Barton alternatives

I’ve been following the furor surrounding David Barton’s Thomas Jefferson book for several months now, mostly in a negative light. Today I’d like to take a slightly different approach, looking at how we can apply what Barton’s debacle teaches.

First, what is it that makes Barton so appealing? He focuses on Christianity’s influence on the American founding which has in fact been downplayed in many history texts. And as Christians, we like to hear that. As Breakpoint put it, “He gave us what we wanted.”

But the danger there is what I sometimes refer to as the Elijah complex. In 1 Kings 19, Elijah complains that he is the only faithful prophet left. However, there were over 100 faithful prophets left, and seven thousand others who were still faithful. Elijah had put too much stock on his own importance, and as such, had been led astray.

Likewise, too often Barton is seen as the only faithful historian out there. In a recent online discussion I was involved in, Barton was described by one of his defenders as “the most reliable voice of historical truth” and “one of the few voices for true history out there.” (Barton cultivates this reputation by poisoning the well with regards to any criticisms.)

But, like Elijah’s complaint, the presumption is wrong. There are other historians who pursue the same themes as Barton, and do so in a more accurate manner while still documenting the influence of Christianity on the founding. Barton is neither the sole voice nor the most accurate voice, and those with an interest in Christianity’s influence in the founding would be well served to look to other better sources.

Two that I have found helpful are John Fea and James Hutson.

Fea’s book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, is an excellent introduction to the debate surrounding the founding. Unlike Barton, Fea does not set out to prove any agenda (indeed, he expressly declines to answer the question his book poses). Instead, he considers the evidence and leaves it up to the reader. As a professor of history at Messiah College, Fea has the credentials that Barton lacks (he is quite critical of Barton in several places).

What was especially helpful about Fea’s book was the broader context it presented. Unlike some others, he addressed several different eras in history. As he notes, the first issue regarding the founding is defining it: is it colonization, the Revolution and Declaration, the Constitutional era, or something later? Fea examines the influence of Christianity in each of these eras.

Finally, Fea also explores the individual faith of the prominent founders: orthodox (John Witherspoon, Samuel Adams, and John Jay) unorthodox (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin) and unknown (George Washington).

It is also highly readable. I picked up a copy from the library with the intent to page through it. I ended up reading the entire thing. It is by no means an exhaustive look at any of these eras or individuals, nor is it intended to be. Rather, it serves as an introduction to and attempt to define the debate itself. (Update: John Fea responded to this post.)

The second source is James Hutson’s Religion and the Founding of the American Republic. I was introduced to this book by Dr. Snyder, my history professor at PHC, who has also explored faith in the founding and is both sympathetic to Barton’s thesis and skeptical of his methods. (Snyder, I might add, has his own book on the subject, but I have not had the chance to explore it at this point. He has also blogged about some of the fake or misinterpreted quotes from the founders that frequently appear in evangelical circles.)

James Hutson is a professor of history at both Yale and William and Mary, and is also Chief of the Library's Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. His book, which is more of a coffee table style book than a textbook, not only explores religious influence in the founding but also includes images of the original documents and artwork from the time. Hutson examines both the culture of religion and individual statements and actions of specific founders and influential pastors. He also, which is quite helpful from a contextual perspective, does not limit his topic to mainline Christianity. Instead, his purpose is broader, and he explores topics like camp meetings, Shakers and Quakers, as well as Mormonism.

Both of these book are excellent additions to a library for anyone interested in Barton’s subject matter but disillusioned with Barton. And they are not the only voices either: there are plenty of other authors that have documented this material. I only selected these two because I am familiar with them. Other recommendations are welcome in the comments.

Click here for more book reviews.

The Conservative Bubble

What is wrong with conservative “leaders”?

• Republican senate candidate Todd Akin made bizarrely inaccurate claims about rape. (To his credit, he quickly backtracked. His once-dominant lead in the polls evaporated, but there are some signs that he may be slowly climbing.)

• Doug Wilson, a well-known conservative pastor (especially in the very conservative circles) writes that rape is simply men acting on their authority over women.

• David Barton rewrites history to make Jefferson more orthodox and his today’s scholars more liberal than either actually were or are.

• Michael Pearl and Pat Robertson decry Christians adopting orphans from other countries because they will sexually molest your children and are “weird.”(See Russell Moore’s excellent response to Robertson, which also applies to Pearl.)

• VA State delegate Bob Marshall said that disabled children are God’s punishment for abortion.

These men are all leaders in their circles and are (rightfully or wrongly) looked up to by many. They also all profess to be conservative Christians on the front lines of the culture war. How did these statements happen?

Dennis Prager has a theory:

I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the Left lives in. That is why so many could believe that boys don’t really prefer trains to tea sets or girls dolls to army soldiers. Those who believe such nonsense usually live in an intellectual bubble. They are raised by liberal parents, taught by left-wing teachers from high school through graduate school, watch left-wing MTV and news, listen to liberal NPR, go to movies produced by leftists, etc. Their whole world is left-wing. They don’t watch, listen to, study under, or socialize with conservatives.

Bubbles tend to produce nonsense. When the only people you talk to, read, and socialize with agree with you, it is easy to abandon critical thinking.

And when you are morally right — and those who argue for a right to life of unborn human beings (or human fetuses, if you prefer) are morally and even scientifically right — a bubble can make critical thought even more difficult.

The bubble theory is part of the problem, but not the entire issue. Also in play are gigantic egos. But I think there is something even deeper at play. The problem is the subjugation of everything to a political ideology.

Kenneth Minogue explains ideology as follows:

Ideology refers, as it were, to the negative and positive poles of a dogmatic conviction. Marxists had a true understanding of the world, and therefore whatever contradicted them must be false - that is, ideological, which meant both false and false because reflecting the wrong social location. … Ideology thus exhausts the entire field of truth and error, so long as one judges that one knows, as Marx and his followers thought they did, what the truth is.

* * *

Ideologies, by contrast with political doctrines, claim exclusive truth. They explain not only the world, but the false beliefs of opponents as well. Ideologists possess the long-sought knowledge of how to abolish politics and create the perfect society. … What they  have inevitably done is to institute a reign of truth, in which discussion disappears and nothing else but the ideology is taught in schools, universities, the media, the law courts, and everywhere else.

Rousseau demonstrates a more succinct description of this approach: “So let us begin by dispensing with the facts, for they are not relevant to the question.”

Classical politics is grounded in rational discussion of our common problems and search for the common good. Not that everything is debatable--there certainly are moral truths--but they don’t come from politics. They come, instead, from the natural order and religion; “nature and nature’s God” to quote the Declaration of Independence. Or, there is CS Lewis’ admonishment: “By the natural light he has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is efficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us.”

So often the conservative alternative to a “liberal ideology” is to establish a “conservative ideology” (which results in what Prager calls the conservative bubble). We have liberal politics and conservative politics, liberal histories and conservative histories, liberal media and conservative media, liberal schools and conservative schools, liberal facts and conservative facts. They all combine to create the liberal or conservative ideology, which holds the secret answer to every question and the solution to every problem.

But as Minogue argues, such an approach leaves no room for rational discussion--which is at the heart of true politics. Therefore, he concludes, ideology has the tendency to destroy politics. All that is left are disagreeing opinions. History, politics, truth, and, ultimately, people, are the casualties. (Bart Gingrich’s critique of Barton comes to mind here: “Those of Christian-cultural influence must realize that we their children are not just bullets in the culture war.”) Anyone who disagrees has, by virtue of their disagreement, secretly bought into the agenda of the “other side.” For examples, look no further than the defenses by Wilson and Barton surrogates. There is no common ground where a shared humanity can meet and discuss, and thus, there can be no common good. There is just left “good” or right “good.”

In addition to an element of shared humanity, what is also missing in ideologies--both left and right--is people. I don’t mean that it lacks people to promote, or mimic, or campaign. I mean that ideologies by their very natures reduce people to means to an ideological end, be it communal ownership of property, an efficient market, or a social panacea. Such things are advocated as good for “the people” as a homogenous whole, regardless of how many human beings get in the way. Ideology is dehumanizing.

But politics is about the common good, and by that I mean the common good of people. It is a method by which we can fulfill the second great commandment: the love of neighbor. But there was no love of neighbor in the statements I opened with. There was no love shown to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, the rape victim, the disabled, or the adopted child. They were simply used as means to a political end.

Ideology elevates politics to the status of religion, and by doing so displaces foundational religious tenets such as imago dei and love of neighbor. So I challenge my readers, conservative, liberal, or otherwise--re-examine your “ideologies.” Do they espouse a shared humanity and show a love of neighbor? Or do they reduce people to dehumanized camps? If the latter, I am afraid that your politics has become a false religion and embarrassing statements are the least of your worries.

David Barton v. the internet

I wrote several weeks ago about David Barton’s new book on Thomas Jefferson (which recently beat out Howard Zinn’s Marxist retelling of the American Founding for the title of the “least credible history book in print”). At the time (as I stated) I had not yet read it, but was responding to the reviews of others. Now, however, I have had a chance to look through the book. In addition to standing by my original review, I have two additional observations.
First, there is significant weight to the argument that Barton is responding to straw men. While he claims to be responding to the “twentieth-century practices that now dominate the study of American history and its heroes: Deconstructionism, Poststructuralism, Modernism, Minimalism, and Academic Collectivism.” (xvi), an examination of his footnotes tells a very different story. For chapters 3-7, Barton takes a specific issue, shows what the “experts” say, and then refutes them. The problem is that his experts are largely not historians or academics but websites like secularhumanism.org, modernghana.com, hubpages.org, about.com (one of his favorites), or The Secular Web. Even when engaging with serious academic works, he cites newspaper or blog reviews rather than the original work itself (Chapters 4 & 7). The one book he does cite with frequency to show mainstream Jefferson misconceptions is “Six Historic Americans,” a 1906 book by John Remsburg, an anti-Christian freethinking lecturer. This book, however, barely qualifies as a “twentieth-century” work, cannot be considered mainstream today, and appears to be a revisionist hit-job on the founders.

The most telling example of this straw-man argument is Barton’s response to Alan Pell Crawford, who stated that “No Jefferson scholar to my knowledge has ever concluded that Jefferson was an ‘atheist,’ as Mr. Barton suggests.” Barton replies:

[B]y this claim, Crawford proves that he has not even read the book he is critiquing, for I begin each chapter with a list of documented quotations from modern writers and scholars repeating a particular lie about Jefferson, and I certainly did that in this chapter as well. But Crawford, like Throckmorton and Coulter, says “to my knowledge,” thus again limiting historical truth to his own personal experience rather than to objective documents and facts.

I have read the book. Barton’s proof that Jefferson is regarded as an atheist, which he trumpets so loudly, consists of:

• A blog review of a Joseph Ellis book for the proposition that “Jefferson hated religion.”
• An unattributed quote from the website cloudyminds.co for the proposition that Jefferson was a deist. (Note: Barton’s url doesn’t work, but I found the blog post published at a different url.)
• A personal Comcast website for the proposition that “Jefferson hated organized religion.”
• A facebook interview by an organization called “pagan + politics” with Michael Weinstein for the proposition that Jefferson was “very likely” an “atheist.”
• John E. Remsburg (discussed above) for the proposition that Jefferson was “not a Christian, but a Freethinker.”

That is the entirety of Barton’s authority for his claim that modern academia has painted Jefferson an atheist, presented in order and without omission. None of those sources are mainstream historians or academics, and only one mentions atheism (two if one accepts Barton’s argument that freethinking is premised on atheism). Barton does not engage with serious historical writing; instead, he scours the internet for inflammatory blog posts and paints them as representative of the whole of liberal academia. This is not a proper approach to either history or research.

Furthermore, despite decrying the modern tendency of “writers and scholars quote each other and those from their peer group rather than consult original sources” (p. xxii), Barton has made this exact error in his review of the Jefferson “Bible.” Instead of consulting the original, he cited Charles Sanford’s 1984 book The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson for the proposition that Jefferson did not exclude all the miracles from his edited bible (p. 73). However, although the cited book does include that information, it is not an accurate reflection of the original Jefferson documents, which show that Jefferson did omit the miracles (as you can see for yourself)

Second, Barton has fallen into the “Minimalist” error he accuses his opponents of committing. He writes in the Introduction that:

Our modern culture insists on easy answers, but the life of Jefferson does not accommodate that demand. He was an extremely complicated individual, not a man to be flippantly stereotyped or compartmentalized. In fact, he was probably much more complex than most other historic individuals from the same era. But many who write about him today try to conform him to a preshaped, preconceived, simplistic mold into which he does not fit. The image of Thomas Jefferson as presented by one modern writer will therefore often completely contradict the image presented by another, because each writer attempted to squeeze Jefferson into his or her own Minimalistic perception. (p. xxi-xxii)

However, Barton then proceeds for the next 200+ pages to make this very error. The book is full of overly broad categorical statements such as “While Jefferson truly was a complex person, he was not confusing, obfuscating, or disingenuous. He was straightforward and truthful on the topics he addressed.” (p. 166), “Jefferson was not only unassuming and humble but he was also good-natured, and his manners never deserted him—even to those who opposed him” (p. 211), and “Jefferson’s record of including, advocating, and promoting religious activities and expressions in public is strong, clear, and consistent” (p. 139).

Barton is right that Jefferson was complicated. But that complexity must be taken into account in his defense, rather than simply brushed away. Jefferson’s actions and ideals did not always act in harmony. Jefferson in particular had a significant blind spot in this area, which meant he thought he was being consistent when he wasn’t. (He does, however, appear to have taken in Barton.) Jefferson could engage in vicious political attacks while simultaneously calling for civility and trying to appear above the fray; he could call for using the navy against the Barbary pirates while simultaneously disapproving the building of said navy because of his fears of a standing army; and most notably, he could decry the evils of slavery while personally owning slaves. (Contrary to Barton’s assertion, Virginia law did not prohibit the freeing of slaves and Barton used cleverly placed ellipses to imply that it did.) As a result, it is easy to cherry-pick from Jefferson’s character, writings, or actions. But determining what Jefferson really thought about any given topic therefore involves much more than simply finding a quote or anecdote to support a claim. It involves a thorough examination of Jefferson’s life and works, as well as evidence of Jefferson's contrary thoughts or actions. I know Barton would agree with this—he said as much. Unfortunately, as with his hero, there is a significant disconnect between Barton’s rhetoric and his actions.

In sum, The Jefferson Lies is a very aptly named book. Just not for the reasons the author intended.

Historical Revisionists Strike Again

One thing I hope our readers know is that although conservative, I do my best to remain intellectually honest and not give free passes to my political allies. If anything, I’m actually stricter towards those I agree with. I greatly dislike finding out I was mislead.

So I’m calling foul on David Barton.

He has a new book out on Thomas Jefferson entitled The Jefferson Lies. (Which I have ordered from my library to look through and possibly review. However, I am not linking it because this is not an endorsement.)

According to the book description, this work is supposed to “correct the distorted image of a once-beloved founding father, Thomas Jefferson.”

Through Jefferson's own words and the eyewitness testimony of contemporaries, Barton repaints a portrait of the man from Monticello as a visionary, an innovator, a man who revered Jesus, a classical Renaissance man―and a man whose pioneering stand for liberty and God-given inalienable rights fostered a better world for this nation and its posterity. For America, the time to remember these truths again is now.

“A man who revered Jesus.” How does that square with Jefferson’s famous bible? Barton explains on his website: “What Jefferson did was to take the ‘red letter’ portions of the New Testament and publish these teachings in order to introduce the Indians to Christian morality.”

Christian morality maybe, but certainly not Christianity. Even if the part about evangelizing the Indians is true (and it’s historically dubious), Jefferson’s bible is certainly not merely a simplified edition. In a letter to Adams, Jefferson described it as a fixing of the historical record:

We must reduce our volume to the simple Evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphiboligisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dung-hill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages.

You can read the result for yourself. As it shows, the "amphiboligisms" "misconceptions" “dicta” and "dung-hill" cut out by Jefferson include all the miracles as well as the resurrection, reducing the gospels to a mere "code of morals." If Barton thinks that’s orthodox Christianity, he fails not only as a historian, but also as a theologian (ironically, his background is theology, not history, and we already knew he had difficulty distinguishing between Christianity and Mormonism.)

A review in the Wall Street Journal nails this point exactly:

Jefferson was "pro-Christian and pro-Jesus," [Barton] says, although he concedes that the president did have a few qualms about "specific Christian doctrines." The doctrines Jefferson rejected—the divinity of Christ, the Resurrection, the Trinity—are what place him in the camp of the deists and Unitarians in the first place. It was Jefferson's difficulty with these doctrines that persuaded his close friends Benjamin Rush and Joseph Priestley that Jefferson's skepticism went beyond anything even these latitudinarian believers could endorse.

I don’t dispute that Jefferson was a very influential founder, or that he made immense contributions to the nation (although he was also a mass of contradictions). But to claim him as a devout evangelical Christian is to make Christianity subservient to political ideology. It is no different than the often complained about practice of liberals claiming Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, or Abraham Lincoln was homosexual. With claims such as these Barton has crossed a line that no Christian or historian should cross. He has redefined orthodox Christianity to exclude the divinity of Christ, and he has rewritten history to serve his political ends. Barton has done to Jefferson what Jefferson did to Christ - rewrote history to exclude the inconvenient parts and then justified it by claiming to “fix” the record.

The word for that is propaganda.

Update: here are my additional thoughts after exploring the book itself.