Politico has published a new excerpt of a book written by Christian journalist Tim Alberta, and this one focuses on a phony "historian" named David Barton who is spreading false claims about the United States having been founded by a theocracy.
According to Alberta, Barton has been the star lecturer in the American Restoration Tour, which has been urging American Christians to see themselves as the natural masters over all domains of American government, culture, and the media.
Barton is being lionized by many American evangelicals despite the fact that his purported historical writings on Thomas Jefferson have been exposed as utterly fraudulent.
"Barton’s 2012 book on Thomas Jefferson was recalled by Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, for its countless inaccuracies," Alberta notes. "A panel of 10 conservative Christian academics who reviewed Barton’s body of work in the aftermath ripped the entirety of his scholarship to shreds."
None of this matters to Barton's audiences, however, for one simple reason: He's telling them exactly what they want to hear.
In reporting on one particular lecture Barton delivered, Alberta zeroed in on his efforts to convince Christians that the Bible is not meant just to be a spiritual or moral guide, but a literal blueprint for governance.
"Citing the works of several long-since-forgotten clergymen, Barton made the case that every issue Americans face today, from war to welfare to health care to taxation, was preached about in sermons in early America," Alberta writes. "His point was that the Bible is not just a spiritual text, but a governing manual, one that explicitly informed our system of self-rule from the very beginning."
None of this is accurate, of course, as America was founded with what Jefferson famously described as "a wall of separation between church and state."
Alberta's book, titled, THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, is due out on December 5th.
