Barton Backs Down: ‘Christian Nation’ Advocate Corrects Some of His Bogus Statements About U.S. History
Faux historian David Barton, a “Christian nation” advocate who made a name for himself by peddling pseudo history to gullible Religious Right audiences, has come under fire of late for distorting the truth or flat out making things up. So what’s a bogus scholar to do? In this case, correct some old errors.
Back in 2007, Barton headlined a tour of the U.S. Capitol on behalf of Religious Right advocacy group the Family Research Council (FRC). FRC made a video of that tour, in which Barton made numerous false and misleading claims about the Founding Fathers and the supposed “Christian origins” of the United States.
The video received over 4 million views on YouTube, but that high visibility may have backfired on Barton and the FRC. So outrageous were some of Barton’s claims, that 34 Christian historians and social scientists asked FRC to pull the video from YouTube, said Warren Throckmorton, a professor at Grove City College, a conservative Christian institution in Pennsylvania.
Throckmorton said FRC admitted Barton’s errors, and made the video private. Barton then corrected some of his previous comments by placing new audio in the old video, Throckmorton added.
Barton posted the updated video on his WallBuilders website this week, and because Throckmorton has made it something of a mission to debunk Barton, he compared Barton’s 2007 statements with his newer ones. He concluded that the pseudo scholar has made progress toward the truth, but quite a bit of distortion still remains in Barton’s version of history.