Right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton has posted a valuable resource on Wallbuilders, his organization’s website, entitled “Revisionism: How to Identify It In Your Children’s Textbooks.”
Over the years, Barton has made a name for himself among the Right by presenting a distorted history of the United States as a nation designed by the Founding Fathers to be explicitly Christian.
Unfortunately, the history Barton presents is often blatantly biased and intentionally misrepresented. As Derek Davis, a legal and church scholar at Baylor University told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram last year
“[Barton’s] not a trained historian. He can be very convincing to an uninitiated audience. He’s intelligent. He’s well-spoken. But a lot of what he presents is a distortion of the truth.”
On Wallbuilders, Barton warns that liberal “revisionists” are attempting to rewrite history to cover up the historically Christian nature of this country and are doing so by
Underemphasizing or ignoring the aspects of American history they deem to be politically incorrect and overemphasizing those portions they find acceptable;
Vilifying the historical figures who embraced a position they reject; and
Concocting the appearance of widespread historical approval for the social policy they are attempting to advance.
Barton says the means by which revisionists are carrying out this plot include making claims that are 1) patently untrue, 2) relying on overly broad generalizations, 3) omitting key information regarding context, and 4) failing to cite primary sources as references.
To anyone familiar with Barton, he has just described his own work perfectly.
