Category: david barton

World Magazine on the David Barton Controversy

Subtitled, “Christian critics challenge WallBuilders president on America’s founders,” this World Magazine article by Thomas Kidd (Baylor University) opens the door on a controversy that has been building for the past several months.

Several weeks ago, Jay Richards, Fellow at the Discovery Institute, began a process of asking conservative professors to read our book along with Barton’s materials. Kidd explains

Jay W. Richards, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and author with James Robison ofIndivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late, spoke alongside Barton at Christian conferences as recently as last month. Richards says in recent months he has grown increasingly troubled about Barton’s writings, so he asked 10 conservative Christian professors to assess Barton’s work.

I am not going to give any additional quotes because I want you to go read the entire piece at World.

Tomorrow, look for another major media segment on this topic. I will have it here as soon as it comes out.

David Barton’s Capitol Tour: Did Thomas Jefferson Spend Federal Funds to Evangelize the Kaskaskia Indians?

This week, Michael Coulter and I are going to present a series of reactions to an eight minute YouTube video of David Barton’s Capitol Tour. Sponsored by the Family Research Council, the video provides narration from Barton speaking in the Rotunda of the Capitol. First, I am going to revisit Barton’s fable about Jefferson and the Kaskaskia Indians. I wrote about the Kaskaskia treaty last year and we cover it in our book Getting Jefferson Right.  In his book The Jefferson Lies, Barton uses the Kaskaskia story as evidence that Jefferson supported missionary work to Indians. Barton also points to the Kaskaskia treaty as an indication that Jefferson supported government sponsored religious activities. Here is the video (this version has 3.7 million views):

In his Capitol tour, Barton makes a little different claim about the Kaskaskia treaty than he does in The Jefferson Lies. On the tour at 6:45, Barton says:

Most people have no clue that Thomas Jefferson in 1803 negotiated a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians in which Jefferson put federal funds to pay for missionaries to go evangelize the Indians and gave federal funds so that after they were converted we’d build them a church in which they could worship.

One reason people have no clue about this story is that it didn’t happen that way.

Continue reading “David Barton’s Capitol Tour: Did Thomas Jefferson Spend Federal Funds to Evangelize the Kaskaskia Indians?”

Quick note on Jefferson and adolescence

Yesterday, on his Wallbuilders Live program, David Barton called adolescence a “progressive, liberal phenomenon.” He also said there was no adolescence during the founding era.

The term adolescence is derived from the Latin adolesco which means to grow up and mature. The concept and the term itself are not modern creations, although each age and culture develops different norms for teens.

Thomas Jefferson’s father died when Jefferson was 14. Did he identify that time of his life as in some way different than adulthood? He certainly appeared to in his 1808 letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. In that letter, he spoke of that time in his life, and noted characteristics of adolescence.

When I recollect that at 14, the whole care & direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a relation or friend qualified to advise or guide me, and recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them & become as worthless to society as they were.

Jefferson recognized that at 14, guidance of an adult was needed. He then credited his mentors, Randolph, Wythe and Small, for helping get through those times by their examples. And why did he need their example?

Knowing the even and dignified line they pursued, I could never doubt for a moment which of two courses would be in character for them. Whereas, seeking the same object through a process of moral reasoning, & with the jaundiced eye of youth, I should often have erred.

Curses on that “jaundiced eye of youth!” Jefferson recognized a formative period, call it youth or adolescence. His plans for public education took into account the intellectual and physical changes associated with youth and adolescence. Unless Barton would like now to  reverse course and consider Jefferson liberal and progressive, I can’t understand the point of taking on adolescence as some kind of liberal invention.

 

David Barton: Preparing for the “progressive, liberal phenomenon”

On Wallbuilders Live today (via RightWingWatch), we get this nugget of wisdom from David Barton:

They [the founders] didn’t know what the word “adolescent” meant. And, by the way, I checked with Rabbi [Daniel] Lapin, he says that is not a word that appears in Hebrew because it’s not in the mind of God. God wasn’t into adolescence, He was in to having you become productive, having you be fruitful, having your produce and so that’s why there was no adolescence in the Founding Era; that’s a modern phenomenon, that’s a progressive liberal phenomenon is adolescence.

This will come as startling news to James Dobson, who wrote “Preparing for Adolescence.” He will have to rename his book: Preparing for the Progressive, Liberal Phenomenon.”

I always thought puberty dealt teens a hormonal deck of cards that was something different than childhood and adulthood. Now that you think of it, hormones probably are liberal.

Aristotle once said, “Youth are heated by nature as drunken men by wine.” Democrat!

Did he just say that God’s mind is limited to Hebrew?

 

 

August 1 – Robert Carter Appreciation Day

On August 1, 1791, Robert Carter wrote a deed of emancipation for 452 of his slaves. Although no slaves were freed that day, he set in motion the largest emancipation in the United States until the Civil War. Carter finished the six page document on August 1, and then filed it in the Northumberland Courthouse on September 5, 1791. You can read “the first day of August” in the oval below.

Carter was moved to consider freedom for his slaves after a move toward first the Baptist faith and then Swendenborgianism. He was a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson, although there is no evidence that they ever communicated about Carter’s act of emancipation.

Today, a group of ministers is meeting in Cincinnati to attempt to hold Thomas Nelson publishers accountable for printing a book that whitewashed the record of Thomas Jefferson on slavery. When David Barton declares in The Jefferson Lies that Jefferson was unable to free his slaves due to Virginia law, Barton obscures the virtue of men like Carter who went against the resistance of other slave owners who talked about liberty but didn’t provide it for all. Carter and other emancipation minded people in Virginia took steps against their own interests to do what was right. These stories need to be celebrated and remembered, not hidden due to misguided reverence for the founders.

Wallbuilder’s slogan is “presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage.” In my view, Robert Carter’s deed of emancipation is forgotten history and Carter is a forgotten hero.

For more on Carter click here, here, and (especially) here.