pro-environment curriculum designed for use by religious congregations. Beck asserted that “environmentalists are now worshiping the ancient god of Babylon, the god of weather.” And Barton took to the blackboard to demonstrate visually his claim that, while the traditional religious view places mankind as the pinnacle of creation, the “secular religious view” actually places mankind at the bottom, as less important than plants and animals. He complained that environmentalists are therefore willing to “inconvenience man” in order to save other animal species. Beisner and Barton agreed with Beck that the environmental movement is “anti-human” and that the environmental curriculum designed for use in churches was more evidence that “the progressive left is coming for the kill on religion.”
Barton on Religious Minorities
In January 2007, Barton penned “An Historical Perspective on a Muslim Being Sworn into Congress on the Koran,” which generously quoted two of Ellison’s most vocal critics. Radio show host Dennis Prager said the use of the Koran “undermined American civilization” and said, “Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book: the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress.” Barton also approvingly quoted Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia, who said Ellison’s election was evidence of the need to restrict immigration.
In the article, Barton argues that the U.S. conflict with the Barbary pirates in the early 1800s provides “useful background in addressing the issue of a Muslim being sworn into Congress.” Barton refers to the Barbary pirates as “Muslim terrorists.”He wrote that Ellison’s use of a Koran owned by Thomas Jefferson was “perhaps not as noble” as Ellison portrayed, saying the reason Jefferson owned the Koran was to “learn the beliefs of the enemies he was fighting.”
After a litany of historical examples of human rights abuses by Muslim leaders, Barton concludes:
Keith Ellison may be the one to break this pattern and start something new with Islam, but in the meantime, he should not be surprised that there is widespread concern over his decision to publicly flaunt American tradition and values and replace them with Islamic ones.
In the article Barton also promotes the books of Robert Spencer, a right-wing author whose vehemently anti-Muslim books have been criticized by scholars of religion and civil rights advocates.
In September 2010, Barton devoted several WallBuilders Live broadcasts to critics of the cultural center that opponents describe inaccurately as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Barton criticized media coverage of the issue, saying, “When they’re claiming it’s a freedom of religion issue, and that’s all they’re talking about, that’s great proof that’s not the issue.”
guest one day. She said promoters of the cultural center want to build a Muslim presence at a site of conquest that would “be seen in the Muslim world as the hand of Allah basically ratifying what happened on 9-11.”She called it “an overt and audacious history grab.”Barton co-host Rick Green agreed that it would be “a beachhead for Sharia law.” Barton referred to Feisel Abdul Rauf, the imam promoting the cultural center, as “this nut” and argued that he is “trying to provoke a nuclear incident with Israel and with Iran.”
day, WallBuilders continued the conversation with Walid Shoebat, a self-described former PLO terrorist and convert to evangelical Christianity, who said that Rauf wants to do the same thing Osama bin Laden wants to do, which is to see America subjugated to Sharia law. Shoebat said that liberals are supporting the project because “liberals always agree with Muslims,” an “insight” that Rick Green called “brilliant.” Barton and Green agreed that the worldviews of liberals and Islamicists “fit together.”
Barton also complained when a Hindu priest was invited to give the invocation before Congress that “the prayer will be completely outside the American paradigm, flying in the face of the American motto ‘One Nation Under God.’”
unconcerned about the impact on religious minorities of his efforts to re-install Christian prayers in public school classrooms. The Star Telegram writes:
Students of all religions should be able to pray in the classroom, during graduation or at football games if the majority of a community wants it, Barton argues.
Barton says other faiths should be able to pray, too, but only according to their representation in a given community. Christian prayers, then, would dominate in most places.
Smaller faiths are owed no more by the majority, he believes. Above all else, Barton believes that America was founded on Christianity.
But secularists still top the list of Barton’s enemies. For all his criticism of Islam, and his defense of those concerned about the election of Muslim public officials, Barton says nonreligious public officials would be even worse:
From a societal standpoint, there should be more concern over elected officials who are secularists and will swear an oath on no religious book, than for Muslims who swear on the Koran. After all, secularism presents a greater threat to American traditions and values than does Islam.
Immigration
argued against immigration reform, saying,
Racial History
Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White, which is designed to help the GOP reach out to black voters by blaming the Democratic Party for slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow. That documentary was a focus of People For the American Way Foundation’s 2006 report on Barton, Propaganda Masquerading as History. Barton’s film credits the GOP with the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Not so surprisingly, his history stops there, ignoring the decades of GOP power-building in the south based on fanning racial resentment among conservative white voters. Barton continues to promote his ideologically blinkered history of race in America, devoting his WallBuilders Live radio show in the first week of March 2011 to a recap of Setting the Record Straight.
Barton also offers a revisionist take on the history of slavery in America, which among other things portrays the Constitution’s treatment of slaves as three-fifths of a person as evidence of the Christian founders’ anti-slavery sentiments.“ Barton accuses historians of hiding the truth about slavery and racism from the American people, a charge that fits the larger conspiracy-oriented worldview of Beck and other leading conservatives,” says religion scholar Julie Ingersoll, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, who notes that Barton’s revisionist view is now showing up in Tea Partiers’ talking points.
Ingersoll summarizes Barton’s strategic revisionism:
David Barton, Glenn Beck’s favorite history “professor,” is the creator and purveyor of a revisionist history of race in America that is rapidly gaining traction in conservative and Tea Party circles. That history, drawn in part from the writings of Christian Reconstructionists, recasts modern-day Republicans as the racially inclusive party, and modern-day Democrats as the racists supportive of slavery and post-Emancipation racist policies.
Barton’s involvement in recent controversies over the treatment of American history in Texas textbooks was another outlet for his efforts to shape the next generation’s understanding of American History. As Mariah Blake of the Washington Monthly wrote of Barton and Marshall:
The Courts
Barton has been an active participant in the long-running Religious Right campaign to impose ideological domination on the federal judiciary. He has published Restraining Judicial Activism, a book calling for the impeachment of federal judges who don’t interpret the Constitution the same way he does. And he has argued that members of Congress should use the threat of impeachment as a way to intimidate federal judges into falling in line. Barton has celebrated Iowa voters’ rejection of pro-equality state Supreme Court justices last November as a signal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In fact, Barton says judges are his number one voting issue when it comes to electing a president, citing the prophet Isaiah saying that the righteousness of a land will be based on its judges. Before the 2008 election, he praised the progress that conservatives had made with Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court and urged people to “just think what we could do with all aspects of the culture war” if they got a fifth or sixth justice. Looking ahead to 2012, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are a powerful motivator for Barton.
Gay Equality
Barton believes the government should regulate gay sex, relying on bogus claims about gay people to make his case, such as “homosexuals die decades earlier than heterosexuals.” Barton has also maintained that countries that “rejected sexual regulation” have inevitably collapsed. He has griped that “if there’s a group in America that is hypersensitive, it is homosexuals. I mean, they got a short fuse on everything.” Not surprisingly, Barton opposes marriage equality and has campaigned for state restrictions on legal equality.
In an article defending exclusion of gay servicemembers from the military, Barton happily cites a litany of harsh condemnations of homosexual “sodomy” from the 18th and 19th centuries, including state laws calling for the death penalty. Among those he cites is an author who in 1814 “outlined why homosexuality must be more strenuously addressed and much less tolerated than virtually any other moral vice in society.” Barton’s quotes include this section:
Barton also made inaccurate statements about the Hide/Seek exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, which aroused the ire of Religious Right groups. On his radio show Barton falsely suggested that Hide/Seek, which examined through portraiture the visibility of gay and lesbian Americans and their impact on modern art, was actually a “Christmas exhibit” designed to lure children into seeing shocking images. Barton and his co-host Rick Green wrongly maintained that the exhibit was “taxpayer funded,” even though Hide/Seek only used private funds and did not receive any taxpayer money.
Enlisting Jesus in the War on Unions
Religious Right activist David Barton promotes his version of American exceptionalism (America was created by its divinely inspired founders as a country of, by, and for evangelical Christians) and biblical capitalism (Jesus and the Bible oppose progressive taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and minimum wage laws). Claiming divine backing is a long-standing Religious Right technique with a powerful political edge: if God supports radically limited government, then progressive policies are not only wrong but evil, and liberals are not only political opponents but enemies of God.
On a conference call with pastors two days after the November 2010 elections to celebrate conservative victories, Barton asserted a biblical underpinning for far-right economic policies: Taxation and deficit spending amount to theft, a violation of the Ten Commandments. The estate tax is “absolutely condemned” by the Bible as the “most immoral” of taxes. Jesus had “teachings” condemning the capital gains tax and minimum wage.
Conclusion
David Barton is in many ways emblematic of politics in Fox News-Tea Party America, in which facts are distorted in service of a right-wing ideological agenda, and in which political opponents are denigrated as enemies of faith and freedom. Barton’s work has repeatedly been debunked by historians and scholars, yet conservative political leaders and pundits continue to promote his manipulations in order to help Republicans get elected and in order to advance the Religio
© 2011 People For the American Way Foundation All rights reserved.
BONUS FEATURE
The Idiocy of Texas and the Threat of David Barton
Posted By Chris Rodda On July 23, 2009 @ 12:03 am In Commentary | 15 Comments
Ever since Governor Rick Perry’s (R-TX) appointment of Gail Lowe as chair of the worst and most dangerous state Board of Education ever, and the almost inevitable choice of Christian nationalist history revisionist David Barton as an “expert” to review the state’s social studies curriculum, I’ve been getting a stream of emails from people who know me as the arch-rival of Barton, wondering why I haven’t written anything on the subject.
Well, I’ve desperately been trying to find the time to get something out on this, but have just been up to my eyeballs in work for my job with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a job that, ironically, I ended up in two years ago because of the discovery of a David Barton essay on the “myth” of separation between church and state in the Junior ROTC core curriculum American history textbook. Then, Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, deluged with media requests since the Ensign and Sanford sex scandals exposed the Family’s “C Street” cabal to a wider audience, asked MRFF president Mikey Weinstein if he could borrow me to help with some further research on certain members of the Family, the full results of which will be breaking soon. So, I’ve just been busy as hell, and hearing and reading about the Texas BOE lunacy and the appointment of Barton, but not being able to find any time to write about it, has put me at serious risk of my head exploding.
I still don’t have much time to spend on this, but I do want to make a few things clear about David Barton.
First of all, very little of what I’ve been reading about the Texas BOE seems to convey just how dangerous Barton really is. His agenda for the teaching of American history is not merely a somewhat more religious “interpretation” of history, as some are describing it — it’s an all out, lie packed, completely revised, Christian nationalist version of history, designed to muster support for a very clear political agenda.
Second, I’ve read much about Barton’s utter lack of credentials to be in any way involved in the development of new textbooks — textbooks that, as Barton has been gloating about on his radio show for months now, will not only be used in Texas, but, because of the economic realities of the textbook publishing business, will find their way into the public schools of all the states. (California, with the largest state population, has always been the other state, along with Texas, the second most populous state, to steer the content of new textbooks, but, because of its current economic crisis, California is out of the picture this time around, leaving the Texas board of wackaloons as the only voice in what will and won’t appear in the next wave of textbooks.)
Now, getting back to Barton’s credentials, or lack thereof, many people have been pointing out that he has no degree in history. His educational credentials consist of a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University, and an honorary doctorate from Pensacola Christian College. But, what bothers me far more than his lack of a history degree is his pumped-up bio, in which he claims to have been been involved in the development of the history/social studies standards not just for Texas, but also for California and other states. Well, like most of his historical claims, this claim isn’t quite true. In reality, Barton’s “involvement” in developing curriculum standards for any other state besides Texas has consisted of nothing more than being enlisted by some conservative member of that state’s standards commission or legislature — someone who shares Barton’s agenda — as an “expert” for their side. It does not mean that he was appointed by that state, and, thankfully, he hasn’t actually been able to succeed in screwing up any textbooks — at least not yet.
In 1998, a conservative member of the California Academic Standards Commission appointed Barton to an advisory position, asking the Texan to critique proposed social studies/history standards. From that perch, Barton attacked the portion of the standards that discussed the development of religious freedom, trying to remove every reference to separation of church and state.
He almost pulled it off. Commission members, unfamiliar with Barton’s agenda, seemed open to adopting his suggestions. They changed course only after intervention by Americans United’s Sacramento Chapter, AU’s national office and others.
Another example of Barton’s grossly exaggerated role in a state’s curriculum development involves everyone’s favorite nut of a congresswoman, Michele Bachmann. Back in September, when Barton had Bachmann on his radio show — introducing her as “a rock solid lady,” and a “real class act” — he brought up his previous encounters with her, including this:
As a matter of fact, I worked with her on history standards up in Minnesota — doing some history legislation, and making sure that they could not censor religious references from history books.
So, what was Barton referring to here? Well, back in 2005, when Bachmann was still a senator in the Minnesota legislature, she and some of her fellow legislative wingnuts had bought — hook, line, and sinker — the wildly distorted story and propaganda about California banning the Declaration of Independence in public schools because it mentioned a creator. So, although existing Minnesota history standards already contained the use of the Declaration and other historical documents with religious content, Bachmann co-sponsored a completely unnecessary piece of legislation to “permit” these same documents that were already being used in the state’s schools to be used in the state’s schools, actually citing the bogus story about California banning the Declaration of Independence as a reason her unnecessary legislation was of the utmost importance. Barton’s big role in all this? Well, he appeared before the Minnesota Senate Education Committee in support of Bachmann’s legislation. Similar legislation had already been introduced by Minnesota state representative Mark Olson in 2001, and Olson, during a House Education Policy Committee hearing on his bill, had also brought in David Barton.
Of course, without the real explanations of the circumstances surrounding Barton’s role in these state history education related proceedings, and relying only on the deceptive way in which Barton describes his involvement, anyone unfamiliar with him would think he sounds like somebody who has lots of legitimate experience in developing history curriculums and is sought out by other states for this expertise.
But, the biggest problem with Barton meddling with our country’s textbooks is not his lack of qualifications. It’s the fact that he’s a big fat liar who will distort, misrepresent, and even fabricate historical events to further his Christian nationalist agenda and political ideology.
I’ve written so much on the subject of Barton’s historical revisionism, and debunked so many of his lies, that there’s no need for me to get into any particular lies here. If anyone wants to see just how bad this guy really is, and why those of us who already know how bad he is are so concerned about his appointment, I urge you to read a few of the things I’ve written and get a little taste of just what our country’s history textbooks may end up looking like.
One is the series I wrote last year when Rep. Randy Forbes introduced H. Res. 888, a resolution for an annual religious heritage week. This resolution, reintroduced in the current congress as H. Res. 397, is packed with a seventy-five “Whereas” clause litany of Christian nationalist historical revisionism. This is what David Barton would like to see taught in our public schools. In fact, Forbes got much of the material for this resolution straight from his pal Barton.
The other is a series I wrote a few years ago about the history revisionism in the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools (NCBCPS) curriculum. This curriculum, already being taught in thousands of our public schools, has David Barton on its Advisory Board, and contains many of the lies from his books. Unbelievably, it even contains fabricated quotes that Barton himself, after being busted on them, started advising his minions not to use. But this didn’t stop him from knowingly reviving these fabricated quotes in this public school curriculum.
For those who don’t have the time or inclination to do a lot of reading, I also made a little video about Barton and his lies after he trashed me on his radio show earlier this year.
For those who do have the time and inclination to do a lot of reading, there are links to a bunch of other articles about Barton, as well as several free chapters of my book, Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History, on my website.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this report mistakenly said that Gov. Perry appointed members to the Texas Board of Education. Board members are elected not appointed. Gov. Perry is responsible, however, for appointing the board’s chairperson. We thank reader Alexa for alerting us to the error.
Chris Rodda is the Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and the author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.
Article printed from The Public Record: http://pubrecord.org
URL to article: http://pubrecord.org/commentary/2686/idiocy-texas-threat-david-barton/
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