David Barton

As we have noted before, Friday episodes of "WallBuilders Live" are generally dedicated to spreading what David Barton and Rick Green consider to be "good news from around the nation the media doesn't report."

We have also pointed out before that Barton believes that everything in our society ought to be governed by what is in the Bible, even our medical practices ... and today Barton returned to this topic, claiming that science cannot create a cure or vaccine for AIDS and that abortion causes breast cancer and mental health problems, proclaiming that to be "good news" because it proves that the Bible is correct:

There's a passage that I love in Romans 1 - I don't love what the topic is - but it talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. And the Bible again, it's right every time, and studies keep proving that and that's why AIDS has been something they haven't discovered a cure for or a vaccine for, because it's the fastest self-mutating virus known to mankind. Every time they just about get a vaccine discovered for it, it transmutes into something new and they have to start over again. And that goes to what God says, hey you're going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.

The same thing goes with abortion and now we're getting studies, and these are somewhat negative studies, but they're positive studies in that they prove that the Bible is right. So I want to read you the results of a couple of new studies that are out. Here's a new study that out, now this is the second study that shows that women who have abortions double the risk of mental health problems ... Now that's not good news; the good news in this is God says "don't kill unborn babies."

Now, along the same thing, here's another study, a new study now shows those who have abortions nearly triple the risk of breast cancer. It's bad news, but it's good news in the sense that it does show that the Bible is right. When God says don't kill those unborn babies, there's a reason. And He tells us in Deuteronomy 6:24 and Joshua 1:8, everything I tell you to do is for your good, for your benefit, so that you can prosper and you can have success. So when he tells us not to do this stuff, whether it's homosexual behavior or whether its abortion, hey it's for our benefit he tells us not to do it and now studies prove that to be true.

Televangelist John Hagee stopped by WallBuilders Live today where the preacher and conservative activist told hosts David Barton and Rick Green that universities are “poisoning the minds of America’s young people” as a result of Saudi financing of “anti-American” professors. He went on to claim that the US is facing decline because of prohibitions on public school-organized prayer and legal abortion as America “in the ’60s turned our back on the very foundations of spiritual and moral greatness that established this nation and we have been going downhill ever since”:

Hagee: The American people simply do not realize that whenever they pull up to the gas pump and pay, what they’re paying, that much of their money is going straight to Saudi Arabia who’s sending it back to our universities and to interests here who are building mosques and who are sponsoring professors at America’s universities who are anti-American and anti-Israel and who are poisoning the minds of America’s young people at secular universities about the exceptionalism of America, about our destiny as a great people and about our future.

…

All people need to do is sit down and consider how far we have fallen in the last forty or fifty years. For instance, in 1948 the first initiatives were made called separation of church and state and then in 1960 came the edict that you cannot pray in school, and we thought that would never happen, but it has happened. We now have federal judges threatening to send children who pray at graduations to jail and then came the abortion issue, oh that will not happen, but it did happen, now we have the systematic state supported murder of 4,000 children every day in America’s abortion mills. We in the ’60s turned our back on the very foundations of spiritual and moral greatness that established this nation and we have been going downhill ever since. Now we are opening our society to the concept that Jehovah God is one of many Gods and I assure you the word of God says ‘if you deny me before men I will deny you before my Father.’ ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,’ there is one God, he’s Jehovah God, the God of Israel, Isaac and Jacob, and there is no other.

Last week, David Barton was once again a featured guest on Glenn Beck's program, this time promoting his new book "The Jefferson Lies."

In introducing the segment, Beck said to Barton that "when we save the country, a lot of the credit in the afterlife is going to go to you," while Barton gave all the credit to God, suggesting that God has placed these historical documents in his hands because "He wants it saved and preserved for the country":

As an aside, I found this clip via professor John Fea's blog, who commented that he didn't "even know where to begin with this video" and lamented the success that Barton has had promoting his false history:

Barton's book is currently ranked #31 at Amazon. It is really sad that the American past is being manipulated for political propaganda in this way. I say this as an historian and an evangelical Christian.

Fea is an Associate Professor of American History at Messiah College and the author of the excellent book "Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction" which I  wrote about several times last year, and his comment raises a question that I have been wondering about for a long time, which is why bona fide historians seem so unwilling to take a stand against Barton and his partisan manipulation of history. 

For academic historians to generally remain silent as Barton's brand of pseudo-history becomes increasingly popular seems, to me, to represent a serious disservice to their field of expertise. Barton's brand of partisan history remains popular, at least in part, because actual historian so rarely speak out against Barton's flagrant misuse and misrepresentation of history.

Fea laments that Barton's book is so popular while simultaneously saying he doesn't even know what to say about this video.  Those two things are not unrelated. 

If historians, and especially evangelical historians like Fea, remain reluctant to get involved in the task of debunking and discrediting Barton and his pseudo-history, they can expect to continue seeing books by the likes of Beck and Barton at the top of the best-sellers list.

UPDATE:  Fea has responded to this post and makes several fair points in defense of his own efforts to debunk Barton's phony history.

In recent weeks, we've been focusing a lot on the difficulty that David Barton has accurately reporting on contemporary issues that are easily verifiable and we have been doing so because it demonstrates his utter unreliability, especially as it pertains to the niche he has carved out as the Religious Right's favorite historian. 

After all, if Barton cannot even tell the truth about things that happened just last year that can be verified with a quick Google search, why should anyone believe anything he has to say about the Founding Era, especially when many of his claims are based on rare documents that very few have ever seen? 

On today's episode of "WallBuilders Live," Barton and co-host Rick Green were discussing the Religious Right's on-going crusade against openly gay Houston Mayor Annise Parker.  During the discussion, Barton lamented that out of some five million people in Houston, nobody was willing to step up to offer a serious challenge to Parker during the last election and that a firefighter who did run against her came within 800 votes of defeating her despite only spending $50,000:

Five million people in Houston and she ran and was elected mayor two years ago. At that time, a whole bunch of churches and pastors got together and said this is unacceptable, not in Houston, not where we've got this kind of vote and so they started recruiting two years ago to get a candidate to take her out, because that was the problem they had two years ago, just not a good candidate. So they worked for two years and they come to this year and still nobody is willing to step up. So a fireman stepped up ... I think the fireman spent like fifty thousand dollars and he came within eight hundred votes of beating her.

The fireman that Barton cites was Fernando Herrera and he was actually just one of five opponents that Parker faced in her last election ... and he came in third ... and Parker received over 42,000 more votes than he did: 

Houston Mayor Annise Parker won a second term Tuesday, but she faced fierce competition from five opponents.

Parker was challenged by Kevin Simms, Amanda Ulman, Dave Wilson, deputy fire chief Fernando Herrera and Jack O'Connor.

Parker received 58,939 of 115,881 votes. O'Connor had 17,153 votes, Herrera had 16,646, Wilson was fourth with 13,589 votes, Simms had 7,733 and Ullman had 1,821 votes.

It is honestly getting to the point where we now have to check nearly every factual assertion that Barton makes because so many of them turn out to be fundamentally false.

On yesterday's episode of "WallBuilders Live," Rick Green and David Barton were discussing the issue of religious liberty and the role the issue played in the formation of the United States when Barton asserted that, right now, America is "like England back in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds" except that we are not burning people at the stake ... yet:

This is a really important thing, to be able to have the presence of religion there but now we're seeing a hostility that we've not [seen before.] This is like England back in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, quite frankly. Now, we're not burning people at the stake yet, but we are imprisoning people for their faith and to say that in America, that's unbelievable.

We will probably be hearing a lot from David Barton in the coming weeks as he makes the rounds promoting his new book " The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson."

Technically, the book is not even supposed to be released until next week, but I have already received the copy I ordered and Chris Rodda has even read through it and produced a nearly two hour video debunking Barton's claims.

Yesterday, Barton was a on "In The Market with Janet Parshall" where he spent the entire hour discussing his book and making many of the claims we have heard him make before.  But Barton did make one interesting assertion when he was asked why public school textbooks don't teach about the Founding Fathers and he blamed it on evolution:

We've taken the evolution thing and kept it as a science debate, and it's not. Evolution [versus] creation is not a science, it is a worldview. If I take evolution and say you know, man's always evolving, moving forward, then I've got to say well, then we need a Constitution that evolves and moves forward with us. And so we get a living Constitution whereby who cares what the Constitution says, here's what we think about Obamacare or gay marriage or anything else.

If I take and apply [the evolutionary worldview] to history, I'd have to say that in public schools, history is the most worthless subject there is if you believe evolution because, if we are evolving, what can we learn from two hundred years ago? My gosh, those guys didn't even have internet back then! They rode horses; let's get up with the real century. And so under that worldview of evolution, history has got to be the first casualty. And it is, quite frankly.

As we have noted several times in recent weeks, David Barton has a problem accurately reporting on contemporary issues that are easily verifiable, which calls into question his reliability, especially when it comes to the pseudo-history he uses to promote his political agenda.

And he did the same thing again today on his "WallBuilders Live" program where he read from his recent "America’s Most Biblically-Hostile U. S. President" document about President Obama, which he claimed represented a "Declaration of Independence[-like] chain of abuses,"  as he asserted that the Department of Veterans Affairs under Obama had banned mentions of God and Jesus during funerals:

2011: the Department of Veterans Affairs forbids references to God and Jesus during burial [ceremonies] at Houston National Cemetery.

I'm sorry. You may be buried there as a veteran, but the government is not running your funeral. You have other people come and do your funeral but the government is saying that since you're being buried on Veteran land, your preacher, your rabbi, your priest can't use Jesus or God during the funeral ceremony.

Really? At your own funeral? It's my husband, it's my brother, it's my uncle, somebody being buried and I can't use Jesus or God? No, you can't.

That is, of course, entirely false.  As we pointed out last year, the Bush administration instituted a policy in 2007 that "prohibits volunteer honor guards from reading recitations — including religious ones — in their funeral rituals, unless families specifically request them." In essence, the policy stated that volunteer groups were not allowed to attend military funerals and inject their religion in to it unless their presence is requested by the family. Conversely, if a family does want to included such prayers in the service, they have every right to so.

Nobody was being told that there could be no mention of God or Jesus during a funeral ... but, as with so many other issues, Barton portrayed the issue in an utterly misleading manner in order to promote his right-wing political agenda.

As we mentioned yesterday, a few episodes of David Barton's "Building on the American Heritage Series" program are available in the TBN archives, including one in which Barton explains how "social justice" is really just another term of "socialism."

At one point, the discussion turned to the subject of climate change, a topic on which Barton fancies himself an expert, in which he explained that the Biblical account of creation in the book of Genesis reveals that God placed man above all animals and the Earth. 

But, Barton explained, today environmentalists have reversed God's order and now place the Earth and animals above man, as proven by the fact that Michael Vick went to prison for dog-fighting but "we don't send abortionists to jail for killing babies": 

After a tour of both mainstream and right-wing media outlets that largely focused on Kirk Cameron’s denigration of gays and lesbians, last night his “documentary” Monumental premiered in select theatres with little public attention.

The premiere included a live stream of Cameron in his living room right before and after the film, where he listened to praise music, gazed over food and mingled with family members and friends, while recounting how “truly sick” America has become.

Cameron admitted that he is no history buff, telling his pastor, “I feel like a dry sponge when I learn all these things.”

Just as Cameron was a “dry sponge” when learning lessons about how the banana disproves evolution, he accepted the claims of Religious Right activists posing as historians at face value.

One of whom was Glenn Beck, who appeared via satellite feed. Cameron and Beck took turns complimenting each other, with the former Fox News host lauding Cameron, “You were in Left Behind while I was reading it.” Curiously, Cameron decided against attending Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally after Brannon Howse, among others, warned evangelicals about joining forces with Beck, a Mormon.

Beck told Cameron that God told him that their mission to “wake up” America is a path they can’t veer from. “Return to me and I will protect you,” Beck says was God’s message, adding that God wants to be America’s “sword and shield.”

But the conservative celebrity appearances didn’t end there: Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece and a Religious Right activist, was in Cameron’s living room as well. Cameron asked her what she thought her uncle would want people to do if he were here today, to which Alveda responded that King would want people to watch Monumental!

She seems to think that King would endorse a movie that whitewashes America’s past, as Cameron determines that America’s problems only began in the last few decades.

In the film, Cameron’s adventure starts in England, where we learn how Puritans were persecuted by the Church of England and ultimately, at great personal and familial sacrifice, made their way to Holland to find religious freedom and escape a society where the “government controlled the church.” It was a stark if simplistic look at religious persecution at a time when many on the Right are decrying the Obama administration’s “attacks on religious liberty.”

Visiting in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Cameron claims that the Pilgrims established a governmental “system of all men created equal under the law.” He then sets forth to find the Pilgrims’ “training manual” and the “secret sauce” that will be the key to stopping America’s plunge into moral and economic disarray.

He finds the “secret sauce” at Plymouth’s National Monument to the Forefathers, which was built in 1910 under the leadership of Freemasons, though from just watching Cameron’s documentary you would think the Pilgrims themselves helped construct it. The message from the monument is that faith leads to personal morality, spreading that faith creates a moral and therefore just society, and a just society produces mercy for the disadvantaged and education for the children. Cameron used the part about education to bemoan how parents can send their children to “government schools” where they are trained to be “slaves to the state,” generating an entitlement culture that breeds government dependence rather than reliance on faith. Ultimately, the “secret sauce” creates “Liberty Man,” who Cameron says is “not a wimpy religious man but a stud.”

Cameron, in seeking to find out how America went from a country of Liberty Men to a fallen people, glosses over how the mythical country of Liberty Men considered African Americans, Native Americans and women to be inferior and endorsed slavery, racism, and discriminatory and violent treatment of women. He also neglects to mention that in Plymouth religious liberty was nonexistent and religious dissenters were mercilessly persecuted. For instance, people were not allowed to become Quakers or even give aide Quakers and Quakers were even executed by the colony’s government.

Just as damning, Cameron conflates the Pilgrims with the Founders: the film gives the impression that the Founders had the same religious convictions and beliefs in the role of religion in government as the Pilgrims. Never mind that more than a few of the Founders were members of the Church of England, the very same church that Cameron noted persecuted the Pilgrims.

Cameron spoke to Christian Reconstructionist ‘historians’ David Barton and Herb Titus to find out how evil, atheist academics from Boston (scary music included) lied to Americans about the country’s Christian heritage. Barton said there is a “deliberate attempt” to hide the faith of the Founding Fathers by using “revisionism,” and Titus warned that “a nation that attempts to build a foundation not based on God’s law will ultimately self-destruct.”

The movie ended with warnings about secular government and democracy run amok, with one guest repeating the myth that Adolf Hitler was a democratically elected dictator, and Alveda King appearing once again to tell us that “America hasn’t been destroyed because we call upon the Lord.”

Accuracy shouldn’t have been expected from a film about American history made by someone who freely admits that he had little knowledge of history and was a “dry sponge” who didn’t think critically about the nation’s past. But since Cameron’s findings easily conformed to the Religious Right view of American history and government, Monumental will surely find a place along with David Barton books and episodes of Glenn Beck that feed faux-history to conservative audiences across the nation.