Yesterday, on his Wallbuilder’s radio show, David Barton took another swipe at Getting Jefferson Right. More precisely, he said:
The book we recently did on the Jefferson Lies, there’s two professors who came out with a book rebutting it before I’d even released the book! We don’t have to read this stuff, we know it all false.
I know of no other book by two professors which rebuts The Jefferson Lies, so I am pretty sure he is referring to our book. As RightWingWatch blogger Kyle Mantyla points out in his write up of Barton’s show, we announced the May 1st release of our book on May 3rd. Barton’s book was officially released on April 10, 2012.
Stranger still is Barton’s contention that we (including other Christians who have critiques Barton’s writing) are all parroting our secular professors. RightWingWatch has the audio, but here is the relevant portion:
…what’s happened is all these secular guys have been training students that were Christians, but now these Christian kids have been trained with a secular philosophy, they’ve become our professors and they’re just parroting what they heard. It’s not that they went back and check for themselves, they just assumed that their professors were right- they really like their professors, they were nice guys and they were really educated and had three Ph.Ds and they told me all the Founders were atheists. And so now you’ve to Christians repeating exactly what they’ve been taught rather than what truth and what history actually is.
In my case, I took undergraduate history from professors at Cedarville University, a pretty conservative Baptist school. None of my professors there told me that the founders were atheists. Beyond that, I don’t remember much of what they taught, except that the founders were a pretty diverse bunch. In my psychology and counseling graduate training, I don’t think I ever heard anything about the founders.
Mike Coulter is a graduate of Grove City College with his graduate work from the University of Dallas, a pretty conservative Catholic school. We both teach at GCC which is pretty well established as a conservative school, not known for parroting a liberal position.
Mr. Barton, that dog won’t hunt.