It would be like hiring a WWF fighter as a wedding planner, or an arsonist as fire department chief. Or, well, appointing an anti-vaxxer as head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
That’s the logic, if you can call it that, behind the Texas State Board of Education retaining David Barton to serve as “Expert Content Advisor” for the revision of the state’s social studies curriculum. The announcement goes on to tout Barton’s “expertise in American history,” his “commitment to historical accuracy and his passion for teaching the exceptionalism of Texas and America.”
I suppose that anyone can call himself a historian, but Barton’s credentials are, to say the least, rather thin. He holds the bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University. Following his graduation in 1976, he served as a youth pastor and later taught math and science (not history) at a Christian school founded by his parents.
For a time, Barton boasted about having earned the Ph.D., but he was curiously evasive about which school had bestowed the degree. It appears that the school was unaccredited and that Barton did nothing to earn his “doctorate.”
That hasn’t stopped him from peddling himself as a historian.
A favorite of Christian nationalists and the Religious Right, Barton asserts that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, this despite the founders’ explicit rejection of religious establishment in the First Amendment —“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion . . .” — and the language of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion. . . .”
Barton also makes the ridiculous claim that 52 of the nation’s 55 founders were “orthodox” Christians and many were in fact evangelical Christians, a category that presumably includes such champions of orthodoxy as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.
Since leaving the schoolroom, Barton has fashioned an entire career out of disseminating this nonsense. He has published several books, and his book “The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Beliefs You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson” made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list.
Turns out, however, that the lies weren’t Jefferson’s, they were Barton’s. Due to the intrepid work of Warren Throckmorton, emeritus professor at Grove City College, an evangelical school, we now know that Barton not only wrenched quotations out of context, he fabricated entire quotations out of whole cloth to support his claims that Jefferson, despite owning slaves, was a civil rights pioneer and that he never supported the separation of church and state.
Jefferson himself was quite clear on the latter. “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State,” he wrote in his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802.
“Mr. Barton is presenting a Jefferson that modern-day evangelicals could love and identify with,” Throckmorton told NPR. “The problem with that is, it’s not a whole Jefferson; it’s not getting him right.”
Barton’s malpractice was so egregious that his very conservative publisher, Thomas Nelson, withdrew “The Jefferson Lies” from publication in 2012 — despite the fact that it was on the bestseller list.
“When the concerns came in, from multiple people, and that had weight too, we were trying to sort things out,” according to Brian Hampton, Thomas Nelson’s senior vice president and publisher. “Were these matters of opinion? Were they differences of interpretation? But as we got into it, our conclusion was that the criticisms were correct. There were historical details — matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all.”
Yet this is the person, David Barton, who the Texas Board of Education believes should be advising them about American history. Unfortunately, Barton has other fans as well, including House speaker Mike Johnson who declared in 2021 that Barton’s ideas had “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do.”
Getting history right is arguably more important now than ever. The Texas Board of Education would do well to engage with real historians.
Randall Balmer teaches American religious history at Dartmouth College. His latest book is “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.”