David Barton — Propaganda Masquerading as History

GOP Operative’s Campaign to Reach African-Americans

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In 1987, God reportedly told David Barton, a one-time science teacher at a fundamentalist Christian school that grew out of a church started by his own parents, that he was “to search the library and find the date that prayer had been prohibited in public schools [and] obtain a record of national SAT scores … spanning several decades.”  Predictably, the result of Barton’s unscientific study was to find a “correlation” between the alleged banning of prayer and a decrease in SAT scores, as well as increases in everything from alcohol consumption to crimes rates across the nation. [1]

Since the publication of his book, “America: To Pray Or Not To Pray?,” Barton has been on a mission to uncover “America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built.” [2]   Styling himself a historian and “expert” on the “original intent of our Founding Fathers in the areas of faith and family,”[3] Barton’s skewed “scholarship” on the Christian history of the United States has been widely embraced by right-wing leaders from James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to Senators Bill Frist and Sam Brownback – Sen. Frist once praised Barton for his “detailed research into the religious heritage of our nation”[4] while Sen. Brownback stated that Barton’s “research provides the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today — bringing God back into the public square.”[5]

Barton has also participated in events hosted by the Texas Restoration Project, a right-wing movement affiliated with the “Patriot Pastors” network[6] and, in 2005, was named by Time Magazine as one of the “25 most influential evangelicals in America.”[7]  Despite the fact that his educational background is limited to a “Bachelor of Arts degree from Oral Roberts University and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Pensacola Christian College” [8] in 2004, Barton was tapped by the Republican National Committee to bring his brand of pseudo-history to evangelical pastors around the country[9] as part of the Republican effort to mobilize the Right in support of President Bush.  For his part, Barton has long been waging his own deceptive efforts to generate African American support for the GOP.

Whereas people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson are well-known right-wing figures, Barton operates mostly under the national media’s radar, speaking to small groups of activists all over the country and churning out  an array of resources that provide the pseudo-historical foundation for much of the right-wing agenda on everything from reigning in “judicial activism” and impeaching judges to defending the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and decrying homosexuals in the military.

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Footnotes