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DAVID BARTON believes the Founding Fathers opposed the separation of church and state—and he thinks he has the historical documents to prove it.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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It was a low point in Barton’s career. His critics seized on the list as evidence that he was a quack. In a perverse way, however, the “unconfirmed quotes” incident served to demonstrate just how pervasive Barton’s ideas had quietly become. Barton published his retraction ten years ago, yet the fraudulent Madison quote still pops up like a bad penny all over the Internet. (Steven Waldman, the editor in chief of the influential spiritual news Web site Beliefnet and the author of a forthcoming book about religion and the Founding Fathers, told me he was astonished at how often Barton was quoted on the Internet.) I happened to hear the Madison quote again—sung this time—when Barton appeared in May with Chuck Norris on the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Praise the Lord show. During the segment, TBN played a video of a song by a Christian pop singer with a version of the quote in its lyrics. The album, for which Barton had served as a consultant, hit the top of the inspirational charts; a copy of the gold record hangs on the wall at his headquarters.
Barton has since completely overhauled The Myth of Separation, removing the offending quotes and adding many new ones, turning it into a sort of catalog of religious utterances by the Founding Fathers. The book, renamed Original Intent, stretches to 534 pages and includes 1,437 footnotes. In the foreword, he declared war on his critics: “Because the portrayal of history so affects current policy, some groups have found it advantageous to their political agenda to distort historical facts intentionally,” he wrote. “Those particularly adept at this are termed ‘revisionists.’”
Barton is not the first evangelical author to take on this material. Years before he hit pay dirt with his best-selling Left Behind thrillers, Tim LaHaye wrote a book about the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Barton’s contemporaries include Gary DeMar, William J. Federer (whose best-known work is literally a catalog of religious quotes by the founders), John Eidsmoe, and the prolific Stephen McDowell, who sits on the WallBuilders board of directors. All of these writers offer variations on the same theme—what Rob Boston, the assistant communications director of Americans United for Church and State (who has been keeping an eye on Barton for years), calls the “stolen legacy” theory: the idea that the real America, the Christian America, is out there, waiting to be found and restored to all its original glory.
In a broader sense, Barton’s work is reminiscent of nineteenth-century historians like Charles Coffin and Parson Weems, scholars who wrote from an unabashedly Christian perspective at a time when there was no culture of objectivity among historians. Weems was best known for his biography of George Washington, in which he did his best to claim Washington for the Christians, despite his well-known reputation as a Deist. In a brief, credulous treatise called The Bulletproof George Washington, Barton resurrected an old Weems-era tale about the supposed divine protection of Washington during the French and Indian War.
The intellectual underpinnings of Barton’s ideas about the First Amendment are found in the never-ending battle between and among constitutional scholars and Supreme Court justices over the meaning of the establishment clause, which has long been the great Gordian knot in the study of original intent. Barton draws on the arguments of what is commonly referred to as the accommodationist camp, best summarized by then—Chief Justice William Rehnquist in his dissent in the 1985 school prayer case Wallace v. Jaffree. Rehnquist too lamented the pervasiveness of Jefferson’s “wall of separation” metaphor and argued that the original intent of the establishment clause was merely to prevent the federal government from establishing a national religion or favoring one particular sect over another. It did not require the government to remain, in Rehnquist’s words, “strictly neutral between religion and irreligion.” But Barton goes much further than Rehnquist or any modern mainstream constitutional scholar. Barton objects to more than just individual decisions of the Supreme Court; he does not accept the legitimacy of judicial review itself. Nor does he seem to accept the extension of the Bill of Rights to the states.
And what does it really mean to have a government “firmly rooted in biblical principles,” as one of WallBuilders’ mottoes goes? Barton told me repeatedly that he would oppose the establishment of a state religion or direct funding of religious activities. But what does he want? It was a discussion he seemed surprisingly reluctant to have. When I asked him what an ideal state would look like, it occasioned a long pause. He finally described a place where outsiders could not impose their will on cohesive communities and where losers in the democratic process could not simply run off to court and undo the will of the majority. “It’s not that I want prayer back in every school,” he said. “It’s that I want every community to have the right to decide.” Barton quoted Washington to me: “The fundamental principle of our Constitution enjoins that the will of the majority shall prevail.” That is certainly true, but losers in the political process still have rights; part of the genius of our Constitution is how it protects minority interests.
In an ironic way, Barton’s earnest—and frequently convincing—portrayal of the founders as deeply religious undermines his larger point. These were men, after all, who failed to even mention God in the Constitution. If they had wanted to make the United States a Christian republic, they could have done so. Indeed, in many of the colonies the idea of secular government was anathema, as Barton correctly points out. The earliest settlers may have come to America in search of religious freedom, but on these shores they established their own state religions and began lashing, jailing, and excommunicating one another for the same thought crimes they had once been found guilty of.
Beginning in their home state of Virginia, men like Jefferson and Madison led the fight against this combine of government and religion. They were reading the Bible, certainly, but they were also reading the ancient Greeks and the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. They were interested in a wall that worked both ways; through Madison’s careful crafting of the First Amendment, that’s what they got. This is the big picture that Barton’s books deliberately ignore: that the views on religion and government of figures like Benjamin Rush fell into obscurity not because of some conspiracy but because they failed to carry the day.
IN LATE MARCH BARTON AGREED to give me a tour of WallBuilders’ headquarters. Aledo still feels like a small town, despite the encroachment of the Fort Worth suburbs. The Barton family church, Aledo Christian, occupies an old bank building downtown. WallBuilders is in a two-story white building on the edge of town. It is built into the side of a sizable hill, at the end of a gravel road that winds upward from a nearby cul-de-sac of tidy ranch houses past a series of large No Trespassing signs. Barton has a staff of perhaps twenty, and the office was bustling with activity when I visited. A staffer was busy processing a set of nineteenth-century newspapers that had just come by UPS, and Barton combed through them with interest.
The WallBuilders library is located in the rear of the first floor, behind a heavy steel door. It is a large room, with eight tall shelving units full of books on one side and a row of display cases running down the opposite wall. The cases are full of ephemera from the colonial era, a collection roughly the size you might find in a small-town history center in West Texas. Barton seemed exceedingly proud of it. He has also recently developed an interest in black history. (As vice chair of the state GOP, he made minority outreach a priority; his daughter, Damaris, is now in charge of it.) He showed me an original proclamation announcing the end of slavery, which he had just bought from Sotheby’s for $4,500. He occasionally allows kids to visit the vault on field trips, he said, and has for some time considered building a separate museum to house his collection.
As a self-publisher, Barton operates on the margins of the $2-billion-a-year Christian publishing industry. He does not have access to the distribution networks available to, say, Rick Warren (whose Purpose-Driven Life is the best-selling book of hardcover nonfiction of all time, in any genre), which means you won’t find his work in Wal-Mart or Barnes & Noble. Yet Barton claims to have sold millions of copies of his books, filling all of the orders out of the modest warehouse on the ground floor of his Aledo headquarters. (There is no way to verify this claim, but he consulted his bookkeeper in my presence about sales of Original Intent and was told he had sold at least 100,000 copies of the paperback alone.) The WallBuilders catalog is thick, but only half a dozen or so of the books listed are authored by Barton himself. Several are reprints of old texts that are no longer copyrighted, such as The New England Primer and Noah Webster’s Advice to the Young. About half the catalog is devoted to Barton’s spoken-word addresses on audiocassette. WallBuilders also sells historical knickknacks: mouse pads, posters, and other wonderama of the Revolutionary period.
My Library
