David Barton again

David Barton, you may recall, is the guy who will use any trick in the book to try to prove that the Founding Fathers wanted the USA to be a Christian nation.  He was a favorite on the Glenn Beck TV show.  His historical method mostly consists of out-of-context quotation and misinterpretation of bits of quotes.  He claims to have voluminous primary evidence, but hasn't shown a lot of it to other historians.

In the past, when his work was debunked, his response was to say that the debunkers had a liberal, secular bias, and therefore couldn't be trusted.  But his new book, "The Jefferson Lies" (an unintentionally funny title, in my opinion), the first of his books to be published by a company other that Barton's own WallBuilders, has been unfavorably reviewed by other conservative historians.  There have been enough substantive complaints about the book that the publisher, Thomas Nelson, Inc., has withdrawn it from the stores.

A recent negative review of the book was written by Steven Green who, despite being Director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University (a school founded by Methodist missionaries), will probably not be deemed by Barton and his supporters as conservative enough or religious enough to be trustworthy.  First of all Dr. Green just has too many degrees, and therefore must be a member of the club that won't let David Barton in.  Second, Dr. Green, a Christian, also believes in the separation of church and state.

Green points out that, in the new book, Barton takes a different tack from his previous ones.

Most likely, Barton seeks to reach a mainstream audience with "The Jefferson Lies" unlike the audience of his earlier works, one that lacks a predisposition toward a Christian nationalism perspective.  Not only has Barton's tone moderated, so too have some of his claims.  Unlike his earlier works where Barton characterized separation of church and state  as a false concept that has contributed to the nation's moral decay, he now embraces a modified version of the concept, one that promotes religious values.  It is as if Barton has realized that he can advance his perspective more effectively through stealth and subtlety, rather than through confrontational polemics.

Reading that paragraph, I zeroed in on the words "stealth and subtlety," which I recognize from so many other right-wing intellectual pursuits, including their attempts to cloak religious beliefs as science. When their arguments are debunked, as they always are, they rewrite the same arguments with new terminology.

Again it occurs to me to wonder whether these people have, at some level, a recognition that they are lying in order to convince others of what they believe.  And if so, if the only way to defend their position is by trickery, mustn't what they are defending be false?

In any case, I can imagine David Barton's believers thinking that, in the face of criticism from these unexpected quarters, that the insidious infiltration by the evil forces of liberal secularism must be worse and more widespread than they ever imagined!  My God, they've gotten to the religious conservatives!