King Of the Christocrats
DAVID BARTON believes the Founding Fathers opposed the separation of church and state—and he thinks he has the historical documents to prove it. Is it any wonder he’s the latest darling of evangelical Republicans everywhere?
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And, indeed, Barton called me the next day. He said he was leaving for D.C. later in the week to take a group of pastors on a tour of the U.S. Capitol building—what he called his “spiritual heritage tour”—and to a briefing with elected officials. I asked if I could come along. “Sure, man,” he said. “Call the office and set it up.”
I MET BARTON AND HIS WIFE AT BULLFEATHERS, a homey pub a few blocks from the Capitol complex, at four o’clock, a couple of hours before the tour was due to start. Barton was wearing a snug pair of black Wrangler jeans, boots, and a dark-blue dress shirt with stars and stripes on the sleeves. Unless he is in church, Barton is almost always in this uniform, which he varies with a seemingly endless collection of solid-color heavy cotton dress shirts, each decorated with a different frieze—silhouetted trees, steer skulls, stars—across the chest and biceps.
Barton grew up in Fort Worth. His father, Grady, was a wind tunnel engineer for General Dynamics, the giant defense contractor. (Barton’s grandfather was also an engineer, with several patented inventions to his credit.) His mother, Rose, was a schoolteacher who quit working when he was born. Even as a child, Barton had an unusual aptitude for memorization, his mother told me: “We didn’t need a phone book. We’d just ask David for the number.” In 1968 Grady and Rose moved the family, which included two younger sisters, out to Aledo, then a sleepy ranching town of 400 about fifteen minutes west of Fort Worth (the population is now closer to 1,500). Barton was just about to enter high school, and his parents were worried about the drug abuse they had heard was rampant in the big city. Barton graduated third in his class from tiny Aledo High. (“Top male student,” he clarified, “but third overall.”) He went to Oral Roberts University, the evangelical Christian college in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a math and science scholarship but wound up with a degree in religious education.
Barton was raised in a very religious household. For years, Grady and Rose hosted a regular Bible study group in their home. In college, Barton did some youth pastoring at small churches in Tulsa. In 1978 he incorporated his first ministry, Christian Living. He sold Bible study correspondence courses and traveled with a series of Christian musical groups. After his parents’ Bible study group became a full-blown fundamentalist church, Aledo Christian, and came to incorporate a K—12 school, Barton taught math and science, coached basketball, and eventually served as the school’s principal. In 1990 Barton and his father recruited a slate of candidates and replaced the mayor of Aledo and most of the city council in a single election. The main issue was financial mismanagement, though the new council also pushed through the most restrictive sexually-oriented-business ordinance it could think of, says Knox Ross, who became mayor that year and is now a part-time associate pastor at Aledo Christian.
When I asked Barton how WallBuilders got started, he told me that he’d found himself in the basement of a law library in Tarrant County in the late eighties, where he came upon some dusty boxes full of old copies of Supreme Court decisions dating back to the earliest years of the Republic. Barton lifted them out and began reading them. He noticed that the opinions made frequent references to the writings of James Wilson. “So I said, ‘Who in the heck is James Wilson?’ Well, he’s one of only six guys who signed the Declaration and the Constitution. He is an original justice of the Supreme Court appointed by Washington. He did the first law school in America. I consider that to be a significant individual, and I’ve never heard his name in my life.” Barton searched for and eventually purchased an original three-volume set of Wilson’s writings.
Intrigued, Barton began buying works by other lesser-known Founding Fathers mentioned in Wilson’s work, like Francis Hopkinson and Benjamin Rush. He felt as if he were reading the real American history for the first time. “I saw a whole different view of government. Saw a whole different view of separation of powers. Saw a whole different view of faith and religion and morality in public policy. Saw a whole different view of civil rights.” Barton had learned in school that the founders were not Christians but mostly Deists—believers in an abstract God who took little interest in human affairs. But men like Hopkinson and Webster and Rush—who called himself a Christocrat—seemed to Barton to be more like evangelical Christians. They were men who believed, first and foremost, that America was founded on the principles of Christianity. Upon further research, Barton says, he discovered that these obscure figures were commonly mentioned in our history books until World War II; then they mysteriously disappeared.
Barton reincorporated his nonprofit as WallBuilders and announced a new mission statement for his ministry: “Presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage.” He self-published his first work of history, called The Myth of Separation, in 1989 and followed it up shortly after with a video. He began traveling extensively. By then he and Cheryl had three children. He and his father outfitted a van with a loft-type bed and cabinets, and Cheryl and the kids came along on almost every trip. By the time she was thirteen, Barton’s oldest child, Damaris, who now works at the Texas GOP’s Austin headquarters, had visited all fifty states. If Barton’s hosts paid for the room, the family slept in motels, but more often they slept at the pastor’s house or at the home of a member of the congregation. Da-maris was taken out of school at an early age, and after that Cheryl homeschooled her and her two younger brothers on the road. “We called it van school,” Damaris recalls.
At each of his stops, Barton kept an eye out for historical documents. Eventually, he was buying so much material that professional dealers began contacting him. He now has more than 70,000 items from before 1812 in a special six-sided concrete vault—complete with a gas-powered fire-suppression system—that he had built into the side of a hill at his headquarters in Aledo.
To spend time with Barton is to get a sense of another America, one that has always been around you but that you have never noticed before. Throughout our short talk at Bullfeath-ers, I’d observed a heavyset woman at the next table glancing our way. After Barton had departed to prepare for the tour, she leaned over. “That man looked familiar,” she said. “Is he a minister?”
When I told her it was Barton, she exclaimed with delight. She said she’d seen him on Kenneth Copeland’s TV ministry. “He’s very knowledgeable,” she said.
“Are you a Christian too?” she asked, as I gathered my things to leave.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m a reporter.”
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, Barton led a group of about fifty chipper and chatting pastors into the south entrance of the Capitol. They hailed from a variety of states and faiths, though they were virtually all white. (Barton leads a special version of the tour for black pastors.) About half seemed to be from nondenominational churches, with names like New Life Victory or New Beginnings. One trim middle-aged man introduced himself as an Army chaplain stationed at the Pentagon. As we filed two abreast down a long entryway, I found myself next to an excitable South Carolina pastor in a cheap black trench coat and floppy black fishing cap hiding what appeared to be a self-administered haircut. He paused to drink from a water fountain but immediately spit the water back out. “That’s what Jesus said in Revelation: ‘You’re lukewarm water—I’ll spit you out!’” he exclaimed, laughing like a kid at the zoo.
We ascended a narrow set of spiral stairs, cut from uneven stone and barely wide enough for one person to pass at a time, and assembled under the spectacular dome in the main rotunda, where Barton removed his boots and stepped up on a bench to better address his audience. He was still wearing his black jeans, but he had changed into a black dress shirt with red and white bands across the biceps. The effect was vaguely military. Like all of Barton’s presentations, this one was delivered by rote; he has been giving this same tour a few times a year since the late nineties, usually to groups of pastors such as this one. He also sells a popular video version of the tour and a self-guided tour booklet. To make the video, Barton could get access to the Capitol only after hours, and he shot the majority of it in a single coffee-fueled all-night session.
Barton began with a lecture on the large oil paintings on the walls of the rotunda. It soon became clear that I was in for a longer version of the same presentation I had heard in Carrollton. He swung an arm over his head, encompassing the whole of the Capitol. “I’ve heard it called ‘the great secular temple of America,’” he said. “In these paintings you have two prayer meetings and a baptism. Not bad for a secular building.” From there we headed toward the Old Senate Chamber. Barton pointed out his favorite historical figures along the way, such as the statue of the redcoat-fighting pastor John Muhlenberg. Roughly one quarter of all the statues in the Capitol, Barton informed us, were ministers.
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