Tag: Eric Metaxas

On Tolerance for All Denominations and Religions in Colonial America

In his upcoming book If You Can Keep It, Eric Metaxas claims there was “complete tolerance for all denominations and religions” for nearly a century before the founding era of the United States. From page 35 of the book:

On page 70, he adds

Since the Pilgrims came to our shores in 1620, religious freedom and religious tolerance have been the single most important principle of American life.

Such tolerance was not extended to Quakers and other dissenters in the colonies. In 1660, Mary Dyer was hanged in Puritan Massachusetts as a Quaker dissenter. Anne Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts in 1638 and settled in Rhode Island where Roger Williams also settled two years earlier after being banished from Massachusetts.  Persecution and discrimination were the lot of many dissenters from the state church.
Thomas Jefferson did not attribute his ideas about religious freedom to the example of the colonial governments. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson criticized the treatment of dissenters by colonial governments.

Note that Jefferson judged that Puritans showed intolerance toward other sects, most notably the Quakers. They wanted religious freedom for themselves but not for others. Religious tolerance was the exception, not the rule in colonial times, even in Jefferson’s Virginia. Metaxas tells us that religious tolerance was complete; Jefferson said the intolerance matched the level displayed in England. I’ll go with TJ on this one.
Metaxas mentions exceptions to the general religious intolerance but he weaves them in with his contention that the Pilgrims and Puritans gave us the tradition of religious freedom. For instance, Metaxas briefly describes the Flushing Remonstrance and Roger Williams’ settlement in Rhode Island. The Flushing document was a petition to the leader of New Netherland settlement Peter Stuyvesant asking for relief from his ban on Quakers. Metaxas rightly heralds this action. However, Metaxas fails to set it in context. Despite the noble purpose, the petition failed and Stuyvesant cracked down on dissent. He jailed two leaders of the petition effort. Others recanted their dissent in the face of punishment.
Regarding Roger Williams, he was forced out of Massachusetts because he “broached  & divulged diverse, new & dangerous opinions.” Williams had to secretly escape to Rhode Island in January 1636 during the harsh Massachusetts winter. Dissent was not well tolerated. Metaxas does not give us the whole picture. Without banishment due to the intolerance of the dominant Puritans, Williams would not have established religious freedom in Rhode Island.
I can’t understand why writers omit this history. The outline for Metaxas’ book appears to come from Paul Johnson’s 2006 First Things article on the same subject. The cover similar ground and gloss over similar issues. The America given to us by the founders is much closer to Roger Williams’ Rhode Island than John Winthrops’ city on a hill. That is a good thing and a story worth telling and retelling.
 
Additional information:
See my post from yesterday and Gregg Frazer’s review of Metaxas’ book.

In New Book, Eric Metaxas Takes a Page from David Barton

Yesterday, History professor Gregg Frazer posted a very helpful preview of Eric Metaxas’ upcoming book, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty. In this book, it appears that Metaxas has taken some pages from David Barton.

There is a preview of the parts of the book available at Amazon and Google so I was able to check some of what Frazer wrote and look into a couple of additional problems. Given what I found, I would not recommend it unless one plans to fact check it. However, as Frazer notes, fact checking is not easy since Metaxas didn’t include many end notes or source materials.
Given what I read, Frazer is spot on.

One of the more egregious historical errors is the claim that the “very first settlers on American shores” came “precisely” to gain religious freedom, along with the equally false claim that “in America the idea of religious freedom was paramount,” and that there was “a complete tolerance of all denominations and religions” from the beginning (34–35).

These are not minor differences in interpretation. As Frazer says, these claims are false. Even though it may be a common false claim, it is disappointing to see Metaxas perpetuate it.

Thomas Jefferson and Yahweh

Of interest to me is Metaxas’ treatment of Thomas Jefferson. The first issue I checked revealed an error and a significant misrepresentation of Jefferson. Metaxas, like Barton, seems to want his readers to see Jefferson as much more religious than current political leaders. In doing so, he uses a questionable quote attributed to Jefferson to make it appear that Jefferson believed in “Yahweh of the Hebrew Scriptures.”
MetaxasJefferson
Here Metaxas claims that Jefferson wrote Daniel Webster a letter in which Jefferson said: “I have always said, and always will say, that the studious perusal of the [Bible] will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.”

First, Jefferson did not write this in a letter to Webster. The fact checkers at Monticello have looked into this and concluded, “This quotation has not been found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson.”

Actually, in a June 16, 1852 letter to a “professor Pease” Daniel Webster claimed Jefferson told him this quote during Webster’s visit to Monticello. Webster said he “spent a Sabbath with Thomas Jefferson many years ago, at his residence in Virginia.” Webster added that “It was in the month of June and the weather was delightful.” According to Webster, on that Sunday in June, Jefferson uttered the words about the Bible (actually Webster said Jefferson said, “sacred volume”).

There are several problems with this quote. First, Webster visited Monticello from December 14-19, 1824, not in June. The weather was not delightful, as they were delayed in leaving because of bad weather. Webster wanted to leave Monticello early because, according to an account of the trip, he received troubling news about an illness in one of his children. When the weather broke (December 19, 1824 — which was a Sunday morning), they left the area. In the historical account of the visit, Webster made no mention of religious discussions or Jefferson’s quotes about perusing the sacred volume.

Thus, the quote itself is suspicious and Metaxas reports it incorrectly as being written by Jefferson.

There is another problem with Metaxas application of the quote to suggest Jefferson believed in the God of the Old Testament. Jefferson didn’t have very good things to say about the Old Testament. Jefferson wrote that Jesus reformed the deficient religion of the Jews.

His [Jesus’] object was the reformation of some articles in the religion of the Jews, as taught by Moses. That sect had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.

and

Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. (letter to William Short, August 4, 1820)

Jefferson’s view of Yahweh is not well represented by Webster’s questionable quote, but rather by his own words, calling Him “cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”

I am pleased that Gospel Coalition published this review and hope that Metaxas will quickly address the errors and misleading narrative.

Note: The one concern with Frazer’s review is that he says Metaxas’ used a fake quote attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville. Apparently, Frazer had a prepublication copy of the book with the Tocqueville credited with the quote. Sometime prior to the Google preview being posted, the error was rectified because Metaxas acknowledges in the Google copy that the quote is false (although he cites it and says it summarizes Tocqueville well).

Eric Metaxas and the Strange Hitlery Tweet

This so wrong on so many levels:


So many good replies:


Eine dummkopf.
Now Metaxas is up there with those folks who call Trump “Drumpf.”
Then I thought of Mark Noll’s sentence: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”*
*Perhaps Metaxas was attempting a joke. In any case, it was a lame attempt. Given his support for David Barton, it is hard to tell when one can take him seriously.
Update: Now Metaxas says he was joking. Alan Noble (Christ and Pop Culture) provides the appropriate commentary.

David Barton Denies Plagiarism; Eric Metaxas Appears on Wallbuilders Live

It is surprising to me that Eric Metaxas appeared today on Wallbuilders Live.
Rick Green, Tim Barton, and David Barton spent the first few minutes laughing off Barton’s use of Metaxas’ article without attribution on January 23. On the broadcast today, after tearing down my faith, Tim Barton said at 3:28 into the broadcast that the gang made it clear during the January 23 show that Barton was reading from an article. If you listen to the broadcast, (click here for the entire broadcast), you will see that none of the hosts tell the audience that Barton’s “math test” and related quotes came from any article. At about 4:00 into today’s show, Tim Barton said, “we openly acknowledge that we are reading someone’s else’s article.” I listened again to the broadcast and there is no mention of an article by anyone. If they had mentioned Metaxas or even that the material came from an article, there would have been no need for the post.
Listening to Eric Metaxas say (at about 19:00) that David Barton is doing his part to get the truth out is surreal.
At the end of the broadcast, the gang makes light of the number of Facebook likes the Getting Jefferson Right page has. How about another comparison with the now pulled from print The Jefferson Lies? How about comparing the number of favorable reviews from actual historians each book has?

David Barton Plagiarizes Eric Metaxas' WSJ Article on a Fine-Tuned Universe

Without any mention of Eric Metaxas or the Wall Street Journal, David Barton, on his Wallbuilders program today, described the exact illustrations and arguments used by Metaxas in his WSJ article “Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God.” Barton referred to Carl Sagan’s two criteria for planets capable of sustaining life and then he said scientists have discovered that 200 perfect conditions must be met for a planet to have life. Barton refers to the Friday segment as “good news Friday.” In this case, the good news according to Barton and crew is that scientists are now leaning toward intelligent design.
Here is the link to the episode. The discussion of Metaxas’ article comes within the first 10 minutes.

Other than Barton’s embellishments, this is a description of the WSJ article. For instance, at 5:36 Barton tells his co-hosts:

BARTON: Now that they know that there are 200, they’re getting this movement in the scientific community  toward what we call intelligent design. As a matter of fact, the guy who coined the term ‘Big Bang’, are you ready for this? Fred Hoyle, and he’s the astronomer who coined the term ‘Big Bang’ said that his atheism was quote ‘greatly shaken’ unquote at the new developments.
GREEN: Wow!
BARTON: He later wrote that quote ‘a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with the chemistry and biology.  The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming to put this conclusion almost beyond question.’ That’s atheist astronomer.

Metaxas wrote in his WSJ article:

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Barton focused on two main points: one, scientists have discovered that no planets (“bubkis”) are in the habitable zone and two, that there are 200 criteria necessary for earth-like life. Both of these points are disputable. As I noted in a prior post, NASA has identified eight planets in the habitable zone, and Metaxas has not provided a source for his contention about 200 parameters. The one source I know Metaxas pointed to, a research brief by Jay Richards for the Discovery Institute, identified only 22 parameters.


In fact, Richards cautions against identifying a broad number of parameters.

In discussing fine-tuned parameters, one can take either a maximal or a minimal approach.
Those who take the maximal approach seek to create as long a list as possible. For instance, one popular Christian apologist listed thirty-four different parameters in one of his early books, and maintains a growing list, which currently has ninety parameters. He also attaches exact probabilities to various “local” factors.
While a long (and growing) list sporting exact probabilities has rhetorical force, it also has a serious downside: many of the parameters in these lists are probably derived from other, more fundamental parameters, so they’re not really independent. The rate of supernova explosions, for 290 instance, may simply be a function of some basic laws of nature, and not be a separate instance of fine-tuning. If you’re going to legitimately multiply the various parameters to get a low probability, you want to make sure you’re not “double booking,” that is, listing the same factor twice under different descriptions. Otherwise, the resulting probability will be inaccurate. Moreover, in many cases, we simply don’t know the exact probabilities.

“Rhetorical force” is a good description of what Metaxas used in his WSJ article.
This rhetoric made an impression on David Barton who liked it so much, he appropriated it as his own and added some rhetorical force of his own.