David Barton

As we have been noting over the last several weeks, ever since Gov. Rick Perry's massive prayer rally in August, there as been a lot of attention being paid to the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation and the Dominion theology many of its leaders promote. 

As such, many of those leaders have started to downplay their own dominionist teachings while Religious Right activists have all suddenly developed amnesia and begun to claim they have never even heard of the doctrine.

Since nobody on the Right seems to have any idea what Dominionism is, let's turn to Chip Berlet, one of the researchers who helped to coin and popularize the term, and let him explain its three main characteristics:

- Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe the United States once was, and should again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.

- Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.

- Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, believing that the Ten Commandments, or "biblical law," should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles.

There is probably not one "mainstream" Religious Right activist operating today that better matches these characteristics than David Barton.

Not only does Barton openly associate with NAR prophets and apostles, but he also openly promotes Seven Mountains theology.  On top of that, Barton is also a borderline theocrat who believes that literally every element of society ought operate in accordance with Biblical teachings, including education, immigration, health care, taxes and economic policy, employment regulations, and the role of government.

Barton routinely claims that our government and its doctrines came directly out of the Bible and that the Bible ought to be used to solve every problem because "anything the Bible talks about cannot be considered secular" ... even when it comes to things like building codes.

But when it comes to Dominionism, Barton claims, just like everyone else, that it doesn't even exist and that the term is just an effort to smear Christians, as he and his WallBuilders co-host Rick Green discussed on their radio program yesterday:

Barton: I've been called the for years and we've had to deal with that. Reconstructionist. Dominionist. And it's a pejorative ...

Green: I hear it all the time, I hear it all over the place but I'd never heard of it before.

Barton: Well, it's supposed to be radioactive and chase people off from you. It's like saying "oh, you're a Nazi, oh, you're an anti-Semite, you're a bigot, you're a racist, you're a Dominionist" and it's a term that's thrown out to really scare people and chase them off from you. Oh, you don't want to listen to Rick Green, he's a Dominionist ... and nobody's ever got around to defining it. And even the people who use it ... Dominionist, that means he wants to stone rebellious children and to kill homosexuals ... really? Have you ever said that?

Green: No.

Barton: But you're a Dominionist.

Green: And I've never heard you say it either, so something's up ...

Barton: Exactly right. It's just a term they throw out to try and scare people and they define it and they define it wrong nearly every time. What a Dominionist means, quite frankly, we as Christians believe we should be salt and light.

In our previous post we noted that the American Family Association spent two hours promoting the new WallBuilders "Building On The American Heritage Series" DVD program and that, during the program, David Barton took calls from listeners in the AFA audience.

During the Q&A, one of the listeners expressed hope that the next president would give Barton a Cabinet-level appointment, maybe as Attorney General, but that was a notion that Barton quickly shot down by admitting it would never happen because he is "radioactive."  

But Barton then went on to reveal that because he is so radioactive, he has been forced to help school boards draft state history and/or government curricula in secret so that people on the Left don't find out about it:

For me, I am radioactive in so many areas. I got a call from US News and World Report and they said "did you know the ACLU just spent a million dollars to discredit you?" There are four law schools I know that have entire websites dedicated just to me. Soros-type people get paid to find my name every time it pops up and they will start blogging about how stupid I am, how I don't know anything, how I make up my history. And so if you Google me, you're going to find a lot of negative stuff about me.

Now, having said that, I get appointed by a lot of states, by state boards of education to do the history and government standards in those states, public schools, etc ... Now, when these guys find out that I'm there, I become the target of their attempts. So in Texas, I was one of six guys appointed by the state Board of Education to do history and government there and suddenly I'm up on Wall Street Journal, MSNBC is doing specials on how terrible I am, all these things are going after me. And that's fine; I understand that I'm radioactive.

So, this is a lot of fun: I had a national textbook publisher come to me and said "hey, you helped write these standards, why don't you help us do textbooks to reflect those standards?" I said "sure, but just keep my name out of the textbook, don't put me down as one of the editors because if you put me down, they'll go all over the nation talking about how terrible this is." So they kept my name out. Guess what? That public school textbook is now the best-selling public school history textbook in America.

So this history is good. People want this history, they want to get this stuff but what happens is there's a political movement that will try to marginalize us by making us radioactive. I currently now am working with multiple states in doing their history and government standards - I'm not going to say what those states are because they've kept it silent, I'm going to keep it silent.

As Brian noted, David Barton has been the guest on Kenneth Copeland's television show all week where he has been peddling his patented brand of Christian-based pseudo-history.

During the episodes, ads were being run promoting Barton's latest DVD project called "Building on the American Heritage Series" and we noticed something odd; namely that Barton is being billed as an "expert historian" and an "American historian" in the ad campaign even though Barton claims that he doesn't consider himself to be a historian and doesn't call himself one:

Shortly after Rick Perry's prayer rally earlier this year, organizers of that event started promoting a Religious Right voter mobilization effort called "Champion The Vote," which seeks to "mobilize 5 million unregistered conservative Christians to register and vote according to the Biblical worldview in 2012."

It turned out that the Champion The Vote effort was a project of organization called United In Purpose, which is being funded by conservative millionaires for the purpose of mobilizing "40 million out of the estimated 60 million evangelicals in the United States to vote" over the next decade.

As part of this effort, United In Purpose/Champion The Vote are producing an event called "One Nation Under God" where churches and Religious Right activists will gather to watch a three-hour DVD being provided United In Purpose and featuring David Barton, Newt Gingrich, James Dobson, and others talking about the importance of keeping America "one nation under God":

Over the weekend, all of the speakers gathered in Florida for a Florida Renewal Project event for pastors at which the filming for the DVD was presumably done ... and it seems that organizers did not want any attention because when a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel showed up at the event, he was tossed out of the hotel by security:

The media was advised that Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s speech to a gathering of Florida pastors Friday would be closed to the public, but apparently the group behind the meeting didn’t even want media in the same hotel.

A couple weeks ago, Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry were announced as possible speakers at a two-day event in Orlando Thursday and Friday called the Florida Renewal Project. But this week no one wanted to talk about it, except to say it would be closed to the media and public.

Perry’s staff even denied he would attend. Gingrich’s staff confirmed his appearance but would not return phone calls to discuss it.

I went anyway this morning, to the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, to see if Gingrich would be willing to talk to me before or after his speech. When he arrived shortly before noon, I was the lone journalist on the scene, waiting in the hallway outside the meeting room. Gingrich and his staff agreed to talk to me later, at another hotel. After seeing that exchange, hotel officials approached me and, saying they were acting on behalf of event organizers, ordered me to leave the Rosen Centre property immediately, and escorted me to my car.

...

Then it turned out Perry had attended after all, sort of, Thursday night - by satellite link-up, according to tweets posted Thursday night by John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, which was a participant in the Florida Renewal Project.

That appearance, which included a speech and taking questions from the pastors, came just hours after the Texas governor’s campaign staff assured the Sentinel he would not attend.

Who organized the event though? No one would say for sure, though Stemberger acknowledged that the California-based organization United in Purpose, which had organized similar “Renewal Project” events in California and Iowa earlier this year, “was involved.”

The last time United In Purpose hosted one of these conferences, we caught Mike Huckabee telling the audience that Americans ought to be forced to listen to David Barton at gunpoint.  But when United In Purpose later broadcast the event, that exchange was entirely edited out. 

So while organizers are going to be releasing a DVD of this Florida event in the coming weeks, it seems that they want to be able to control what people actually see and don't want reporters around revealing what was really taking place.

Just because David Barton may be a pseudo-historian who routinely peddles falsehoods in order to promote himself and his Religious Right agenda, that is not going to stop Glenn Beck from regularly featuring him on his program.

Beck's love of Barton is well-established and he featured him again on his program last week where Beck praised Barton as "one of the most honorable men I know, one of the best Christians I know" and his hero before urging his viewers to donate to Barton's WallBuilders organization because it does more good than "a pack of charities combined":

Yesterday, David Barton and Rick Green hosted Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern on WallBuilders Live to discuss her new book, The Stoning of Sally Kern, and caution listeners about the dangers of saying “something disparaging about homosexuality.” Kern’s book details her political activism and the fallout of her claim that the “homosexual agenda is destroying this nation ... it’s the biggest threat that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam,” a sentiment she recently repeated, telling anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera that homosexuality is “more dangerous” than terrorism.

Barton said, “If you touch homosexuality, be prepared to pay a price,” warning that it “may cost your life.” Later in the interview, Green said Kern must have experienced a “physical fear” of the “militant” gay-rights activists, and Kern told her story of how she was prepared to lose her life over the issue.

Listen:

Barton: With all of the protection we have for free speech, there’s still a number of areas where you’re not free to speak out on certain things. If you touch homosexuality, be prepared to pay a price, not just attacks, it’s gonna cost you economically, other things as well, may cost your life. This is, the way people respond to what you say about homosexuality if you criticize it and we got Sally Kern today, State Rep from Oklahoma who experienced that first time, what happens if you exercise your right of free speech and happen to say something disparaging about homosexuality.

…

Kern: I have to be honest with you Rick, when I was sitting there in my car that day and when she told me that those emails were coming from homosexuals, honestly, fear gripped by whole body, because I was very aware of the homosexual lobbyists and the power that they have. And people say, ‘oh you’re so brave, so heroic,’ but I’m not, I’m just a sinner saved by grace and I was gripped with fear that day. I just said, ‘Lord, what have I done?’

Green: And not just I would think not just fear, not a political fear, physical fear; there’s a militant agenda out there as well.

Kern: It entered our mind but honestly, and I mentioned this in the book, the Saturday night when my husband and I sit down and really talked about this and prayed about it, when we asked ourselves the question, are we willing to even lose our lives over this? I can’t tell you, Rick, how liberating that was, it really was.

In August, David Barton misleadingly claimed that “the leading pediatric association in America” sent a letter to schools cautioning them against programs that try to prevent anti-gay bullying, asserting that pediatricians agree that young people will “end up being heterosexual unless you force them to be homosexual.”

As it turned out, Barton and his co-host Rick Green were citing the work of the American College of Pediatricians, an exceptionally small, right-wing splinter group of the significantly larger and more reputable American Academy of Pediatricians. In fact, the ACP broke away from the mainstream AAP because of the ACP’s vehement opposition to gay rights.

Warren Throckmorton of Grove City College pointed out at the time that while the ACP has “probably less than 200” members, the AAP has around 60,000. Professor Throckmorton tried to reach out to the AAP and WallBuilders, and the AAP said that Barton’s claims were demonstrably false. After AAP spokeswoman sent WallBuilders a letter asking for a retraction, Barton’s group replied:

Hi Debora (sic),

Thank you for your email to WallBuilders Live, I apologize for the delay in response but I hope I can address your concerns! After airing the episode about ACP David and Rick were informed that the news source they quoted during the episode was mistaken. David and Rick sent a letter to the news source addressing the mistaken information in the story. We apologize for the mix up and appreciate your notification as well.

If you have any further question or concerns please feel free to contact us. Many blessings!

Caroline Henry

wallbuilderslive.com

WallBuilders admitted to the AAP that their earlier assertion was demonstrably false and apologized. But that is not the story that was told on today’s episode of WallBuilders Live where Barton and Green contradicted the letter sent to Henry and refused to issue a retraction or back down from their discredited claims and even criticized the AAP for having the gall to attack them. Barton, who recently likened himself to Jesus and said that his critics are just like Jesus’ persecutors, chastised the AAP but altered his original claim to say that the ACP is now “a leading” organization:

Green: Actually David I got a—actually it’s not a retraction at all actually—we got a letter that wanted a retraction. Remember when we did the show? There was a great paper that was put out by the American Academy—I mean the American College of Pediatricians, and they were saying look some of this stuff you’re doing on homosexuality in schools is dangerous for kids, this homosexual agenda is not a good idea and bringing it into the classroom and that sort of thing. We did a whole program on this. In the program we talked about hey this is one of the leading pediatric associations in the nation, and we got a letter from one of the other pediatric associations, let’s see the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has more members and has been around a little longer and they I guess took offense to that so they sent us a letter and they said they wanted to make sure we knew that the ACP was not the leading pediatric association in America and they put some of their papers in here and there position is a little different I would say—

Barton: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Green: Much more liberal on this. As we pointed out to them directly and we’ll put it out here on the show: leading does not mean largest, leading means, sometimes it takes a newer, leaner more responsive organization—

Barton: And they are one of the leading organizations. Now the fact that this other organization may not like them and may disagree with them doesn’t mean they’re not a leading organization. They are a credentialed organization made up of credentialed people and the fact that they don’t agree with them doesn’t make them less than leading. And if they’re expecting a retraction, sorry, ain’t happening!

The ever so humble David Barton told listeners on a conference call for United In Purpose’s “ One Nation Under God” event today that the criticisms he faces for his erroneous, reliably wrong and consistently debunked portrayal of history are just like what Jesus endured. Bill Dallas of United In Purpose and Champion the Vote asked why the “secular press” always questions Barton’s faulty interpretations of history. In fact, Barton’s critics include historians from both Christian and secular institutions. Barton answered that his critics, like the persecutors of Jesus, don’t attack the content of his message but only lie about who he is.

Barton, who is currently suing three of his critics for libel and defamation, recommends that since “Jesus ignored those comments,” you “don’t worry about when they attack you, you don’t worry about what they say.”

Dallas: Well when the secular press tries to pigeonhole you as a historical revisionist, how does that make you feel? How do you combat that? How do we combat that? Because we use a lot of your materials, David, what do you say to that?

Barton: One of the things that I’ve found is that they like to go after me but they won’t go after the content because it’s documented so well, in our case we have 100,000 documents from before 1812. I have four law schools out there, secular law schools, who have entire websites smashing me, trashing me, but they’ve never been able to go after the content, they just don’t like what’s there. So what they’ll do is, and I don’t want to compare myself in anyway, but it’s the same tactic they used with Jesus. When Jesus had content that would change people’s lives they’d say ‘oh he’s a wine-drinker, he’s a glutton,’ and they would make things up about him and that’s designed to sever people from listening to him, ‘who wants to listen to a drunkard, who wants to listen to a glutton?’ So what you have to do is, you get by there, Jesus ignored those comment, you keep putting out the information so you don’t worry about when they attack you, you don’t worry about what they say, you get a whole bunch of people who will listen and you just overwhelm them with numbers.

Dallas also told listeners that Barton will give a two hour lecture during the “One Nation Under God” event, which will also feature Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, but which Dallas stressed is completely “nonpartisan.” Of course, having Gingrich, Perry, and Barton, the former vice-chair of the Texas Republican Party and a paid consultant of the Republican National Committee, shows that event organizers aren’t trying very hard to hide their pro-GOP message.

When you listen to David Barton on a regular basis, you learn all sorts of interesting things - a lot of them happen to be false and/or terrifying, but interesting nonetheless. 

For instance, on "Wallbuilders Live" today he explained that federal judges are not appointed for life but simply "during good behavior,"  which means that any time any judge issues a ruling that Congress does not like, they simply have to convene a hearing, force the judge to defend the ruling, and then impeach them:

Rick Green: So where is the accountability if a judge is appointed for their whole life.

Barton: Well, the first part is they're not appointed for life. That's one of the things that people think today and this is one of the great judicial myths that's out there that's absolutely not accurate. If you go back and look at the Constitution, Article III deals with the judiciary; there's nothing in there about judges being appointed for life. They're not appointed for life.

What they did, and what they also did in the federal Constitution, when you read it it says federal judges are allowed to hold their appointments for the quote 'duration of good behavior.' That's not a lifetime appointment - that's as long as you act right you can stay there as a federal judge. But if you don't act right, we're going to take you out.

The best way to know is to go see the guys who wrote the clauses, see what they define as good behavior by who they throw off the court.

There was a federal judge thrown off the court because he cussed in the courtroom. Founding Fathers threw him off the court. Why'd they do that? Because the federal Constitution says "for the duration of good behavior," They said cussing in a courtroom is not good behavior for a judge, you're gone.

Another guy was thrown off the court because he got drunk in his private life. Whoa, it's his private life; had nothing to do with his job. No, it's not good behavior for a judge - you're gone.

Another guy got thrown off the court because he contradicted an act of Congress. Supreme Court does that all the time today. Congress pass something, ah we don't like that act, it's going to be unconstitutional. No, he did that - you're gone buddy.

...

There have been 97 impeachment investigations across history with judges; you've had 13 impeachments taken off the court. And the more often you have an impeachment investigation, the less often you have to remove a judge because, what Thomas Jefferson says, impeachment is a scarecrow - you sit out there in the middle of the field and that will scare them off.

Green: Because all the other judges are watching that, going 'I don't want that to be me.'

Barton: You betcha. For example, take the judge in California that says, oh no, having 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, completely unconstitutional.

What you do is you convene a hearing in Washington DC, Congress says we want you to come appear before the judiciary committee and explain to us exactly what your thinking is that says we can't acknowledge God when that's in the Declaration and in the Constitution. What are you thinking?

And other judges see him getting called before Congress to be accountable and they go 'oh my gosh, we're not going to touch that.' Exactly!