Brad Hart has an excellent debunking of a David Barton video. As usual, Barton delivers a speech full of lies, half-truths and distortions and Brad catches most of them. I especially love Barton’s claim that American universities are teaching that none of the founding fathers believed in God. I’d love to hear just a single example of a history professor at any American university teaching such a thing. If they are, I’ll be leading the charge to fire them for gross ignorance of their subject.

Thanks to Jon Rowe for spotting this post at the American Revolution blog. It’s written by Lindsey Shuman, an evangelical Christian and a grad student in history, and it blasts the pseudo-scholarship of David Barton. Jon leaves a comment that is spot on, noting that there are serious evangelical Christian historical scholars out there whose views deserve to be taken seriously – Mark Noll, George Marsden, Gregg Frazer. Barton is little more than the punchline to a joke to anyone with an education.

No, not the frame on Roger Federer’s tennis racket. I’m talking about this ridiculous commentary at the Worldnutdaily by William Federer, a man who rivals David Barton for mendacity and irrationality. Federer is a Christian Nation advocate who peddles the worst kind of tripe to his ignorant followers and here he’s framing every single church/state controversy as one of Christians vs atheists.

Daily there are news reports of atheists offended by prayers at graduations and football games; offended by a Cross or Star of David; offended by Christmas carols or patriotic hymns; offended by Christmas trees and menorahs; offended by the Ten Commandments or “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance; offended a teacher might hint there may be a Creator; offended a soldier said “God bless you” at a funeral; offended the Boy Scout Oath says “Do my duty to God and my country”; or offended by a cross on a Veterans Memorial.

(more…)

Jon Rowe found this item on Ebay, a picture of James Madison selling for nearly $500 by the Christian Heritage Museum. It includes the now-infamous fake quote from James Madison:

“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to The TEN COMMANDMENTS OF GOD”

(more…)

Chris Rodda, my indispensable Talk2Action colleague, has another post revealing false claims by the Christian Nation crowd, this time specifically about the 1797 treaty with Tripoli. This is the treaty negotiated under Washington and signed by John Adams. Article 11 of the treaty begins by saying, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…” This has led to some fanciful attempts to explain that text away by those who wish it wasn’t there.

The first part of Rodda’s examination of this treaty is here. She points out the common arguments used by the Christian nation crowd. They can’t deny that the words are there, of course, so they have to find some way of explaining it away, of claiming that they didn’t really mean it. Sometimes they claim that Article 11 was not found in the Arabic translations of the treaty, the one signed by the Muslim leader of Tripoli.
(more…)

Jon Rowe caught this one. Take a look at this page where Newt Gingrich offers the usual Christian Nation apologetics, including one of the most famous fake quotes from the founding fathers:

Washington’s personal journal provides more evidence of his deep faith:

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe, without the agency of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.

Except Washington never said that. This is one of the many quotes that even David Barton has to admit has never been found. Even funnier that Gingrich even cites a source for it, a source that, of course, does not contain that quote. And here’s the punchline: Gingrich was a history professor before entering politics.

AlterNet has a lengthy story about the gathering in Maryland around the 4th of July to honor Judge Roy Moore. I wrote about this event earlier, noting that they actually used the Confederate flag rather than the American flag on the stage. That speaks volumes, don’t you think? Those who appeared with more spoke volumes as well and much of it is captured in this article. Like Michael Peroutka of the absurdly named Constitution Party:

Setting the nation right, in Peroutka’s view, apparently means a radical dismantling of secular democracy and the creation of a fundamentalist theocracy. Peroutka and his attorney brother, Stephen, operate a Maryland group called the Institute on the Constitution (IOTC), which claims America was founded “as a Constitutional Republic of Sovereign States with a central government of purposely limited powers based on Biblical principles.” The group, which lists U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) on its board of advisors, disseminates reams of material by David Barton, a “Christian nation” activist.

(more…)

Remember James Goswick, the Christian Nation apologist and David Barton disciple I wrote about a couple weeks ago? Well he’s got a post on his blog objecting to the following statement I made about Jefferson, which can be found in this post:

“The Declaration was written by a man who believed in a very different “creator” than Barton. Remember, Jefferson explicitly condemned the Old Testament God as “cruel, capricious, vindictive and unjust” and rejected the notion that Jesus was divine or part of any trinity.”

Goswick responds:
(more…)

A reader sent along an op-ed piece written by Rep. Bill Sali of Idaho, the Congressman who made the absurd comments about how horrible it is that Congress now has a Muslim member and the Senate let a Hindu chaplain offer an opening prayer. That op-ed was in an Idaho newspaper that does not have free access on their webpage, so he sent me the full text, which I will quote below along with responses. He begins:

This nation was founded on the principle of freedom of religion – a principle that I emphatically embrace and have taken an oath to defend. But our nation’s freedom of religion does not mean, as some history revisionists would like us to believe, that our Founding Fathers weren’t religious, nor that they didn’t embrace Christian principles. They most certainly did. The Founders recognized that “it is impossible to rightly govern the without God and the Bible.” It is unfortunate those words, which come directly from George Washington, would be deemed narrow-minded or bigoted if they were spoken today.

(more…)

Chris Rodda has a follow up and more detailed review of Stephen Mansfield’s new book full of historical distortions at Talk2Action. She provides a perfect example of a phenomenon with which anyone involved in this issue, or in the evolution/creationism issue, is quite familiar. It works like a version of the telephone game, where you tell someone something and they tell someone, who tells another, and so forth, until 5 or 10 steps down the line what was being repeated is changed significantly in the retelling. Author A makes a claim. Author B repeats the claim but alters it slightly. Author C repeats the claim of Author B but omits the footnote and alters it slightly again. By the time you’re done, you’ve got an entirely different claim where no one has bothered to check the original source. Here’s the quote from Mansfield’s book that Rodda cites:

(more…)

Some hack named Bryan Fischer has a column at the Worldnutdaily defending Idaho Rep. Bill Sali for his ignorant comments about the Hindu prayer and a Muslim in Congress somehow damaging the country by making God mad. He starts by responding to Sali’s critics…kinda:

Sali has been called everything from a “brainless bigot” to “stark raving mad” to “ugly and dangerous” to “spectacularly stupid,” and he has been compared to a “deranged person shouting at pigeons on a street corner” by hate-filled, vitriolic left-wing bloviators on blogs such as The Carpetbagger Report and Daily Kos.

Certainly the role of religion in American history is worth dialogue and debate. But you’d never know it by listening to the screeching voices of secular fundamentalists, who, in their hatred for all things Christian, don’t want to discuss but only to destroy anyone who would dare defend the historic role of Judeo-Christian values in America’s public life.

(more…)