Beck University’s Latest Lesson: Don’t Divide Church And State!
It’s Raining Glenn: TPM Braves Week Four Of Beck University | TPM LiveWire
In week four of our ongoing Beck University lecture series, Professor David Barton returned for “Faith 102” — the second of his lectures — and set about trying to prove that church and state are totally meant to be together by debunking the “myth” that many of our founding fathers were “agnostics, atheists, deists.”
When we last saw Barton, he explained that he knows church and state have been apart for a while now, but if they could just give it one more chance he knows they can make it work this time…
And last night, he again tried to show how church and state are perfect for each other by using some strange roundabout logic about how some of our founding fathers liked to go to church.
“We’re told that they’re secular,” Barton said, but this is “revisionist history.”
He began by defining what a founding father is: basically anyone who was “pretty significant in helping us become who we are.” By his count, there are 250 of them, but “people don’t talk about 250 founding fathers,” they only “pick one or two.”
“Look at Franklin. Look at Jefferson,” these crazy people say. They are just showing “the exception, and not the rule.” This is called “deconstruction,” Barton said, and will be hilariously important later.