NPR Factchecks Christian Pseudo-Historian David Barton

I never got why the right is so keen to push all of the Founding Fathers as deeply religious men. If that was the case – if they were all devout, Bible -thumping Christians – doesn’t that just make the fact that the Constitution makes no mention of God and only speaks of religion to say that we won’t have an official one all the more powerful? I mean, they very easily could have written it so that you had to be Christian, Judeo-Christian, or Abrhamic to have any rights or recognition in this country, consistent with the supposed beliefs that Barton and his ilk ascribe to them, and they didn’t.

Fascinating read, thank you. My favorite part from the NPR article has to be Barton exulting:

“And you get Thomas Paine, who’s the least religious Founding Father saying, ‘You’ve GOT to teach creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that.'”

“Of course,” the NPR article dryly adds, “that was years before Charles Darwin was born.”

Duh. It’s utterly absurd to cheer that the Founding Fathers might have been in favor of “creation science.” The concept of evolution hadn’t yet been thought of. That one sentence pretty much lays bare Barton’s lack of any true understanding of history.

The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. In fact, his actions strongly argue for both: that his statements are lies is unquestionable; were he anything other than a moron, it would be more difficult to discern that they are lies than by simply picking up a Bible and reading the referenced passages!

It is a sad testament to the times we live in that where we once faced dangers from subtle and clever liars, even the obvious and slow-witted ones now find plenty of ears.

Yes, I say that all the time. Separation of Church and State exists to protect Christianity as well as all other religions. If the founding fathers were devout Christians, that would only underscore the fact that S of C & S is good for Christianity. Yet Barton and his ilk claim that S of C & S hurts Christianity and at the same time they claim that the creators of it were devout Christians!

Unfortunately he is not a moron. He is an immoral man making a lot of money by telling people lies that they want desperately to hear.

Thanks.

I heard that NPR report, and thought it was excellent.  I expect we will soon hear more calls for defunding public broadcasting.

 Ick. Sorry about the formatting. Not sure why that happened.

 “i” tags are broken since a couple of days and treated as linebreaks for some reason. “em” still works for italics

They’re pushing it because they want to usurp the Constitution. They want the U.S. to be an Evangelical Christian Nation, a theocracy, and they’re doing their best to rewrite history in the minds of the electorate to support this agenda.

It all comes down to control and privilege. The Old White Guys all want things to remain the same, to keep the Other down, and to keep those uppity women and Negroes where they belong. And they feel they can do that with texts that are granted authority simply because they’re old and also because you don’t need logic or evidence to support your position.

Like Cleon Skousen, the old Mormo-Christian, John Bircher and wack -job that wrote “5000-year Leap, David Barton comes at American History like a creationist approaches the Earth’s present geological and biological status. He already has a thesis, “America is a Christian Nation, founded in biblical principles.” He then collects snippets from history, cherry-picking, distorting, torturing and downright fabricating, in order to come to the conclusion he wishes to be true. And Glenn Beck is a fan of both Barton and Skousen, so what does that tell us?

Some of the comments on the linked NPR site deal with a side issue: Who has enough street-cred in history to denounce Barton as the fraud that he is. And it is vexing when an actual historian like the ultra-venal Newt Gingrich support this guy. But this is silly. Anyone who passed my 12th grade government class could tell that Barton’s assertions are laughable on their face. The article says that David Barton never debates. No wonder. Any one of my “B” students could mop the floor with him.

True, we dismiss frauds like Barton at our country’s peril.

i havent read the comments yet, so forgive me if this was already brought up but, didnt NPR fire a few folks just recently. because they wouldnt run a fundies christian ideology of evolution?

im searching….i couldnt have dreanmt that, could i? lol

Alabama Outrage, Joel Kaplan, July 26, 2012 The firings of two long-time public broadcasting executives at Alabama Public Television has led to outrage, consternation, mass resignations and questions about whether the political appointees of the Alabama Educational Television Commission were seeking to force the station to broadcast programs based on creationism. http://cpb.org/ombudsman/display.php?id=103

“Anyone who passed my 12th grade government class could tell that Barton’s assertions are laughable on their face. The article says that David Barton never debates. No wonder. Any one of my “B” students could mop the floor with him.”

The problem is that the whole fiction behind Barton’s revisionism is the notion that Barton is carefully reconstructing REAL history, whereas your poor misled students aren’t learning the truth of history, but rather being indoctrinated with liberally biased, left-wing propaganda. Therefore, no matter how much they’ve learned and how intelligent their arguments are, Barton’s audience will never accept your students’ conclusions. Any reasonably educated student should be able to poke numerous holes in his assertions– but his audience will simply believe that the student has been an unfortunate victim of the liberal schools. This makes debating him fairly pointless, I suspect.

 I thought that too.  That his audience wouldn’t even bother to check when he supplies the verses is baffling, and that he knows this is downright frightening.

The really stupid part of that perspective is that the material that really is taught is pretty watered down to start with, and I’m speaking from a  Californian honors class perspective- supposedly as “liberal” as it gets!   
 
 I don’t remember ever being taught about the religious beliefs of the founders in grade school or even in high school, except the basic facts that they were mostly christians of one sort or another, often different denominations, and yet found a successful way to work together.  What’s so goddamned liberal about that?  That it didn’t require genocide or a Thirty Years’ War American Style?  That nobody got “purged” (except a whole lot of Natives, who weren’t mentioned much either)?  Isn’t that success one of the main reasons we have the government and country we do in the first place? 
 
I didn’t find out about any of the controversial religious views of the founders, or any of the great deist/skeptic quotes, or the Jefferson Bible until I started doing my own reading as a late teen/young adult!   They sure don’t mention the Jefferson Bible in grade school.  Even if some of it was in the books in high school, it certainly wasn’t stressed, or on any of the tests I took.  Apparently, “liberal bias” in education means that tiptoeing around conservatives’ religious sensibilities isn’t enough…everyone has to actively lie on their behalf! 
 
I don’t think I will ever understand the minds of hyper-religious and hyper-reactionary people.  They must be deeply under the influence of horrible, crushing fear and anxiety, or motivated by an insatiable thirst for power, or both.  Based on what they SAY they want, but also on what it is that they attack, I can only conclude that they are even more power-hungry and more inclined to fascism than they already admit.  They really do want to destroy our country and replace it with one in that is purely in their own image, and I think they relish thoughts of righteous bloodshed, domination, and brutal punishment for those who aren’t willing to play good “sheep” to their “shepherd” act.
 
The only unanswered questions I ask myself are:
 “Do they really, truly believe that they will be saving the country from their god’s wrath and justly gaining incredible authority in the process, or is it all just a power-grabbing put-on?  Can they really believe the ridiculous horseshit the claim to believe?  How?  Could they really be that shitty WITHOUT sincerely insane beliefs?  How?   
Not that it matters much in the end- if it ever comes to spilling blood to preserve my freedom, their inner motivations are the least of my concerns. 

I thought Barton was a crackpot the instant he tried to claim that the Founding Fathers were adherents to a sect of Christianity that didn’t exist until after the Civil War.

It has been argued, but Jefferson, Franklin, and others were certainly of a deist and secular mind, and deism does not have the trinity, or ‘supernatural’ miracles…it is simply a thinking that all this great stuff got here somehow, it might or might not be from one creator. For Christians to argue different is just trying to get it not to mean what it says – but to say what they mean.  Period.

I don’t know where I read that before Darwin, there were a couple of guys that had talked lightly about a concept similar to Darwinian evolution; but it was with Darwin that it took a concrete presentable form. Geez. Can someone help me?