In a 1990 video titled America’s Godly Heritage, Barton acknowledges that Jefferson assures the Danbury Baptists in his famous letter of January 1, 1802, that language in the First Amendment erects “a wall of separation between Church & State,” in Jefferson’s own words.18 Then Barton goes on to argue that Jefferson meant only to prohibit “the establishing of a single denomination.”19 The First Amendment “never intended to separate Christian principles from government,” he says. The wall, Barton writes, “was originally introduced as, and understood to be, a one-directional wall protecting the church from the government.”20
But Jefferson did not say anything about a one-directional wall. Rob Boston, who has been tracking David Barton since the 1990s, has said, “If Barton would take the time to actually read Jefferson’s letter he would see that he is simply wrong. Jefferson’s letter says nothing about the wall being ‘one directional,’ and certainly does not assert that it was meant to keep ‘Christian principles’ in government. Such sentiments … conflict sharply with our third president’s well known advocacy of church-state separation and religious freedom.”21
By the early 2000s, Barton’s historical inaccuracies were beginning to attract notice, and a number of exposés catalogued the errors and distortions. Author Chris Rodda filled three volumes with Barton’s crimes against history under the title Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate View of American History. Yet the adverse coverage did little to stop the Barton juggernaut. If anything, it affirmed his authenticity in the eyes of his followers. In 2012 he released his biggest book yet, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, in which he turns the tables on his critics by supposedly exposing the lies promulgated by those mainstream historians who have characterized Jefferson as a representative of the Enlightenment.
Barton’s demagoguery met with immediate scrutiny. According to National Public Radio, “We looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible but not one of them checked out.”22 The History News Network soon named The Jefferson Lies “the least credible history book in print.”23 Ironically, among Barton’s most forceful critics were academic historians at evangelical institutions. “David Barton is offering an alternative vision of American history which places God, the providence of God, Christianity, at the center,” said John Fea, then chairman of the history department at Messiah College.24 Two Christian professors at conservative religious colleges, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, rebutted Barton’s claims, eventually publishing a take-down: Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. The controversy deepened as ten conservative Christian professors reviewed the book and identified numerous errors and distortions.25 In August 2012, Barton’s Christian publishing house, Thomas Nelson, halted production of the tome, announcing that they had lost confidence in it.
“There were historical details—matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all,” said Thomas Nelson senior vice president and publisher Brian Hampton.26
At the root of all the controversies over Barton’s work, one inevitably finds the same fundamental falsification of American history. Christian nationalism, by its nature, must deny the extraordinary achievement of America’s founders in creating the world’s first secular republic and replace it with the kind of shabby religious-nationalist mythology that characterizes reactionary movements around the world. Likewise, Bartonian historiography seems to involve a brazen disdain for scholarly norms and the actual facts. But it makes a certain kind of sense: you have to tell lots of little lies to promote one big lie.
But none of that has mattered. Barton’s pseudo-history is too valuable to the Christian nationalist machine to let facts and scholarship get in the way, and his standing with his own audience has continued to soar. For at the heart of Barton’s project is an assault on the very idea of history as a meaningful subject of scholarly investigation and a source of objective truths. Embedded in Barton’s enterprise—and visible in the very title of his magnum opus, The Jefferson Lies—is the message that history is just a political battlefield where the votaries of “the Left” spin their secularizing falsehoods from the comfort of “the Academy,” and the only alternative is to spin better stories from those who believe rightly. As with the many utterances of Donald Trump—“God’s candidate,” according to Barton—the fact that liberal critics find no end of lies and contradictions in his work only serves to confirm in the minds of his followers his authentic commitment to a deeper truth.
On a cool December morning in 2017, the line coils around the corner from the front entrance of the Museum of the Bible. A chatty family from Maryland compares schedules for field hockey practice and dental appointments. A man in a black sweatshirt with a torso-size cross emblazoned on the front studies a brochure. A mom who looks like she has just stepped out of a long car ride herds her children away from the curb and hands out snack bars.
The museum is housed in a repurposed, eight-story, 430,000-square-foot 1922 warehouse building just two blocks from the National Mall. Passing through the huge bronze entrance gates inscribed with text from the Gutenberg Bible, the visitor enters a cathedral-like hall, lined with monumental stone columns from Jerusalem, with colorful LED displays gracing the 140-feet-long and 40-feet-high ceiling.
The museum’s installations include an immersive sound-and-light show designed to convey “the stories of the Bible” through animated films, kinetic sculptures, and fiber-optical representations of the parting of sea. Another exhibit, “Washington Revelations,” literally moves and shakes visitors as it takes them on a virtual helicopter ride through the nation’s capital in search of biblical inscriptions. A restaurant on the sixth floor draws on ingredients and flavors of the Mediterranean and Middle East.
The sound-and-light show may strike some visitors as garish, but it isn’t inaccurate—inasmuch as a well-executed cartoon may be said to represent the contents of the Bible. Which is, of course, one of the puzzles that any visitor to this museum must consider. There is no hint in the animated sequences and fiber-optic oceans that the texts from which the stories are drawn contain inconsistencies and contradictions, that a certain violence must be done to them even to turn them into picture narratives, or that they have been interpreted in radically divergent ways by scholars and religious traditions. It appears that the guiding assumptions in this museum are that the Bible has only one meaning, that this meaning is directly accessible by dint of individual effort, and that this particular meaning is the foundation of the Christian religion (at the very least). These are very Protestant assumptions. But no matter: the museum has attempted to simulate nonsectarianism by mixing in displays of Jewish and Catholic aspects of the history of the Bible. (Islam, on the other hand, shows up sporadically; the various Orthodox Christian traditions are neglected; and you can pretty much forget about the Mormons.)
An exhibit on the translation of the Bible into many languages features videos of groups of colorfully dressed brown people dancing in jubilation. They are presumably there to provide a chorus of affirmation for the museum’s theology in living color.
The artifacts from the Green family’s vast collection—scrolls, stone slabs, religious objects, and so on—fill large sections of the museum, mixed in with nuggets of Scripture printed on purple banners unfurled from the ceiling. Amid the various displays, the visitor comes upon a documentary film presentation, Drive Thru History, that offers a breathless tour through archaeological work on holy sites. The narrator, Dave Stotts, is a well-known personality in Christian nationalist media circles—he also stars in a video series, The Birth of Freedom, that teaches “the biblical roots of liberty” while providing believers with “a resource for countering anti-Christian revisions of history”—and he exudes enthusiasm as he careens around Israel in a series of flashy sports cars. What he does not exude is any sense that the archaeological evidence might contradict the textual claims of the Bible. In this museum the only
purpose of archaeology is to confirm what the Bible has already told us. This museum, like the documentary film, doesn’t proselytize—at least, not overtly. It simply celebrates. Here the Bible is the Forrest Gump of history. Whenever something big is happening, the Bible is there, and it’s always doing good.
The messaging is hardly surprising, when one considers the sources. A glance at the Drive Thru History film credits shows it to be the work of ColdWater Media, which has also created content for conservative activist and policy groups such as Students for Life of America, the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and Focus on the Family. ColdWater Media is also the force behind several American history–themed series of DVDs, including Drive Thru History—“America: Columbus to the Constitution.” The DVDs offer “stories of history, character, faith, and the hand of God in America’s discovery.”27 Dave Stotts stars in that series, too. It appears to cover much of the same ground as a 2006 DVD series also titled, Drive Thru History America: Foundations of Character, also featuring Dave Stotts, produced in collaboration with Focus on the Family and “based on the work of Christian historian David Barton.”28
Where the museum takes on the task of protecting the myth of America’s Christian foundations, the pattern of assertion by omission yields to something closer to outright distortion. In “Washington Revelations,” the aerial hunt for Biblical inscriptions in the nation’s capital, we are taken to the Jefferson Memorial, where the narrator reads from one of the panels: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” This, we are assured, was inspired by Psalm 145 (“the Lord is righteous …”). The camera does not take us to the panel on the other side of the Jefferson Memorial, which honors the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, in support of which Jefferson declared that the mind advances by “reason alone,” without appeal to revelation.
Before you know it, we’re hovering inside the Lincoln Monument, where the narrator repeats the famous hope of the Gettysburg Address, that “government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” We are informed that this phrase comes from a line in Scripture where John tells us that believers in Jesus “shall not perish.” Yet there is no direct evidence that the line as delivered in Gettysburg actually comes from Scripture. The ride designers are presumably unaware that Lincoln might just as easily have picked up the words from his favorite philosopher, Theodore Parker. Widely denounced in his own time as an abolitionist and an “infidel,” Parker asked, in a speech Lincoln read, whether America and its “government of all, by all, and for all” might one day “perish.”
As the visitor reels out of the virtual roller-coaster ride of Washington Revelations, he or she may stumble across a large reproduction of Arnold Friberg’s iconic painting of George Washington kneeling in prayer in the woods of Valley Forge. The caption on the right tells us that the artist took pains to render the general’s uniform true to life. On the left, a little plaque reminds us that the artist made sure the painting was realistic, describing the scene as “an imagined moment of prayer.” Nowhere does the museum take the trouble to inform viewers of the actual provenance of this imaginary scene. It was in fact a fiction, concocted by a reverend forty years after the alleged incident, who claimed to have heard about Washington’s moment of prayer from a man named Isaac, who is also referred to as “John,” and who, it later turned out, was nowhere near Valley Forge in 1777. The story fell apart in 1918 when the National Park Service thought to erect a monument on the alleged spot of the genuflection and conducted an investigation. But in this museum, none of that matters.
It all starts to make more sense, as you leave the museum, when you come across the donor wall. The museum’s sponsors, apart from the Green family and Hobby Lobby, are a roll call of powerhouse funders of the Christian nationalist movement. Amway cofounder Richard DeVos’s family foundation as well as his son Richard Jr., and daughter-in-law, Education Secretary Betsy, all make it on to the wall for gifts in excess of $250,000. At the time of my visit, the roster of the museum’s board extended the list of power players from the Christian right. Board member Bob Hoskins, who has dealings with the Green family at least as far back as 2008, leads a very large and extremely well-funded international ministry, OneHope, dedicated to evangelizing children. The first president of the board, Cary Summers, was also founder of The Nehemiah Group, which works to promote “Biblical” principles of leadership to for-profit and faith-based organizations. Joining them on the board were evangelical mega-pastor Rick Warren and Gregory Baylor, a senior counselor at the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the Green family in the Hobby Lobby case. Green has declared that all board members are asked to sign a statement of faith.
To judge from what David Barton practices rather than what he preaches, history is a means to an end. It is there to be used, not studied or probed. The domination of the American political system by Bible-believing Christians is always the ultimate goal. And so it came to pass that, even as his WallBuilders group manufactured mythologies about the American past, he began to lay the groundwork for his political activism. A key early step was the creation of The Black Robe Regiment, an association of conservative clergy members and “concerned patriots” whose mission is to “restore the American Church in her capacity as the Body of Christ, ambassadors of Christ, moral teacher of America and the World, and overseer of all principalities and governing officials (Rom 13), as was rightfully established long ago.”29
Barton presciently anticipated that the Republican Party would become the principal instrument of the Christian nationalist movement, and he quickly resolved to fashion himself into the vital link between Republican politicians and the nation’s conservative pastors. As WallBuilders grew into a propaganda machine, he began to accumulate positions and influence of an overtly partisan political nature. From 1997 to 2006 he was vice-chair of the Republican Party of Texas and also acted as a political consultant to the Republican National Committee on evangelical outreach. He served as a co-director, along with Newt Gingrich, of Renewing American Leadership, whose leadership also included Jim Garlow and whose mission was “defending and promoting the three pillars of American civilization: freedom, faith and free markets.”30 Barton and Gingrich frequently appeared together to deliver keynote addresses at pastors’ policy briefings in battleground states.
Another one of Barton’s go-to organizations is the American Renewal Project, which is closely aligned with the hyper-conservative policy group the American Family Association and whose briefings bring conservative clergy together with right-wing politicians to foster collaboration on policy initiatives. Every year Barton assembles sympathetic lawmakers for a ProFamily Legislative Network Conference, “an opportunity for conservative pro-family State legislators from across the United States to come together for an insightful briefing session with leading experts in a variety of fields that touch many of the most crucial areas of public service.”31
Barton’s ideas found a warm welcome among Republicans interested in courting the evangelical vote. In 2004 he was hired by the GOP as a consultant, playing a key role in the Republican National Committee’s outreach to members of the clergy. He traveled across the country for a year showing pastors a slideshow promoting his views. His efforts, he told the online magazine Beliefnet, were “below the radar … We worked our tails off to stay out of the news.” The effort proved critical in clinching George W. Bush’s narrow win over John Kerry.32
Barton also hosted pastor gatherings and tours to indoctrinate clergy with the idea that the U.S. was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and that Christians today should “take it back”—mainly by voting for conservative Republicans. The aim of the gatherings was to encourage participants to mobilize their congregations and organize voter registration drives. Kyle Mantyla, a senior fellow with People for the American Way, reported that Sam Brownback appeared on Barton’s radio program and referred to Barton as “one of my big heroes.”33 In 2013, while Brownback was governo
r of Kansas, Barton headlined the prayer breakfast in that state.
Barton soon waded into education policy. He has served as an “expert reviewer” to the Texas State Board of Education in establishing the state’s textbook curriculum standards. In fact, he had such sway with the far-right faction that dominated the Texas State Board of Education that he was permitted to submit his notes and comments separately from a panel of professionally vetted and approved curriculum specialists, and his recommendations were parroted by the far-right faction’s members. (Because Texas is the nation’s largest purchaser of textbooks, publishers have historically written to the Texas standards.) Barton also serves on the advisory board of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a program that produces sectarian “Bible study” classes as for-credit courses in public high schools.
Equally concerning, perhaps, is Barton’s influence on education in the military. Researcher and author Chris Rodda spotted a David Barton essay about the “myth” of church-state separation in a JROTC American history textbook as far back in 2007. “We’re constantly seeing Barton’s brand of revisionist history promoted in places like military base newspapers. Barton’s books are even in the libraries at West Point and Air Force Academy,” she told an interviewer in 2016. “He also speaks at military bases and recently claimed that he was asked to train military leaders, one of his few claims that is unfortunately probably true.”
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