Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 04:03, 13 October 2011

David Barton (born 1954) is an American evangelical Christian minister, conservative activist and author. He founded WallBuilders, a Texas-based organization with a goal of exposing the claimed US constitutional separation of church and state as a myth. Barton is the former co-chair of the Republican Party of Texas.

Barton collects early American documents, and his official biography describes him as "an expert in historical and constitutional issues". Barton holds no formal credentials in history or law, and critics (for example those discussed below) dispute the accuracy and integrity of his assertions about history, accusing him of practicing misleading historical revisionism, "pseudoscholarship" and "outright falsehoods". His research has been described as flawed by many historians, who dismiss his work as that of "a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible."

A 2005 Time magazine article entitled "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals" called Barton "a major voice in the debate over church-state separation" who, despite the fact that "many historians dismiss his thinking... a hero to millions—including some powerful politicians." He has been described as a Christian nationalist and "one of the foremost Christian revisionist historians"; much of his work is devoted to advancing the idea, based upon research that many historians describe as flawed, that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation. Barton has appeared on television and radio programs, including those of former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Glenn Beck, who has praised Barton as "the Library of Congress in shoes".

Biography

Barton graduated in 1972 from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas; a suburb of Fort Worth. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University in 1976.

After graduating, Barton served as a church youth director. He taught math and science and eventually became principal at Aledo Christian School, a Christian school of fewer than 100 students which grew out of Aledo Christian Center, a nondenominational charismatic church started by Barton's parents.

In 1987 Barton formed Specialty Research Associates, which "focuses on the historical research of issues relating to America's constitutional, moral, and religious heritage." Specialty Research Associates has submitted amicus curiae briefs in court cases.

Barton is the founder and president of the Aledo-based group WallBuilders, an organization which says it presents "America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built." WallBuilders publishes and sells most of Barton's books and videos, some of which present Barton's position that the modern view of separation of church and state is not consistent with the views of the Founders. Among other beliefs about the religion clauses of the First Amendment, they argue that its religion clauses were not intended to include such faiths as paganism and witchcraft, but only monotheistic religions, and perhaps solely Christianity.

Barton is married and has three grown children, including a daughter who does minority outreach for the Republican Party of Texas.

Affiliations

Barton is a former Vice Chairman of the Texas Republican Party and has acted as a political consultant to the Republican National Committee on outreach to evangelicals.

He serves on the Board of Advisors of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, publisher of a controversial Bible curriculum for use in public schools (not to be confused with The Bible and Its Influence curriculum). This curriculum contains direct quotations from Barton's books, recommends the resources published by WallBuilders, and advocates showing that group's video, Foundations of American Government, at the beginning of the course.

One of the WallBuilders speakers is Rick Green, a former Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives and a failed candidate for the Texas Supreme Court in an April, 2010 runoff election.

Barton serves on the Board of Advisors of the Providence Foundation. According to its website, the Providence Foundation is a nonprofit Christian educational organization whose mission is to spread liberty, justice, and prosperity among nations by instructing individuals in a Biblical worldview. Emphasis is said to be upon educating in principles, rather than issues, drawing upon examples in history for illustration. In an article discussing Barton, The Nation described the Providence Foundation as "a Christian Reconstructionist group that promotes the idea that biblical law should be instituted in America."

In Barton’s book The Myth of Separation, the author states his belief that Christians were the ones who were intended to hold public office and that Jews and members of other sects were not. According to Skipp Porteous of the Massachusetts-based Institute for First Amendment Studies, Barton was listed in promotional literature as a "new and special speaker" at a 1991 summer retreat in Colorado sponsored by Scriptures for America, a far-right Christian Identity ministry headed by Pastor Pete Peters, which has been linked to neo-Nazi groups. However, Barton said he was unaware of the group's anti-Semitic and racist views at the time. In September, 2011, Barton sued two former Texas State Board of Education candidates for posting a video on YouTube that stated that he was "known for speaking at white supremacist rallies".

Barton is a lecturer for Glenn Beck's online Beck University.

Media

Barton received two Angel Awards (awarded to "people in any form of the media who have successfully contributed to the advancement of quality in life without the unnecessary need for violence, profanity and sexual content to sell to their audience") from the group Excellence in Media. He has appeared in Time magazine, and has been a guest on Trinity Broadcasting Network, The 700 Club, Fox News Channel, ABC, The Daily Show, and National Public Radio.

Reception of Barton's work

Support

This section may contain lists of external links, quotations or related pages discouraged by Misplaced Pages's Manual of Style. Please help integrate this content into the body of the article using in-text citations.

Barton has been praised by U.S. conservatives such as Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Michele Bachmann. Huckabee's praise was effusive when he followed David Barton as a speaker at the Rediscover God in America Conference in Iowa March 26, 2011:

I wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, at gunpoint no less, to listen to every David Barton message. And I think our country would be better for it. I wish it would happen.

Senator Sam Brownback praised Barton’s work for providing "the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today—bringing God back into the public square."

Criticism

He has received criticism from secular groups and professional historians:

Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote

The Religious Right's leading practitioner of this type of historical revisionism is David Barton ... Barton makes a lucrative living traveling the right wing's lecture circuit where he offers up a cut-and-paste version of U.S. history liberally sprinkled with gross distortions and, in some cases, outright factual errors. Crowds of fundamentalist Christians from coast to coast can't get enough of it.

Rev. Randolph Bracy, president of the Orange County, Florida chapter of the NAACP has referred to Barton as a "Holocaust-denier, an anti-Semite and someone who has called for the death penalty for gay and lesbian people", stating that Barton has "a long history of being related to the worst fringes of our society."

Many historians dismiss his thinking, but Barton's advocacy organization, WallBuilders, and his relentless stream of publications, court amicus briefs and books like The Myth of Separation, have made him a hero to millions—including some powerful politicians.

— 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America, Time Magazine

Richard V. Pierard, Stephen Phillips Professor of History at Gordon College, describes Barton's work as follows:

Moreover, American history is rewritten to become

“Christian history,” the story of a people chosen by God and who honored him in the past. David Barton and a host of other evangelicals have produced books and videos setting forth a “holy history” of America—an idyllic past to which we must return if the nation is to be saved

from destruction at the hands of secularists.

Writing in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, (then Republican) Senator Arlen Specter stated:

Probably the best refutation of Barton's argument simply is to quote his

own exegesis of the First Amendment: "Today," Barton says, "we would best understand the actual context of the First Amendment by saying, 'Congress shall make no law establishing one Christian denomination as the national denomination.' " In keeping with Barton's restated First Amendment, Congress could presumably make a law establishing all Christian denominations as the national religion, and each state could pass a law establishing a particular Christian church as its official

religion.

— Arlen Specter, Defending the wall: Maintaining church/state separation in America

Chris Rodda, Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, published Liars for Jesus in 2006. It was largely devoted to debunking Barton's misrepresentations.

Writing in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, historian John Fea suggests that Barton's 'legal' mode of inquiry is at odds with historical scholarship. Fea states that this mode of inquiry is focused upon obtaining a predetermined desired result (as a lawyer does, advocating for a client), cherry-picks material to obtain this result, and fails to reconstruct the complexity of the past, but rather "lets the Founders speak for themselves" devoid of this context, which may violate "every rule of historical enquiry". Baylor University historian Barry Hankins makes similar observations.

First Muslim Congressman statement

In 2007, Barton published an article suggesting that founding-era Senator John Randolph of Roanoke of Virginia was actually the first Muslim member of Congress in reaction to the recent election of Keith Ellison (D-MN), a practicing Muslim. Barton's statement garnered widespread coverage in the evangelical Christian media at the time, but appears to have been based on a misinterpretation of a passage in which Randolph reported a youthful flirtation with agnosticism and professed sympathy for the Muslim Arabs during the crusades. Randolph was a practicing Episcopalian for most of his life, and biographer William Cabell Bruce considered Randolph's self-described "absurd prejudice in favor of Mohammedanism" a vagary that soon passed.

"Unconfirmed Quotations"

In an article titled "Unconfirmed Quotations", Barton conceded that he has not located primary sources for eleven alleged quotes from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions (hence, the title of the article), but maintained that the quotes were "completely consistent" with the views of the Founders. This drew criticism from Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who accused Barton of "shoddy workmanship", and said that despite these and other corrections, Barton's work "remains rife with distortions of history and court rulings". WallBuilders responded to its critics by saying that Barton followed "common practice in the academic community" in citing secondary sources, and that in publishing "Unconfirmed Quotations", Barton's intent was to raise the academic bar in historical debates pertinent to public policy.

The Texas Monthly noted that Barton has denied saying that in his famous letter to Danbury Baptists "Jefferson referred to the wall of separation between church and state as 'one-directional'—that is, it was meant to restrain government from infringing on the church's domain but not the other way around. There is no such language in the letter." The article goes on to note that this denial is contradicted by a 1990 version of Barton's video America's Godly Heritage in which Barton states:

On January 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote to that group of Danbury Baptists, and in this letter, he assured them—he said the First Amendment has erected a wall of separation between church and state, he said, but that wall is a one-directional wall. It keeps the government from running the church, but it makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.

Barton was also criticized for speaking at two functions organized by the ministry of Christian Identity adherent and Holocaust denier Pete Peters. He later stated that he "didn't know they (the groups he spoke at) were part of the Nazi movement".

Barton's legitimacy was reported to be growing in 2006, due largely to his first work which was not self-published, a 2003 article in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, (Volume XVII Issue No. 2, 2003, p. 399), a "rather tame survey" on Jefferson’s writings about the First Amendment.

References

1. ^ Blakeslee, Nate (2006-09). "King Of the Christocrats". Texas Monthly. 34 (9): 1. ISSN 0148-7736. Retrieved 2008-11-10. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
2. Billy Bruce (1992-02-18). "First Amendment specialist views church/state separation as "myth"". Daytona Beach Sunday News-Journal. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
3. "NOW: God's Country". PBS. 2006-04-28. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
4. "David Barton Bio". Wallbuilders. 2001-09-11. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
5. ^ Specter, Arlen (Spring 1995). "Defending the wall: Maintaining church/state separation in America". Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. 18 (2): 575–590. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
6. David Barton - Propaganda Masquerading as History, People for the American Way
7. Dissecting the religious right's favorite Bible Curriculum, Rob Boston, Americans United for Separation of Church and State
8. Harvey, Paul (10 May 2011). "Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton's Alternate Intellectual Universe". Religion Dispatches. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
9. ^ Eckholm, Erik (May 4, 2011). "Using History to Mold Ideas on the Right". New York Times. Cite error: The named reference "NYT" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
10. ^ 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America, Time
11. What is Christian Nationalism?, Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com, May 14, 2006
12. Kayla Webley (2010-07-07). "Perusing the Glenn Beck University Curriculum Guide". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
13. The Foundations of American Freedom, Christian Broadcasting Network
14. ^ The Turnaround in Education, David Barton
15. The Turnaround in Education, David Barton, Oral Roberts University
16. "Aledo Christian School". Education.com. 2011-06-22. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
17. "Aledo Christian School history" (PDF). Retrieved 2011-09-28.
18. "Brief Amicus Curiae of Specialty Research Associates, Inc" (PDF). 2002-05-03. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
19. "Westside Community Bd. of Ed. v. Mergens, 496 U.S. 226 (1990)". Justia.com. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
20. "Wallbuilders Overview". Wallbuilders. 2001-09-11. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
21. The Faith Divide: Christian Right's attack on rights - On Faith at washingtonpost.com
22. History of the Republican Party of Texas
23. The Dobson way, Dan Gilgoff, U.S. News & World Report, 1/9/05
24. "NCBCPS Board of Directors and Advisors". National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schoolz. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
25. The Revised Curriculum of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, Mark A. Chancey, Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University, October 2005
26. "Former Texas Supreme Court candidate Rick Green files libel suit". Texas Lawyer Blog. 2011-04-20. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
27. ^ Providence Foundation Mission statement
28. In Contempt of Courts, Max Blumenthal, The Nation, April 11, 2005
29. Boston, Rob (April 1993). "Sects, Lies and Videotape: David Barton's Distorted History". Church & State. 46 (4): 8–-12. Retrieved 2011-10-12.
30. ^ David Barton – Extremist ‘Historian’ for the Christian Right | Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center
31. "Article from Wallbuilders.com, retrieved 6, July, 2010". Wallbuilders.com. 2001-09-11. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
32. David Barton (2009-04). "Is President Obama Correct: Is America No Longer a Christian Nation?" (PDF). Retrieved 2011-09-28. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
33. Christin Coyne (2011-09-14). "WallBuilders files libel suit against three". Weatherford Democrat. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
34. "Beck University". Retrieved July 8, 2010.
35. "Angel Awards History". Excellence in Media. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
36. "Angel Awards 2007 Winners". Excellence in Media. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
37. Rediscover God in America Conference March 26, 2011, accessed May 5, 2011
38. Fea, John. "Should Christians Trust David Barton?". Confessing History. Patheos. Retrieved 20 May 2011.
39. Allen, Bob. "Huckabee defends praise for controversial historian". The Baptist Standard. Retrieved 20 May 2011.
40. A man with a message; Self-taught historian's work on church-state issues rouses GOP, Chris Vaughn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 22, 2005
41. ^ Texas Textbook Massacre Architect Backing Grayson Opponent by Ryan Grimm, The Huffington Post, August 26, 2010
42. Boston Theological Institute Newsletter Volume XXXIV, No. 17, Richard V. Pierard, January 25, 2005
43. Rodda, Chris. "Do Well By Doing Good". Retrieved 2011-05-20.
44. Fea, John (2011). Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. p. xxvi. ISBN 0664235042.
45. Hankins, Barry (2002). Uneasy in Babylon. University: University of Alabama Press. p. 128. ISBN 0817311424.
46. David Barton (2010-02-05). "The Role of Pastors and Christians Part Six". David Barton. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
47. Washington, The (2007-01-31). "Inside the Beltway: Faux First". Washington Times. Retrieved 2011-09-28.
48. John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833: a biography based largely on new material, Volume 2
49. ^ Barton, David. "Unconfirmed Quotations". WallBuilders website.
50. Boston, Rob (1996). "Wallbuilders Shoddy Workmanship". Church & State. 49 (7). Americans United for Separation of Church and State: 11–13. Retrieved 2007-07-06. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
51. Thomas Jefferson (1802-01-01). "Letter to the Danbury Baptists". Retrieved 2011-09-28.

External links

• David Barton biography
• Template:Worldcat id
• Ingersoll, Julie (5 May 2011). "Pseudo-Historian David Barton in the Times and on The Daily Show". Religion Dispatches. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Brooks, Joanna (6 May 2011). "Why Won't David Barton Submit to Peer Review?". Religion Dispatches. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Template:Persondata

• Texas Republicans
• Separation of church and state
• Religion and politics
• Living people
• 1954 births
• Category:People from the Dallas – Fort Worth Metroplex
• People from Parker County, Texas
• American Charismatics
• Oral Roberts University alumni
• Aledo High School (Texas) alumni
• Writers from Texas
• American non-fiction writers
• American activists
• Glenn Beck
• Dominionism
• Pseudohistory