The Most Influential Evangelist You’ve Never Heard of : NPR
Barton’s claims just keep getting wilder and crazier yet Fox keeps promoting him and GOP politicians keep seeking the blatant liar’s endorsement. At some point you have to just laugh about it, because otherwise the shill’s success at reaping rewards through lying for Jesus while support for science among conservatives ebbs will just depress you. It’s still true that the easiest people to hustle in the world are those who are fundamentally religious and extreme in their views.
Barton has collected 100,000 documents from before 1812 — original or certified copies of letters, sermons, newspaper articles and official documents of the Founding Fathers. He says they prove that the Founding Fathers were deeply religious men who built America on Christian ideas — something you never learn in school.
For example, you’ve been taught the Constitution is a secular document. Not so, says Barton: The Constitution is laced with biblical quotations.
“You look at Article 3, Section 1, the treason clause,” he told James Robison on Trinity Broadcast Network. “Direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim. I mean, it drives the secularists nuts because the Bible’s all over it! Now we as Christians don’t tend to recognize that. We think it’s a secular document; we’ve bought into their lies. It’s not.”
We looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out. Moreover, the Constitution as written in 1787 has no mention of God or religion except to prohibit a religious test for office. The First Amendment does address religion.
What about the idea that the founders did not want government entangled in religion? Wrong again, says Barton. On his tours of the U.S. Capitol, for example, he claims that Congress not only published the first American Bible in 1782, but it also intended the Bible to be used in public schools.
“And we’re going to be told they don’t want any kind of religion in education, they don’t want voluntary prayer?” Barton asks his audience rhetorically? “No, it doesn’t make sense.”
But historians say Barton is flat-out wrong in his facts and conclusion. Congress never published or paid a dime for the 1782 Bible. It was printed and paid for by Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken. At Aitken’s request, Congress agreed to have its chaplains check the Bible for accuracy. It was not, historians say, a government promotion of religion.
