david Barton – Page 45 – Warren Throckmorton

David Barton's War on Christian Colleges: Claims Disputed by Focus on the Family Researcher and His Own Book

Last weekend, David Barton continued his war on Christian colleges when he told an audience at Faith Baptist Church in Knightdale, NC that 50% of students at Christian universities deny their faith while in college. Watch:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/PBnk92GoKSQ[/youtube]
At 1:03 into the clip above, Barton said:

I mentioned before that between 60 and 80% of our kids deny their faith at university, you can at least send your kids to a Christian university, cause only 50% of them deny their faith at a Christian university. How does that happen? Because so many of the Christian profs we have get trained by pagan guys who think pagan in the way they go at it.

This isn’t the first time he has said this. As he did this time, he often couples his claim with criticism of Christian college professors. As with many of his other claims, he offers no evidence. Ultimately, in my opinion, this war on Christian colleges has more to do with self-defense than objective truth. Barton’s strongest critiques have come from Christian academics. He cannot claim we are on the left so he has to make up a cover story — in the case of this claim, he apparently thinks it helps him look better if he can convince audiences that Christian college professors only teach what their pagan graduate school professors taught them.
When I researched this claim before, I found nothing to support it. If anything, Christian schools are showing less erosion of faith commitments among their students.
A new wrinkle in Barton’s war on Christian colleges is the fact that the footnotes in his most recent book with George Barna (U-Turn) actually contradict his claim. In that book, Barna and Barton write about loss of faith for people under 30:

Most studies now show that roughly one-third of them [people under 30] have no connection to organized religion—and that their distaste for organized religion is growing steadily.4 Barna, George; Barton, David (2014-10-21). U-Turn: Restoring America to the Strength of its Roots (p. 26). Charisma House. Kindle Edition.

I can find nothing in the book which references Christian colleges.
The footnote about colleges in general goes to several surveys, none of which support Barton’s claims. One study in particular comes from Focus on the Family and suggests that doom and gloom predictions are wrong. Instead, they found that “only 18% of young adults raised with any religion are now unaffliated with a particular faith.” One of the authors of that study, Glenn Stanton, told me that Barton’s claims are actually discounted by current research. About Barton’s claim that 50% of Christian college students lose their faith, Stanton told me in an email:

That number is far too high even for kids at secular schools. No sound research data show anything near that.

Stanton then pointed me to a research brief he prepared for FotF which included some recent research on young people, college attendance, and religiosity. If anything, it is lack of college attendance which is associated with declines in religious participation. From the report:

Is College Corrosive to Faith?

In the last few years, social scientists have “found that the religiously undermining effect of higher education…has disappeared” and that a recent study “using some of the best longitudinal data available has shown that is not those who attend college, but in fact those who do not attend college who are most likely to experience declines” in religious participation and importance. An additional survey of college students found that 2.7 times more students said their faith was strengthened, rather than weakened, through their college experience.

Stanton added in an email:

In fact, the best research shows that all things being equal, young adults are more likely to abandon their faith if they don’t go to college, be it a Christian or secular school.

Sometimes Barton defends himself by telling audiences how many footnotes he has in his books. In this case, he should have read at least this one. David Barton’s war on Christian colleges has nothing to do with Christian colleges and everything to do with David Barton.

Lincoln Memorial University Features David Barton

I can’t understand why any institution would want to do this to their students.
Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN is going feature David Barton in their “Upholding the Constitution” series on April 24. Perhaps LMU is one of the Barton 12 (one of a dozen schools that Barton thinks are correct on the Constitution).
In his speech, perhaps he can find those Bible verses he says are quoted verbatim in the Constitution. Probably the talk should be called “Rewriting the Constitution.”

How David Barton Speaks to 400 Groups per Year

David Barton frequently claims that he speaks to over 400 groups per year. Once he said he spoke to over 600 different groups per year. Given the number of days in a year and his other activities, this seems like a fantastic claim. After reading a document from his defamation lawsuit, I now think I know how he gets to this number.
In 2012, Barton sued two candidates for the Texas Board of Education for defamation, Judy Jennings, and Rebecca Bell-Metereau. The case was settled out of court in late 2014. Jennings and Bell-Metereau said in a campaign video Barton was known for speaking to white supremacist groups. In fact, Barton only spoke to two such groups early in his career and he said he didn’t know about their views at the time. He settled out of court gaining an apology from the defendants.
In Barton’s affidavit, he claimed that the accusations of Jennings and Bell-Metereau hurt his business. To prove it, he called on one of his employees, Tracy Geron, to provide financial information from years 2009-2011. I will deal with Barton’s claims of harm in a future post. For now, I want to focus on the claim of presentations before 400 groups per year.
In the affidavit provided by Geron, a numerical summary of Barton’s activities for years 2009-2011 was provided. See all three years of presentations below:

Notice that the largest single category of presentations is “Radio.” Barton does a taped radio show (ironically called Wallbuilder’s Live) each week day. He appears on most of them. It appears that he is counting his daily show as a group presentation. Doing so pushes the number of “groups” he addresses to over 400. Looking at these lists of presentations, it does not appear that he addresses 400 different groups per year. In this list, Barton even includes the articles he writes as a presentation. By this logic, I spoke to at least 590 groups in 2014 (blog posts), and that doesn’t include my columns in the Daily Beast and elsewhere. If my college lectures and other speaking opportunities are included, I do twice as many presentations as Barton. Does that mean I speak to twice as many groups?
I would really like to know what falls under “other.”
From these data, it doesn’t appear that the 2010 allegations about white supremacy hurt Barton much. He only had two fewer presentations in 2011. As you will see from the pdf of this financial statement, his financials remained strong in 2011 despite his claims to have suffered harm. More on that in a future post.

Happy Birthday Thomas Jefferson

In honor of our third president, I can suggest a worthy gift given to anyone in his name.

Written mostly to debunk David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies, the book stands on its own as an examination of Jefferson’s views on religion, the Bible, and slavery.
Barton spent a lot of time at the Faith Baptist Church telling the audience that the founders all followed Blackstone’s ideas that our government was based on the Bible. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t impressed with that argument as this letter to John Adams shows. Here’s just a bit that sounds like what David Barton would like us to do:

it is not only the sacred volumes they have thus interpolated, gutted, and falsified, but the works of others relating to them, and even the laws of the land. we have a curious instance of one of these pious frauds in the Laws of Alfred. he composed, you know, from the laws of the Heptarchy, a Digest for the government of the United kingdom, and in his preface to that work he tells us expressly the sources from which he drew it, to wit, the laws of Ina, of Offa & Aethelbert, (not naming the Pentateuch.) but his pious Interpolator, very awkwardly, premises to his work four chapters of Exodus (from the 20th to the 23d) as a part of the laws of the land; so that Alfred’s preface is made to stand in the body of the work. our judges too have lent a ready hand to further these frauds, and have been willing to lay the yoke of their own opinions on the necks of others; to extend the coercions of municipal law to the dogmas of their religion, by declaring that these make a part of the law of the land.

David Barton Again Says Bible Teaches HIV Vaccine Won't Be Discovered; Distorts Vaccine Research

David Barton continues to mislead his audiences about HIV research. Earlier this year, he told Charis Bible College students that a vaccine won’t be discovered for HIV because the Bible teaches HIV is the penalty for being gay. Then he misrepresented two separate studies on HIV vaccines to make it appear vaccine research had been halted due to lack of success.
Barton did the same thing again Saturday, April 11th at the Faith Baptist Church in Knightdale, NC. He told the audience the Bible teaches that no HIV vaccine will be found and then he misrepresented two studies so that he could seem right. Watch:

If Barton is right, then why don’t all gays get HIV? And why is HIV a straight disease in countries other than the United States?
What I wrote in early March is still true about Barton’s claims. At about 1:56 into the clip above, Barton shows a headline touting the discovery of a HIV vaccine. Then he says, “six weeks later” another article came out saying the vaccine didn’t work. However, what he doesn’t tell his audience is that he is deceiving them. The first headline was about one study and the second headline was about another study conducted four years later. To Faith Baptist Church, Barton said essentially the same thing as he said at Charis Bible College. What I wrote then about the claims applies to this speech:

…Barton said he might be wrong because of a 2009 article in Popular Science with the headline: “For the First Time Ever, An HIV Vaccine Shows Success in Trial.” This was taken from the New York Times and is a report about the RV 144 vaccine trials, also known as the “Thai Trials” because the six-year study was conducted in Thailand. According to the NIH News, the trials began in 2003 and demonstrated safety and modest effectiveness. Barton implies that this trial was halted; it was not.

In the video, Barton first showed the Popular Science headline and then said:

The headlines came out and said, for the first time ever an HIV vaccine shows success in trial. Oh my gosh, I guess there is, I guess I must have misinterpreted the Bible, cause the Bible’s true, and then six weeks later, they came out with this that says, NIH halts trial of HIV vaccine after it fails to work. The newspaper said it worked but none of the medical evidence said that it worked. So they still don’t have a cure.

The problem with Barton’s presentation is that the second headline didn’t come out “six weeks later.” Rather it came out four years later in 2013 and was about an entirely different attempt to create a vaccine.

The Yahoo News article Barton referred to (the second headline – NIH Halts Trial of HIV Vaccine After it Fails to Work) is only available via Internet Archives and is dated April 26, 2013. The Yahoo article linked to a NIH announcement that the HVTN 505 clinical trial had been halted. The HVTN 505 trial results had nothing to do with the earlier success of RV144. The RV144 trial was reported in 2009, the same year that the HVTN 505 started. The NIH has more on the HVTN 505 trial on the NIH website.

Barton got the time frame wrong and made it appear that the two headlines were related to each other.

Barton’s use of the headlines is extremely deceptive. In fact, progress continues to be made which builds upon the modestly successful vaccine already available. In fact, R144 vaccine does offer protection from HIV infection. An extension of the success of R144 is being conducted in South Africa now.
It is hard to understand how Barton could make this mistake unless he either didn’t read the articles (just relied on the headlines but didn’t read the articles) or he is intentionally misleading people.