Scientists have a 95-100 percent certainty that humans are causing temperatures to rise, and popular evangelical leader David Barton agrees — just not exactly in the way you might think. In a recent sit-down with televangelist Kenneth Copeland, the Texas Republican matter-of-factly reasoned that the U.S. government’s “wicked” policies are causing disastrous floods, out-of-control storms and debilitating drought. Barton said these wicked policies no doubt include the allowance of abortion, or as Copeland called it, the “murderous, bloody crop of child death.”…. “[When] you open the door to killing, it’s got a lot of different manifestations,” Barton said. “When a nation does something bad, it gets a judgment or it gets blessing. … Which is why policies matter. Because if you take a bad policy you get judged for it on the spot, if you take a good policy you get blessed for it on the spot.”
It would be difficult to do justice to the depths of David’s Barton’s lack of integrity and hyper-Christian intellectual dishonesty. Then again, if you can make a career out of spreading lies and disinformation in the name of Jesus Christ…well, everybody deserves to have a niche, right?
Barton, whose relationship with facts and honest, rigorously sourced scholarly efforts can only fairly be described as tenuous at best, has never allowed a lack of factual accuracy to be an impediment to his work. Yes, if the highway to Hell has an express lane, then Barton’s flying down it at 100 MPH. He’ll tell you he’s just doing the Lord’s work, but the only person seeing any benefit from his dissembling and Christian propaganda is Barton himself.
A former vice-chairman of the Texas Republican Party, Barton is a prominent and popular voice among Evangelicals…which only goes to demonstrates that Evangelicals aren’t put off by (and often embrace) willful dishonesty. Barton once published a book in which he claimed that only Christians should be allowed to hold elected office. The reality that America is also populated by large numbers of Jews, Muslims, and those of numerous other faith traditions is something that bothers Barton not a bit…because he doesn’t bother to acknowledge that fact. When you believe that America by rights belong to Conservative Christian White males, you’re willing to overlook a number of inconvenient truths- the least of which is that America is NOT a Christian nation.
America may be a country in which 80% self-identify as Christian, but America is officially a secular nation. Something about the Founding Fathers wanting to prevent religious tyranny, I guess. Of course, Barton believes that Christians should have the keys to the Kingdom, and so he’s more than willing to overlook any fact that doesn’t dovetail with his personal prejudice.
The idea that abortion, or homosexuality, or same-sex marriage, or Liberalism…or the Green Bay Packers…is responsible for the increasing numbers of significant, devastating natural disasters is as dishonest and inaccurate as it is insulting. The idea that God has removed his “hand of protection” from America is something we could expect from intellectual and moral midgets like Pat Robertson or Glenn Beck. Barton, accepted by the Evangelical community as an intellectual stalwart, wouldn’t recognize the teachings of Jesus Christ if He showed up with a tube of AstroGlide, a pair of kneepads, and a tarp.
The Texas Republican Party has long been the playground of hyper-Christian intellectual midgets who refuse to believe anything they can’t find in their Bible…preferably in the Old Testament. That David Barton is held in no small amount of esteem by such zealots is all you need to know about what’s wrong with modern Christianity. When you believe more strongly in homophobia, the denial of both womens’ rights and scientific fact, and anti-intellectualism than you do in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you’re as much a Christian as Scott Roeder. If your flavor of Christianity is heavy on hatred, oppression, and misogyny…well, it’s a pretty good bet that you’re a card-carrying member of the American Taliban and maybe even a Texas Republican.
If David Barton is an intellectual and a man given to honest scholarship, then I’m the Queen of England. Why anyone with even half a brain and the barest shred of human decency would take him seriously and consider him a worthy man of God only serves to illustrate why people like me fear God’s fan club. The politics and religious beliefs of the Religious Right has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ. It’s about power, control, hatred, and fear…not things Jesus ever taught as hallmarks of Christianity.
