[Jefferson] rejected traditional Christian beliefs such as the deity of Christ and his resurrection from the dead. He did not believe that the Bible was inspired by God. He despised Calvinists of both the Congregational and Presbyterian variety. He supported the French Revolution, an uprising associated in the Federalist mind with atheism and the destruction of organized religion. He opposed established Christianity and called for the separation of church and state. And he believed that Christians were on the wrong side of history…. In the early nineteenth-century, the building of a Christian republic meant opposing Thomas Jefferson. Today, this no longer seems to be the case. In fact, some Christian nationalists believe that Jefferson and his legacy are actually useful in their ongoing argument that the founding fathers of the United States set out to forge a Christian country.
Anyone with even a passing understanding of American history understands that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t a Christian. He was a deist. Along with Thomas Paine and other believers in deism, Jefferson believed that God “created the universe but remains apart from it and permits his creation to administer itself through natural law.” Jefferson’s beliefs did not lend themselves to those who believed then (and those who continue to believe today) that America is a Christian nation blessed by God with a Divine charge to rule the world.
Jefferson didn’t reject Christianity, merely the tenets put forth by organized religion that he felt were used largely to justify its continued existence. He felt the Christian church rejected reason and preyed on those in search of a spiritual anchor in their lives. There’s absolutely nothing in his beliefs or his writings that indicate anything other than his rejection of organized religion as being on the wrong side of history.
That some Christian nationalists are now employing Jefferson’s legacy to further their own self-serving agenda is as cynical as it is laughable…but hardly surprising. Over the course of our history, Christians and their churches have regularly used their power and influence to attempt to interject their agenda into public governance. This is where David Barton, perhaps the single most dishonest historian extant in America today, comes into our story.
Barton’s reinterpretations of American history tend to be little more than deeply Conservative religious propaganda covered with a thin veneer of academic posturing so as to lend his work an air of credibility and gravitas. No historian worth the appellation would take virtually anything Barton claims to be historical fact as either historical or factual…yet most of the Conservative Christian community does just that.
Ironically, the same Thomas Jefferson that admired the Enlightenment views of Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, and Paine…is now celebrated by David Barton, the nation’s most influential Christian nationalist. Barton is a GOP political activist who uses the past to advance his conservative agenda in the present. He is the founder and president of Wallbuilders, an organization based in Aledo, Texas, that is “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built—a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.”
Barton self-assumed role as an “historian,” if he can even actually be referred to as such, revolves around manipulating the legacies of American historical figures to support his theocratic agenda. In 2012, he released The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, which challenges virtually everything held to be convential wisdom about the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. Barton’s creative reinterpretation of Jefferson is a particularly egregious example of his fundamental dishonest interpretation of our country’s history.
As stated earlier, Jefferson was a deist who believe that God created the world and bestowed man with reason in the expectation that mankind would run things. He didn’t reject God, merely conventionally accepted interpretations of things like the deity of Christ and the Bible as the word of God.
Barton’s Jefferson comes off as “more like a 21st century member of the Christian Right than a product of the eighteenth-century world in which he lived.” Among Barton’s claim concerning Jefferson were these gems:
- That he rarely questioned the teachings of orthodox Christianity
- That he rejected the separation of Church and state
- That he didn’t have a child with Sally Hemings
- That he tried to establish a theological professorship at the University of Virginia (the public, non-sectarian university he founded)
- That he founded the Virginia Bible Society
- That he didn’t produce a version of the Gospels that omitted mention of the miracles of Jesus
There’s more- much more- intellectually dishonesty, but I think that’s sufficient to drive home the point that this Jefferson is a historical fiction who exists primarily to support Barton’s ultra-Conservative theocratic agenda.
As you might imagine, Jefferson scholars have been something less than sanguine about a man even Evangelical historians don’t recogize. One church historian said the book should be retitled “Barton’s Lies About Jefferson.”
Barton is the former vice-chair of the Texas Republican Party, the same political organization whose 2004 platform included the line “the United States of America is a Christian nation.” His books and videos about America’s Christian heritage are popular among conservative evangelicals and he speaks on the subject to large audiences, both in person and through his radio and television shows. In 2005 Time named Barton one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America.
The reader should keep in mind that the Texas Republican Party in 2012 approved a platform which, among other things, opposed “the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), [and] critical thinking skills[.]”
That’s the short version; there’s the expected justification and rationalization accompanying it, but the truth is that the Texas GOP is whitewashing their desire to create an educational system that will turn out reliable, obedient Christian soldiers who do what they’re told when they’re told to do it. Though no longer holding a leadership position, Barton’s signature is all over today’s Texas GOP.
It’s surprising how lucrative peddling dishonesty and historical propaganda can be, but Barton has carved a nice little niche for himself amongst the Evangelical community, many of whom are predisposed to believing a version of history that supports their sincerely-held religious beliefs and desire for an American theocracy. The fact that it’s as fantastical as is it fictional is really beside the point.
David Barton has found a way to profit off the truism that a lie can circle the globe before the truth drags its sorry ass out of bed. His business is dishonesty and Christian propaganda…and it appears business is very, very good.
Interesting that very people who feel religious tyranny are the same ones willing to create their own version of the same? Ah…but it isn’t tyranny when you’re the one doing the oppressing, is it??
