Con-ster Profile 1.1 -- David Barton

I bet you didn't know that many of the Founding Fathers were devout evangelical Christians. You probably didn't even realize that James Madison believed that American polis was grounded in the Ten Commandments. You just haven't been paying enough attention to David Barton.

If you want to learn about Barton, a lengthy New York Times profile [1] is a good place to start. Here's the relevant chunk:

Mr. Barton, who is also the vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, is a point man in a growing movement to call attention to the open Christianity of America's great leaders and founding documents. The goal is to reverse what many evangelical Christians claim is a secularist revision of history, to defend displays of religion in public life and to make room for God in public school classrooms.

Their campaign and the liberal resistance have turned even the slightest clues about the souls of the Republic's great leaders — that Washington left church before communion and almost never referred to Jesus, that the famously skeptical Jefferson attended Sunday services in the House of Representatives, or that Lincoln never joined a church at all — into hotly contested turf in the battle over the place of religion in public life. In a sign of his influence, the California and Texas school boards have consulted Mr. Barton on their curriculums. And sympathetic legislators in a dozen states have passed American Heritage Education Acts intended to protect teachers who discuss religion's role in history — measures liberals call unnecessary.

It turns out that much of Barton's history is more creative than accurate. Most of the signers of the Constitution were not very religious at all [2], let alone holy rollers. And James Madison never claimed [3] that the American state was grounded in the Ten Commandments. But why let truth get in the way of a comfortable story?

Barton is not just a sham historian. His work inspired Tom Delay's ill-fated attempt [4] to let Congress impeach judges. Barton also serves (along with Chuck Norris) on the advisory board of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools [5], a group that tries to push a quasi-legal Bible curriculum. [6]

But most of all, Barton is a shill for the Republican party. As reported on Beliefnet, [7] Barton was hired by the Republican National Committee as a political consultant...

...and has been traveling the country for a year, speaking at about 300 RNC-sponsored lunches for local evangelical pastors. During the lunches, he presents a slide show of American monuments, discusses his view of America's Christian heritage — and tells pastors that they are allowed to endorse political candidates from the pulpit.

Barton's organization, WALLBUILDERS [8], is a co-sponsor of the "We Get It" declaration [9], a sly admixture of evangelicalicism and global-warming revisionism.

Over the next few days, I'll investigate the other co-sponsors of the declaration. For tuesday: the innocuous-sounding Institute on Religion & Democracy.