Pseudo-historian David Barton visited Engage In Truth radio on Friday to share his right-wing view of American history and the Constitution. Without citing any evidence, David Barton said that the Due Process Clause and the Fourth and Eighth Amendments “all came out of the Bible.” Of course, Barton has a long track record of mentioning long lists of Bible verses which he believes inspired the drafters of the Constitution while never providing any proof to substantiate his claims.
Barton then goes on to cite various trials in the Bible or of biblical figures as evidence of how trials ought to be conducted and asserts that the trial system enshrined in the Constitution came directly out of the Bible:
Barton: Now we have the Due Process Clause in the Constitution and the 4th and the 8th Amendments and that’s where you get an attorney and the right to confront your accuser and habeas corpus and all the things that are there, every one of those came out of the Bible. And it started in the Reformation with these guys pointing to the bad trials going in Europe and they said, look at the trials in the Bible, you got the trial of Naboth under Ahab and Jezebel, you got the trial of Jesus, the trial of Paul, the trial of Peter, none of the trials in Europe were being done biblically, we gotta get a system where we can do that. I mean the Declaration of Independence is about having good trials as it is about anything else and the trial clauses all came out of the Bible.
Barton, who launched his career by claiming that SAT scores dropped as a result of the end of unconstitutional school-officiated prayer, went on to say that the best way to improve the education system was to bring back school prayer. Again, without citing any evidence to back up his point, Barton blames the lack of prayer for a drop in test scores and then argues that test scores rose rapidly in schools that returned to school prayer even though he says it is banned:
Barton: If the premise is that taking prayer out in ’62, ’63 affected education, then the reverse premise is putting prayer back in will restore education. And that’s interesting because there’s a ton of stats that the schools that returned to prayer have academic scores exactly what they wore prior to 1962, 1963, that is fascinating that we can show that when you take prayer out our academic knowledge just went through the floor but it can also show that when you put it back in their knowledge recovered. So two those things are fairly significant and when you get a double correlation in social sciences that pretty strong stuff and we got that on the effect of prayer.
Clearly, the only thing David Barton “proved” in these interviews is that his lack of respect for facts and evidence shows why academics do not consider him a legitimate historian.
