David Barton is not a historian

The New York Times ran an interesting item yesterday on the efforts of some religious conservatives to use revisionist history to advance their political agenda (i.e. — more government sponsorship of their theological beliefs). It holds special relevance in light of the Supreme Court’s work this week on state-endorsed Ten Commandments displays. The NYT piece centered on a guy named David Barton.

Mr. Barton, who is also the vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, is a point man in a growing movement to call attention to the open Christianity of America’s great leaders and founding documents. The goal is to reverse what many evangelical Christians claim is a secularist revision of history, to defend displays of religion in public life and to make room for God in public school classrooms.

Their campaign and the liberal resistance have turned even the slightest clues about the souls of the Republic’s great leaders – that Washington left church before communion and almost never referred to Jesus, that the famously skeptical Jefferson attended Sunday services in the House of Representatives, or that Lincoln never joined a church at all – into hotly contested turf in the battle over the place of religion in public life. In a sign of his influence, the California and Texas school boards have consulted Mr. Barton on their curriculums. And sympathetic legislators in a dozen states have passed American Heritage Education Acts intended to protect teachers who discuss religion’s role in history — measures liberals call unnecessary.

Mr. Barton, an expert witness in a case about the public display of the Ten Commandments that is coming before the Supreme Court this week, said he has given his “spiritual heritage” tour of the Capitol more than a hundred times, for scores of Congressmen and thousands of visitors. The contents of articles, books and videos produced by his organization, WallBuilders, about the religious underpinnings of American history have echoed through Christian cable networks, magazines and pulpits around the country.

Barton is indeed the right’s go-to guy when it comes to religion in early American history, and he’s been in high demand. His materials purport to explain the nation’s “Christian underpinnings,” the deep religiosity of the Founding Fathers, and, naturally, the need to undo any efforts to separate church and state in the U.S.

But there’s some key background that the Times article neglected to flesh out: Barton, a rabid partisan, has no academic credentials as a historian, and his “scholarly” work has routinely been discredited by real academicians. In Bush’s America, where Republican activists pretend to be reporters, it’s only fitting that Republican activists also get to pretend to be historians.

Though Barton would prefer that his patrons remain unaware of it, he published a book several years ago called “The Myth of Separation,” which relied on alleged quotes from key figures from early American history to prove that this is a “Christian nation.” Unfortunately for Barton, a closer look at his book’s content showed repeated instances of bogus quotes, never uttered by any Founding Father.

Similarly, Barton produced a documentary called “America’s Godly Heritage.” In 1996, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs reviewed the documentary’s claims carefully and concluded that it is “laced with exaggerations, half-truths and misstatements of fact.”

Barton ultimately had to withdraw some of his materials and issue an alert to his supporters not to use some of the spurious quotes he’d been touting for nearly a decade. This more or less should have ended his fledgling career as an amateur historian and “expert” on the role of religion in America’s founding.

Alas, it didn’t. As has become far too common, conservatives were less concerned with Barton’s shoddy scholarship and more concerned with his conclusions, which merely served to reinforce what they wanted to believe anyway. The right continues to treat Barton as a legitimate scholar.

Indeed, conservatives are so enthralled by Barton’s revisionist historical tales that the Republican National Committee literally put him on the payroll — a $20,000 stipend during the 2004 campaign to travel and preach the historical gospel, as he sees it, so long as it helps produce GOP votes.

Barton traveled the country for about a year prior to the election, showing pastors a slideshow designed to prove that the United States was meant to be Christian. He told Beliefnet that his efforts were meant to be “below the radar…. We work our tails off to stay out of the news.”

Spoken like a true academic with the highest respect for historical scholarship.

Reading the Times piece, and discovering that Barton is relied on as an “expert witness” in judicial hearings and state school board meetings, you might think that this is just some conservative professor with an ax to grind. If only that were so; Barton got his B.A. from Oral Roberts University and has no post-graduate degree in history or anything else.

Barton is a partisan activist who’s memorized a few self-serving quotes from the Founding Fathers. That doesn’t make him an historian; it makes him a hack.