David Barton and the US Religious Dimwits

David Barton is a Republican Party activist and a fast-talking, self-promoting, self-taught, self-proclaimed historian who is miseducating millions of Americans about U.S. history.
April 20, 2011 |

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Newt Gingrich promises to seek his advice and counsel for the 2012 presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee calls him America’s greatest historian, says he should be writing the curriculum for American students, and in fact suggested that all Americans should be “forced at gunpoint” to listen to his broadcasts. Michelle Bachmann calls him “a treasure for our nation” and invited him to teach one of her Tea Party Caucus classes on the Constitution for members of Congress. State legislators from around the country invite him to share his “wisdom” with them. Glenn Beck calls him “the most important man in America.” Who is this guy?

This guy is David Barton, a Republican Party activist and a fast-talking, self-promoting, self-taught, self-proclaimed historian who is miseducating millions of Americans about U.S. history and the Constitution.

Barton has been profitably peddling a distorted “Christian nation” version of American history to conservative religious audiences for the past two decades. His books and videos denouncing church-state separation have been repeatedly debunked by respected historians, but that hasn’t kept Barton from becoming a folk hero for many in the Religious Right. His eagerness to help elect Republicans has won him gratitude and support from national as well as state and local GOP leaders. Former senator Sam Brownback, now the governor of Kansas, has said that Barton’s research “provides the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today -- bringing God back into the public square.” Indeed, Time Magazine named him one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelical Christians in 2005.

Barton broadened his audience when Fox News’ Glenn Beck became a fan. Last year, Beck invited Barton to appear regularly on his “Founders’ Fridays” broadcasts, sending Barton’s books up the bestseller lists. And when Beck brought his messianic road show to Washington, D.C. in August 2010, Barton shared the stage with him. At America’s Divine Destiny, the kick-off event on the eve of Beck’s Lincoln Memorial rally, Barton waved copies of old books and sermons and argued that the nation’s founding documents were essentially cribbed from colonial-era sermons.

While Barton is best known for his claims about the religious intentions of the nation’s founders, he has become a full-service pundit for the far-right in Tea Party America. He pushes predictable positions on abortion, gay rights, and the judiciary. But he is also attacking environmentalists working to combat climate change. And he is a key figure for conservative strategists who would love to forge an even stronger political merger between the Tea Party and Religious Right movements between now and the 2012 elections. Barton’s contribution: claiming that a radically limited role for the federal government was God’s idea, and that Jesus and the Bible are opposed to progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, collective bargaining, and “socialist union kind of stuff.”

Why Barton Matters

Barton’s growing visibility and influence with members of Congress and other Republican Party officials is troubling for many reasons: he distorts history and the Constitution for political purposes; he encourages religious divisiveness and unequal treatment for religious minorities; and he feeds a toxic political climate in which one’s political opponents are not just wrong, but evil and anti-God.

Scholars have criticized Barton for presenting facts out of context or in misleading ways, but that hasn’t stopped him from promoting his theories through books, television, and, yes, the textbooks that will teach the next generation of Americans. He promotes conspiracy theories about elites hiding the truth from average Americans in order to undermine the nation from within. Last summer, he declared that liberal and media attacks on the Tea Party were just like attacks on Jesus. In February, Barton spoke at the Connect 2011 Pastors Conference, where he said that Christians needed to control the culture and media so that “guys that have a secular viewpoint cannot survive.” Said Barton, “If the press lacks moral discrimination, it’s because we haven’t been pushing our people to chop that kind of news off.”

Michelle Obama Target of Religious Right

The Religious Right’s Uppity Woman Strategy
Christine Wicker, HuffPost

A core 5 percent to 7 percent of Religious Righters are Republican theocrats, heart and soul. They will vote for McCain, even though they can hardly stomach him; they have no one else to vote for this year. For the McCain campaign the challenge is how to rouse them.
Republicans have been playing the race card every presidential election since Nixon made it his Southern Strategy. It worked then and it has worked ever since. Usually they pair it with fear of crime. They'll do it again.
But this election, the theocrats have a twofer. Michelle Obama. Racism and sexism. What a combination. Although fundamentalists once did a good job of using the Bible to support racism (children of Cain and all), they can't use God to support that kind of bias anymore. Too much backlash.
But they can make a case that God hates uppity women.
They're already working on it.
A professor of Christian theology from Louisville's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the Southern Baptist Convention's flagship seminaries, showed the way at a Texas Bible Church a week ago. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the country and a powerful voice for evangelicals.
One reason men abuse their wives is that women rebel against their husband's God-given authority, said Professor Bruce Ware. Women are sinners who want their own way instead of desiring to submit to their husbands..
"And husbands on their parts, because they're sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged--or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches," Ware said from the pulpit of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas," wrote Rob Allen.
Here is a summation of Professor Ware's 10 reasons that God gave men power over women from Denny R. Burk, an assistant professor of New Testament at Criswell College in Dallas.
1. The order of creation, with the man created first, indicates God's design of male headship in the male/female relationship (Gen 2; 1 Tim 2:13).
2. The means of the woman's creation as "out of" or "from" the man bears testimony also to the headship of the male in the relationship (Gen 2:23; 1 Cor 11:8).
3. While both man and woman are fully the image of God (Gen 1:26-28), yet the woman's humanity as "image of God" is established as she comes from the man. Adam names her "isha" (woman) because she was "taken out of ish (man)" (Gen 2:23; cf. 5:3).
4. The woman was created for the man's sake or to be Adam's helper (Gen 2:18, 20).
5. Man (not woman) was given God's moral commandment in the garden; and woman learned God's moral command from the man (Gen 2:16-17).
6. Man named the woman both before and after the entrance of sin (Gen 2:19-20, 23; 3:20).
7. Satan approached the woman (not the man) in the temptation, usurping God's design of male-headship (Gen 3; 1 Tim 2:14).
8. Although the woman sinned first, God comes to the man first, holding him (not her) primarily responsible for their sin (Gen 3:8-9; Rom 5:12-19; 1 Cor 15:22).
9. The curses on the man and woman indicate the fundamental purposes for which each was created, respectively (Gen 3:16-19).
10. The Trinity's equality and distinction of Persons is mirrored in male-female equality and distinction (1 Cor 11:3).
To anyone not indoctrinated into fundamentalist thinking, Ware's reasoning may seem laughable. But not to Professor Burk. He's impressed that Professor Ware used verses from Genesis and the New Testament.
Sure Jesus brought Good News, but women didn't get released from the curse. No, sir. Not them. Professor Ware showed good Biblical grounding in making that point clear.
Ware's reasoning is weak gruel, but the many quotations from the Bible floating around in it make it good, solid food to a lot of Religious Right evangelicals. Remember Ware isn't some yahoo pontificating during coffee break. He's a respected Biblical scholar, an expert in Christian theology, standing in a pulpit. He'll have plenty of yahoos ready to repeat his reasoning.
You can see how it will play out.
Michelle Obama is nobody's little woman, keeping quiet, searching her husband's face to know what she ought to say, as God intended her to be. So she can't be a godly woman..
As for Barack Obama, there are only two options for a man who doesn't control his wife.
Even the fundamentalists aren't likely to say that Obama beats her. So he must be a wimp.
Who wants a wimp for president?