David Barton

• PFAW: New PFAW Report on the Importance of the Supreme Court in the 2012 Presidential Election.
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• Rebecca Berg @ BuzzFeed: Todd Akin Feels The Republican Love.
• Warren Throckmorton: Texas does not use third grade reading levels to project future prison population.

On "WallBuilders Live" today, David Barton and Rick Green were discussing the importance and benefits of school choice in terms of improved scholastic performance.  While making the case, Barton explained that during Glenn Beck's "Restoring Love" event earlier this year, WallBuilders was tasked with organizing volunteer opportunities for the thousands of attendees and one of the groups they partnered with was a church that had been asked to help improve the reading ability of local third grade students.

And the reason this was so important, Barton explained, is because the Texas Department of Corrections uses the number of third grade students who are not reading at grade level to determine how many prison beds they will need in fifteen years "because kids that are not reading at grade level in the thrid grade, they're the kids that end up in prison.  That's the best indicator they have found is where these kids are in third grade": 

You will undoubtedly be shocked to learn that this is an ubran legend and not at all true.

In August, the Liberty Institute and the Family Research Council released a joint report entitled "The Survey on Religious Hostility in America" which purported to be a "collection of more than 600 cases, detailing religious bigotry throughout America" ... but, for some reason, the incident they love to cite more than any other is a nearly twenty year old myth about an elementary school student who was supposedly yanked out of his seat and yelled at simply for praying before eating his lunch in the school cafeteria.

In reality, the student was disciplined for fighting in the lunch room in 1994 but the Religious Right continues to perpetuate this lie to this day. In fact, David Barton cites it repeatedly despite the fact that it is demonstrably false, and did so again today on "WallBuilders Live," as did the Liberty Institute's Kelly Shackelford, who was on the program to promote the report:

Barton: What does it say to that elementary kid who got jerked out of his seat and hauled to the principle's office in front of everybody else and told don't you ever pray over your lunch again, period? What kind of impression is that giving? Jesus said "suffer the little children to come unto me" and we're doing our best to say "absolutely no way, absolutely not will we ever allow any kid to get to you" ... this is crazy stuff.

Shackelford: It's all the way from a ten-year old boy who was quote "caught" praying over his meal in the lunch cafeteria who was lifted out of his chair and carried to the principle's office where he was told to never do that again while he was at school.

Even though this incident never actually happened, Bartonsees it as proof that we at PFAW and other groups have created a "toxic" and "hostile" environment in which public officials are pressured into persecuting Christians:

Barton: And I really blame this climate on the secular groups, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Americans United, the People For the American Way, the Military Freedom Foundation, all these guys who have so made the climate so toxic that if you share your faith, public officials feel like they have to come down on you with both feet otherwise they'll get sued and end up in court and have to spend millions of dollars defending something religions. And so these guys have created such a hostility in the public that now public officials and school officials and city council officials and those who run senior's centers and everything else are so scared to death of seeing faith that if they see it, they feel like they have to jump on it with both feet and both hands and bring out the hammers and run over you with a car and pull out a chainsaw and cut you to pieces. They over-react and I really blame a lot of those organizations. 

Last year, David Barton began recommending a book called "None Of These Diseases" by S.I. McMillen, which claims that everything we need to know about medicine and health care can be found in the Bible. Barton called the book, which states that promiscuity is the cause of arthritis and insanity, that it is not necessary for women to experience orgasm, and that women who have been punched the face by their husbands just need to learn to submit, "one of the best healthcare books you'll ever read."

Today, on "WallBuilders Live," Barton recommended the book again as he predicted that eventually science will discover that salt is not actually bad for you ... because that is what the Bible says: 

That's one of the life verses I love is Joshua 1:8 that if you do things according to His law, you'll have prosperity, you'll have success. You just do it according to His way. You also get the promise of Exodus 15:26 that says now if you do all of the things that I command you, you won't be stuck with all those diseases I put on the Egyptians, you'll really be health. And so this is really the basis of healthcare is actually doing your body the way God wants you to do your body. That's one of the great books out of the 60's called "None of These Diseases" by Dr. S.I. McMillen who's just a medical doctor and he said 'hey, let's go back and look at what God said about health things in the Bible." And, my gosh, four thousand, five thousand years later we doctors have finally figured out God got it right.

And I'll make a speculation on this because I think the Bible is always right on science and science eventually does catch up, we're going to find out salt is not that bad a deal for you. There's a reason Jesus made salt a good thing, that we are the salt, we are the light, we're the preservative. Now anything taken too much is going to be a problem, but I have seen in the last two weeks new studies coming out saying well, it turns out salt is not as bad as we thought it was.

Back in July, Eagle Forum Collegians hosted their 2012 Annual Leadership Summit at the Heritage Foundation where Rep. Michele Bachmann delivered a speech warning of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposed infiltration of the U.S. government, her baseless pet cause. Bachmann told attendees that the Obama administration’s meeting with an Egyptian lawmaker, who was vetted by the Secret Service and both the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, was part of a string of “outrageous, unbelievable actions on the part of the administration to allow influence by the Muslim Brotherhood at the highest levels of power: the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI.”

She then attacked the media for “saying we’re going after individual personalities and that we’re being mean to Muslims.” But Bachmann did in fact specifically name individuals, including Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and other Muslims serving in the administration as part of a witch hunt denounced by Democratic and Republican leaders alike, including the Republican Speaker of the House and the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Bachmann went on to explain that “every day I’m in trouble for something, who cares, who cares?”

Watch:

Later, the Congresswoman suggested that attendees read “everything Phyllis Schlafly has ever written,” calling her an “absolute genius,” and also recommended books by extremist commentator Ann Coulter and disgraced pseudo-historian David Barton.

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• Rob Boston @ Wall of Separation: Sunday Scofflaws: It’s Time For The IRS To Crack Down On ‘Pulpit Freedom Sunday.’

• Warren Throckmorton: David Barton’s Founders’ Bible: John Adams and the General Principles of Christianity.

• Dan @ TFN Insider: Texas Supreme Court Might Consider David Barton Defamation Lawsuit.

• Judd Legum @ Think Progress: Republican Candidate In Arkansas Says Parents Should Seek Death Penalty Against ‘Rebellious Children.’

Scott Lively’s Redemption Gate Mission Society is hosting a Thanksgiving fundraiser [PDF] featuring none other than fellow pseudo-historian David Barton! Perhaps Barton is helping Lively’s ministry after he came to Barton’s defense when his latest book The Jefferson Lies was pulled off the shelves by its Christian publisher over its many factual inaccuracies, thanks in no small part due to the heavy criticism it received from evangelical scholars such as Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, whose book Getting Jefferson Right thoroughly exposed Barton’s errors and distortions.

Lively rushed to defend Barton from Throckmorton since the Grove City College professor also criticized Lively’s book The Pink Swastika, which argues that homosexuals were behind Nazism and the Holocaust in order to seek revenge on the Jewish people, and his work in Uganda, where he advocated for homosexuals to either be imprisoned or ordered to go through conversion therapy. Lively’s work also helped inspire Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would make homosexuality a crime punishable by death, although Lively later distanced himself from that specific provision.

As Throckmorton notes, Barton and Lively have both arrived at the conclusion that criticism of Barton’s work, even from other evangelicals, is driven by the “homosexualist” movement and therefore they don’t need to make any serious effort responding to it.

On November 9, David Barton is slated to appear at Scott Lively’s Redemption Gate Ministry. Perhaps this boost to Lively’s credibility comes as a pay back for Lively’s conspiracy theory about why The Jefferson Lies was attacked by so many Christian historians prior to being pulled off the shelves by publisher Thomas Nelson. In August, Lively linked my blog posts debunking The Pink Swastika in 2009 to my recent book with Michael Coulter (Getting Jefferson Right) debunking Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies. Since everything has to do with homosexuality for Lively, he opined that our book fact-checking Barton’s book was written because David Barton is anti-gay. Barton ran with that idea by tweeting the article to his followers, and having Lively on his Wallbuilders show.

The whole conspiracy idea (and it is a false one – we wrote the book about The Jefferson Lies because it had just come out and because Barton made/makes many false claims) was used by Barton to deflect the substantial criticisms we made in Getting Jefferson Right. Neither Lively nor Barton have responded directly to the evidence we presented about their various claims. Instead, their tactic has been to launch ad hominem attacks against me and others. The primary strategy of both Lively and Barton has been to invent a narrative where I am a liberal who has somehow persuaded scores of conservative people to write critically about these two men. Barton’s right hand man, Rick Green, compared me and others conservative Christian scholars to Adolf Hitler and Saul Alinsky because we pointed out blatant errors of fact in David Barton’s work.

In Biblical interpretation, there are some who engage in a practice called "prooftexting" which is "the practice of using isolated quotations from a document to establish a proposition." In essence, it is a practice of pulling isolated passages, fragments, or even sometimes single words out of the Bible, removing them from their original context and then using similarities in language or symbolism to assert that the cited passages support a certain position or prophesied a certain event.

As anyone who has any familiarity with the "history" produced by David Barton knows, the practice of yanking things out of context and then making bold declarations based on linguistic or stylistic similarities is fundamental to his work.  And his new book, the Founders' Bible, provides a key insight into how this practice pervades all of Barton's work, be it interpreting the Bible or interpreting American history.

The book of Joshua kicks off with a sixteen page article on the history of the English language Bible in which Barton seeks to explain why, for most of Christian history, Bibles contained not only the 66 books found in current versions of the Bible, but dozens of other books as well, known as the Apocrypha.  It was not until the 1500s that these books began to be excluded from the Bible when it was decided that they were not "part of the authoritative canon of Scripture."

In seeking to explain why, after thousands of years, these other books were suddenly excluded from the Bible, Barton provided a lengthy explanation about how it was God himself who said that there were only to be 66 books in the Bible way back when Moses and the Israelites were still wandering in the desert.

As Barton sees it, when God was giving Moses instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle, He was very specific about the construction of the lampstand that was to serve as the light source within:

Make a lampstand of pure gold. Hammer out its base and shaft, and make its flowerlike cups, buds and blossoms of one piece with them. Six branches are to extend from the sides of the lampstand—three on one side and three on the other. Three cups shaped like almond flowers with buds and blossoms are to be on one branch, three on the next branch, and the same for all six branches extending from the lampstand. And on the lampstand there are to be four cups shaped like almond flowers with buds and blossoms. One bud shall be under the first pair of branches extending from the lampstand, a second bud under the second pair, and a third bud under the third pair—six branches in all. The buds and branches shall all be of one piece with the lampstand, hammered out of pure gold.

“Then make its seven lamps and set them up on it so that they light the space in front of it. Its wick trimmers and trays are to be of pure gold. A talent of pure gold is to be used for the lampstand and all these accessories. See that you make them according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.

Barton then explains that, throughout the Bible, a lamp or lampstand is frequently used as a symbol for the Word of God, which he claims, based upon the instructions from Exodus, demonstrate that God intended the Bible to contain exactly 66 books:

The lampstand was to have 7 branches, with 3 branches on each side of a center branch. Each branch was comprised of 3 cups in the shape of an almond blossom, and each cup had a bulb and a flower, thus 9 pieces (3+3+3) for one branch. The center branch had 4 cups, each with a bulb and a flower, or 12 pieces (4+4+4). So there are 6 outer branches of 9 pieces each and once center branch of 12, which means that the combined number of individual pieces (9+9+9+9+9+9+12) is 66.

The golden lampstand, being a type or symbol of the Word of God, has 66 individual pieces of hammered gold that are fashioned together into a single complete unit. And the Bible has 66 books, by dozens of authors, written over the span of some 1,500+ year, preserved and recorded for us upon who the ends of the age have come, fashioned together to create one amazing, continuous story that testifies of God and shines his light of His purpose and plan for salvation.

Is that coincidental, or is it God's providence?

There's more. Adding up the individual pieces of hammered gold of the first four branches of the lampstand (9+9+9+12) gives a total of 39 - the number of books in the Old Testament. Combing the individual pieces of the remaining three branches (9+9+9) yields a total of 27 - the precise number of books in the New Testament.

Not everyone is going to agree as to whether this proves anything, but it's hard not to agree that it is utterly amazing! The Bible has 39 Old Testament books + 27 New Testament book = 66 books of hammered pure gold that are considered one compete work - not just 39 or 27 or 80, but 66 Divinely inspired, purposed, and planned before the first one was ever penned.

And that is just one of the marvelous gems awaiting discovery in this supernatural Book! 

As we noted yesterday, we are working our way through David Barton's new book "The Founders' Bible" and we've made it up to the book of Deuteronomy, which Barton has filled with articles about how the Founding Fathers disapproved of using the government to help the poor, wanted the Bible taught in schools, included God in the wording of oaths, created courts to carry out Biblical justice, and opposed the imposition of unbiblical progressive taxation:

America's original system of taxation treated Americans as individuals rather than as part of a group, and it allowed, figuratively speaking, for the sun to rise alike on the good and the evil, and the rain to fall equally on the just and the unjust. This is just one of the many areas in which the Constitution specifically incorporated Biblical principles. We would do well to return to the wisdom that God establish for how to order our society. Forsaking it only invites destruction.

There is also a long article defending the Biblical legitimacy of the death penalty, which Barton roots in Deuteronomy 17:6, which says that "on the evidence of two witnesses or three witnesses, he who is to die shall be put to death; he shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness."

Barton again asserts that this passage is the foundation for the Constitution's treason clause, but also explains that God was using DNA evidence way back in Genesis and so it counts as an "eyewitness" in today's courts of law:

Biblically, the death penalty could not be applied unless there were at least two eyewitnesses to the incident. Circumstantial evidence, even when strong, is not the equivalent of multiple eyewitnesses and therefore does not meet the Biblical standard. Interestingly, however, the Bible long ago acknowledged a specific eyewitness that only in recent decades has become recognized in Americans courts.

Recall the account of Cain's murder of his brother Abel from Genesis 4:8-10. When God asked Cain where his brother was and Cain lied, God specifically confronted him with the declaration: "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to Me from the ground" (v. 10). Blood cries out? Blood has a voice? How can that be? We now know that DNA has a voice - that it serves as an eyewitness to specific crimes, just as when it cried out to God about Abel's death. This voice therefore Biblically qualifies as one of the "two or three eyewitnesses" needed to secure the death penalty in a capital crime.