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DAVID BARTON believes the Founding Fathers opposed the separation of church and state—and he thinks he has the historical documents to prove it.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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Barton sells books almost entirely without advertising. He relies instead on spreading the word through his relentless touring schedule and his appearances on Christian or conservative radio and TV programs. Barton’s periodic newsletter, The WallBuilders Report, and his Web site solicit donations and market his many publications. Some of Barton’s followers might be surprised to learn, however, that revenue from the sales of most WallBuilders publications does not go to the nonprofit but to Barton himself. That’s because WallBuilders is actually two entities: a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation called WallBuilders Presentations and a for-profit enterprise called WallBuilders Inc. (A third corporation, Specialty Research Associates, holds the copyrights for his books.) Barton has not sought accreditation for his nonprofit, which takes in more than $1 million per year in donations. When I asked him why he didn’t submit his ledger to a group like the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, Barton said he already hired an external auditor to examine his books every other year. In fact, it’s unlikely that his revenue arrangement would pass muster with the ECFA. Paul Nelson, the former president of the organization, told me that one of the red flags they look for when publishing is involved is whether a nonprofit is being used to promote sales of a book for which the royalty goes directly to the CEO, not back into the nonprofit.
Barton insisted that he did not use funds from the nonprofit to promote his for-profit business. Still, the benefits of associating his book-selling business with the nonprofit are considerable. A typical publisher will spend $15,000 to $20,000 promoting a new title from a mid-list author. This includes money for travel and lodging for a multicity book tour, hiring a publicist to book the author on talk shows, and perhaps a modest Web site. But Barton tours the country continuously at the expense of the nonprofit side of WallBuilders. In a sense, he has been on the world’s longest continuous book tour. It’s a well-funded one; in 2004, under the category of “Presentation/Promotion,” the nonprofit reported spending over $750,000.
It’s not a particularly efficient way to promote books, but it has paid off. Though his lifestyle does not reflect it, Barton’s book sales seem to have made him a wealthy man. He owns the contents of the vault at WallBuilders, which, he says, are worth “pretty well up there in the seven figures.” (Historical artifacts appreciate like antiques.) The board members of the nonprofit, half of whom are members of the Barton family, pay him a salary of roughly $100,000.
Barton told me that he went to great pains to ensure that the revenue and expenses of the two companies were kept separate and that meticulous records were maintained. In fact, the two companies are highly intertwined. Several of Barton’s employees work for both the nonprofit and the for-profit. According to his tax returns, Barton’s nonprofit pays a “user fee” to his for-profit whenever it uses materials owned by the for-profit. Simply by holding up his 1608 edition of the Geneva Bible in Carrollton, for example, Barton earned the for-profit company—in effect, himself—a 10 percent cut of the day’s take. (If he receives no honorarium or “offering” for his appearance, the for-profit collects nothing.) In 2004, the year of the most recent tax returns available, Barton’s for-profit company collected $99,321 from the nonprofit under this arrangement. When I asked Barton why, as president of both companies, he didn’t simply donate the use of the materials to his nonprofit, he said he preferred to deal with the nonprofit as he would any other company, fearing the appearance of “collusion.” “Sharing creates more problems than it solves,” he said. The nonprofit also paid $32,674 in rent and $83,652 for “professional services” to the for-profit in 2004.
WHAT SEEMS TO HAVE OFFENDED Barton most about his critics is their questioning not his competence but his honesty. (“I mean, this is what we do,” Cheryl said, pointing to the stacks of material in the vault. “We’re not trying to fool anybody.”) But honesty has been a problem for Barton over the years and still is. After he issued his “unconfirmed quotes” retraction in 1995, for instance, a group of independent researchers went over The Myth of Separation with a fine-tooth comb and found more than one quote that Barton apparently fabricated through the flagrant misuse of ellipses. (On page 248, for example, Barton pulled this quote from a Supreme Court of New York case called People v. Ruggles: “This [First Amendment] declaration … never meant to withdraw religion … and with it the best sanctions of moral and social obligation from all consideration and notice of the law.” In the unedited version, however, it is abundantly clear that the “declaration” referred to is not the First Amendment, as Barton indicated in brackets, but an article of the New York state constitution.) In the vault, I finally got to take a closer look at a piece of plastic-sheathed parchment Barton had been waving around on the pastors’ tour in D.C., which he claimed was an example of Jefferson signing a document “In the Year of Our Lord Christ.” It was already pretty flimsy evidence that Jefferson was a Christian, but on closer inspection it appeared that Jefferson himself had not even written the words; the document was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a form letter.
Perhaps the most embarrassing gaffe Barton has been accused of is an egregious mischaracterization of Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists. Barton allegedly said that Jefferson referred to the wall of separation between church and state as “one-directional”—that is, it was meant to restrain government from infringing on the church’s domain but not the other way around. There is no such language in the letter. This mistaken quote does not appear on Barton’s list of retractions, however, and when I asked Barton about it, he denied ever having misquoted Jefferson’s letter in any of his publications. He claimed instead that unspecified critics had merely heard him mention the “one-
directional wall” in a speech and that he had in fact been summarizing Jefferson’s general views on the First Amendment, not purporting to paraphrase or quote from the Danbury Letter. In other words, his critics had dishonestly taken his words out of context to make him look bad.
For whatever reason, Barton is not telling the truth. The mistake in question comes from a 1990 version of Barton’s video America’s Godly Heritage. Here are Barton’s exact words from the tape: “On January 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote to that group of Danbury Baptists, and in this letter, he assured them—he said the First Amendment has erected a wall of separation between church and state, he said, but that wall is a one-directional wall. It keeps the government from running the church, but it makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.” In a later version of the video, Barton carefully fixed this mistake, so it’s not something he could have forgotten. He has admitted to making other mistakes, so why not acknowledge this one? It may be that the Danbury gaffe—like his first book, now out of print, in which he claimed that God spoke to him—is something that the new Barton, the Time-approved Barton, can no longer afford.
NONE OF THESE MISSTEPS have done Barton any lasting harm. On the contrary, his legitimacy is growing. In 2003 he published an article in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy—a sober, rather tame survey of Jefferson’s writings about the First Amendment. Also in the works is a new book, to be published by Broadman & Holman, a major Christian publishing house. This would be Barton’s first title that he has not published himself, which means his work will be in bookstores across the country. In recent years, Barton has begun franchising the WallBuilders brand, arranging for other speakers to be booked through his organization for speaking engagements; the fee, or “love offering,” is split. One of these speakers is Ned Ryun, son of Republican congressman Jim Ryun, of Kansas. Barton’s most promising protégé is Rick Green, the former state legislator from Dripping Springs. Green, a self-described acolyte of motivational guru Zig Ziglar, was in the nutritional supplement business before serving a short, ill-fated career in the House. When I took the spiritual heritage tour in March, one of Barton’s assistants was taping his address for the purpose of training Green to host the tour.
Barton is popular because, as critic Rob Boston puts it, he purports to reconcile the Bible with American history, just as the creationists claim to reconcile the Bible with science. If his views reach a larger audience, it’s not difficult to imagine a shift in the nature of the two-hundred-year-old debate about original intent and the First Amendment. After all, William Rehnquist—unlike Barton—never claimed that anyone’s version of history was a hoax. If the separation of church and state really is a “myth,” then, as with the fight over evolution, there is no room for differing opinions or middle ground—one side has to be right and one wrong. The debate seems to be heating up already: There is a slew of new titles on the subject by mainstream historians, many of them written for popular audiences. Why now? When I put that question to Jim Hutson, the head archivist at the Library of Congress, he suggested that history, like biology, has indeed become another front in the culture war. He quoted George Orwell: “He who controls the past controls the future.”
There’s no question that Barton is focused on the future. He recently began teaching at an annual clinic for law students. “That’s eighty-five kids a year that want to be federal judges someday,” he told the pastors in D.C. “God helps the next generation through this one.” It’s hard to imagine him taking on yet another project, but he seemed tirelessly upbeat almost the entire time I was with him. “The Bible says the Lord will come like a thief in the night,” he said. “I don’t know when he’ll come. So I’ll stay busy until he does.”
My Library
