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DAVID BARTON believes the Founding Fathers opposed the separation of church and state—and he thinks he has the historical documents to prove it.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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Very little of the tour seemed to focus on Congress. What Barton really wanted to talk about was the Supreme Court. The founders intended the judiciary to be the weakest of the three branches, he told the pastors—not the powerful policy-making body it is today. The high court, and the federal judiciary in general, is Barton’s particular nemesis. (He is the author of Restraining Judicial Activism, a short how-to guide on impeaching federal judges.) The list of offending cases, from Roe v. Wade to Lawrence v. Texas (which invalidated anti-sodomy laws), is a long one. Barton has taken the tour of the current Supreme Court building, but for him, the real history of the high court is in the basement of the Capitol, in the Old Supreme Court Chamber, where the justices met until 1935.
For 150 years, Barton joked as we descended another narrow flight of stairs, Congress kept the Supreme Court in its place. The old courtroom was indeed modest. On the far side of the square chamber was an elevated row of nine chairs behind a balustrade of dark mahogany. Barton stepped down into a sort of pit with four green-felt-covered tables, while the rest of us lined up in the rear of the room, behind a thick wooden railing. The walls were made of oversized stone blocks, and the vaulted ceiling seemed unusually low, especially in the dimly lit corners. There must have been very little space for spectators; large columns filled up much of the rear portion of the room. The overall feeling was of being in a crypt. Barton leaned casually on one elbow against the railing behind him. He clearly relished this part of the tour.
He surveyed a few of the cases that had been heard in the room but subsequently lost to history. One 1844 case involved the contested will of a man who’d sought to dedicate his entire estate to the city of Philadelphia for the founding of a college, with the sole proviso that no clergyman ever be employed there as a teacher. The man’s family thought it a very unorthodox (not to mention, from their perspective, unremunerative) request, and they hired the great Daniel Webster to have the whole plan declared illegal. Webster’s main argument, Barton explained, was that there could be no school in a Christian nation such as ours in which the Bible was not taught. In the end, despite spending an entire day quoting from the Bible itself, Webster suffered a rare defeat. The will was legal, the justices found, because it didn’t preclude the teaching of the Bible per se; it only stipulated that the Bible would not be taught by an ordained minister. Webster was correct, Justice Joseph Story wrote for the court, in his contention that Christianity could not be excluded from a public education. Story went on to say, as Barton reports in one of his books (but does not mention on the tour), that the court would not waste its time considering whether a public college could be founded “for the propagation of Judaism or Deism or any other form of infidelity. Such a case is not to be presumed to exist in a Christian country.”
Barton paused to let the implications of this case sink in. “You would never recognize the Supreme Court that practiced in this room,” he said. It seemed hard to argue with that assertion.
Barton’s final flourish was an act of civil disobedience. “I always like to close down here with a prayer,” he announced. The room got quiet. After a tour filled with a litany of ways that our culture suppresses public religious expression, the idea of praying out loud—not only inside the Capitol but in the Old Supreme Court Chamber—felt more than a little transgressive. Then Barton, still leaning against the railing, bowed his head slightly and began to sing the opening lines of “God Bless America.” His eyes were cast down toward the historic red carpeting, but otherwise his posture remained unchanged, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to sing at the end of a tour of the Capitol. Barton’s voice was not particularly powerful, but he sang with admirable confidence, and the pastors readily joined in. The acoustics in the room proved to be surprisingly good, and the song’s soft and familiar final notes resonated sweetly in the chamber.
THE PASTORS’ BRIEFING BEGAN promptly at eight the next morning in a well-appointed conference room in the Jefferson Library of Congress Building. Cheryl instructed the pastors to stand and applaud as each new speaker appeared, and the group was kept bouncing up and down all morning as House members and administration officials dropped by, including Tim Goeglin, President Bush’s point man on evangelical matters, and Claude Allen, his recently resigned domestic policy adviser. (It may have been Allen’s last public appearance for a while; he was arrested the next day for a series of thefts from D.C.-area Target stores.) Several of the elected officials who spoke were members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, a relatively new group of around twenty House members who meet regularly in a special room in the Capitol to pray. Barton is working on a Web site to allow people around the country to sign up to pray along with them in five-minute increments, forming what the caucus is calling a 24-hour “wall of prayer around America.”
Many of the issues the pastors heard about are by now quite familiar: the Defense of Marriage Act, anti-abortion legislation of various stripes. A few are more obscure. Republican congressman Walter Jones, of North Carolina, has called on President Bush to nix a proposed requirement that Air Force chaplains offer only nonsectarian prayers—i.e., that they do not mention Jesus. There is also a move afoot to try to rein in “activist” judges by passing legislation removing the jurisdiction of federal courts over certain issues, like stem cell research.
Between visitors, Barton discussed electoral politics with the pastors. He is an avid reader of polls, and he showed them a slide show on the recent decline in evangelical voter participation. I was surprised to hear Barton tell the pastors that they could endorse candidates from the pulpit provided they made clear that they were speaking on their own behalf, not on behalf of the church. I’d heard Barton tell his Carrollton audience this as well. The IRS, however, says exactly the opposite. In response to a request for clarification of the law in the 2004 election season, the IRS issued a public letter warning churches in no uncertain terms that they could lose their tax-exempt status if their leaders made “partisan comments in official organization publications or at official organization functions, including official church publications and functions.”
What made Barton’s comments all the more puzzling is that the night before he had discussed with me the recent case of a pastor who was under investigation by the IRS for allegedly endorsing John Kerry’s presidential candidacy from the pulpit. He had to have known he was advising the pastors to get into trouble with the government.
IN 1995 THE HISTORIAN ROBERT ALLEY attempted to trace the provenance of a quote that Rush Limbaugh had mistakenly attributed to James Madison, in which Madison purportedly called the Ten Commandments the foundation of American civilization. All roads led to David Barton, whose The Myth of Separation attributed the following quote to Madison: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Barton cited two sources for the quote: a 1939 book by Harold K. Lane called Liberty! Cry Liberty! and Frederick Nyneyer’s 1958 book First Principles in Morality and Economics: Neighborly Love and Ricardo’s Law of Association. Alley couldn’t find the quote anywhere in Nyneyer’s book, however, and eventually concluded that Barton had pulled it from an article in a journal with the unlikely title Progressive Calvinism, which, in turn, had attributed it to something called the “1958 calendar of Spiritual Mobilization.” In any case, Alley reported, the editors of Madison’s papers were unable to find anything in his writings that was even remotely similar. “In addition,” they added, “the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison’s views on religion and government, which he expressed time and time again in public and in private.”
Although Harold K. Lane was apparently the source of the original misquote, Alley was particularly hard on Barton, whose work, he argued, went beyond revisionism; it was “anti-historical.” Around this time Barton published a sort of mass retraction—a list of “unconfirmed quotes,” including the disputed Madison quote, that he advised his followers to stop using. A couple were simply mistakes attributable to sloppy work by Barton or his researchers, but most seem to have been drawn from questionable secondary sources, which Barton was unable to verify by turning to his now extensive collection of the founders’ original writings. He further announced that he would henceforth adhere to what he called a “legal standard” in his research: Any mention of the founders’ ideas or words in a secondary source would be considered hearsay evidence. He would go by only what he could find in their original writings.
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