The world’s largest Christian publisher Thomas Nelson has pulled David Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies” because of Barton’s “unsupportable” claims regarding the third president’s views on religion. Barton’s deputy Rick Green accused academic “elitists” of acting like Adolf Hitler to smear Barton, while Barton ironically defended his book by insisting that a group of anonymous academics endorsed his work. Now that Thomas Nelson has recalled Barton’s book and removed all mention of it from its website, we wanted to see what books the publisher apparently found to be more credible than Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies”:
1. Todd Burpo’s “Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back.” Pastor Todd Burpo describes how his 3-year-old son Colton went to heaven during surgery where he saw God literally “fit the entire world into his hands” and Jesus’ “sea-blue eyes”!
2. Rick Joyner’s “The Vision: A Two-in-One Volume of The Final Quest and The Call.” Thomas Nelson considers not one but two books by the self-proclaimed prophet who claimed to have miraculously made a dish of casserole multiply and stopped the Asian Flu, blamed Hurricane Katrina on homosexuality and warned of the West Coast’s impending doom, as more supportable than Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies.”
3. Hank Hanegraaff’s “The Creation Answer Book.” This book claims that humans and dinosaurs walked on the earth together and that the earth was created in six consecutive 24 hour days, apparently less of a stretch than Barton’s argument that Jefferson and the rest of the Founders were fundamentalist Christians.
4. John Hagee’s “The Beginning of the End.” The televangelist describes how the Antichrist will soon come to power, using microchips implanted in humans and hate crimes laws to secure his authority.
5. Michael Savage’s “Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder.” It’s a book called “Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder”!
Again, these are the books seen as more reliable than Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies.”
