The Great Confrontation of 2012: David Barton and the Evangelical Historians

In August 2012, Thomas Nelson (now part of Harper Collins Christian) pulled David Barton‘s book The Jefferson Lies from publication. This rare move by Thomas Nelson took place in the midst of efforts by several people to confront Barton with his errors. While I cannot tell the whole story (in part because I don’t know it and in part because the main players are not willing to discuss it completely), I can provide a little more insight into the situation. The door was opened to this by a footnote on David Barton’s website and other vague references to a series of meetings that took place in 2012. The footnote is on the page where Barton claims to explain false quotes from his first book. Barton says this:

Although many people, including several respected academics, have told David that they admire his honesty and transparency, others have attempted to use this practice against him. For instance, in a recent critique of David’s work, Professor Gregg Frazer of The Master’s College writes:

“Having been confronted over the use of false quotes, Barton was forced to acknowledge their illegitimacy in some way on his website. There, he describes them as “unconfirmed” – as if there is some doubt about their legitimacy. In a computer age with search capabilities, we know that these quotes are false – the fact that they are listed as “unconfirmed” reflects a stubborn attempt to hold onto them and to suggest to followers that they might be true. That is made worse by the fact that under these “unconfirmed” quotes are paragraphs maintaining that the bogus quote is something that the person might have said.” 2

What an interesting reward for trying to be honest and transparent.

Barton’s claim to be “honest and transparent” requires much more attention, but for the purpose of this post, let me move on to Barton’s description of the source of Gregg Frazer’s words. In the footnote, Barton explains the source of Frazer’s quote:

From a hostile written review of David Barton and WallBuilders written by Gregg Frazer at the request of Jay Richards. That written critique was subsequently passed on to David Barton on August 13, 2012, by the Rev. James Robison, to whom Jay Richards had distributed it. 

After Jay Richards read my book with Michael Coulter, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third Presidenthe asked ten Christian historians to read both The Jefferson Lies, and then our book. Richards wanted to get expert opinions on the facts in each book. He also asked Gregg Frazer to review Barton’s DVD, America’s Godly Heritage (which is still for sale on Barton’s website).

With Frazer’s permission, the complete review of America’s Godly Heritage is now available here.

As is clear from an examination of the paper, Frazer did not look at each one of the quotes in Barton’s first book. He specifically examined the DVD series America’s Godly Heritage. Even though the DVD is still for sale, Frazer found faulty quotes in it.

As Barton says in his footnote, this paper was presented to Barton by James Robison surrounding the time when his book was pulled by Thomas Nelson (August 2012). Robison is an apostolic elder at Gateway Church and host of the television show Life Today. As this footnote reveals, Robison was in on the confrontation as was Richards and the Christian historians. While I don’t know specifics, some met with Barton at his ranch where he rejected their advice and counsel. Furthermore, Barton met with at least one leader at the Family Research Council in August 2o12. In that meeting, Barton’s errors were confronted with promises from Barton to provide corrected material. However, nothing happened on Barton’s end until the Family Research Council was confronted by numerous Christian historians in the Spring of 2013.

Despite numerous clear factual errors, FRC continues to have Barton involved in their presentations to pastors. As Politico documented in 2013 (Sen. Ted Cruz defends Barton in this article), Barton has been accepted back into the good graces of the political arm of the Christian right (e.g., this apologetics conference).

The awareness of Barton’s systematic distortion of the nation’s founding is well known at the highest levels of the Christian political right and yet many such groups continue to promote Barton as an exemplary historian.  Because the Christian right is aware of the problems but continues to feature Barton as an historian, the “great confrontation of 2012” has turned into the “great cover-up of the present.”

Gregg Frazer’s review of America’s Godly Heritage is a devastating critique of this popular DVD program. It has been read by high level decision makers on the Christian right and ignored. I urge readers to read it and pass it around. I intend to give it more attention by focusing on various highlights in upcoming posts. Here is a follow up post on Frazer’s review.

CVV: Searching For A Libertarian Jesus

Gil Harp and Michael Coulter have a thought provoking op-ed out this morning via the Center for Vision and Values titled, “Searching For A Libertarian Jesus.”
In reaction to various unnamed Christian supporters of a minimalist state, Harp and Coulter search for a libertarian Jesus without success. To listen to Christian proponents of the tea party, for instance, one might think governments are incapable of any good. One might think that, but one should not claim Jesus expressly teaches it. Harp and Coulter:

Must Christians—because of the example of Jesus—oppose states enacting sabbatarian laws or limiting access to pornography? How about making drivers wear seatbelts? There might be prudential reasons for opposing such laws, but Jesus’ teaching doesn’t address them. In addition to punishing criminals, governments can use their power to do positive good, such as sometimes using force so that child support is paid by a non-custodial parent. Government can also use its power to discourage some harmful behaviors, such as divorce or public drunkenness. Nothing in Jesus’ teaching explicitly rules out these kinds of state actions. The Gospels do certainly offer ethical principles, such as the Golden Rule, but they don’t provide a blueprint for health insurance regulations or tariff policy.

While I don’t want sabbatarian laws enacted, I think I get the point. The Gospels, and I will add the Bible, don’t offer us detailed economic policies which must be followed as one would follow revealed truth. In much Christian discourse today (e.g., David Barton’s sermons), the Bible is presented as the GOP policy manual with deviation from the political platform treated as grounds for excommunication.
Christian libertarians who want Jesus to be a libertarian have to contend with an inconvenient truth. One the icons of their movement, Ludwig von Mises, didn’t think much of Christianity. Again, Harp and Coulter:

Mises was no fan of Jesus’ economics. He asserted that Jesus’ “teachings had no moral applications to life on earth.” Mises contended that, “Jesus offers no rules for earthly action and struggle; his Kingdom is not of this world. Such rules of conduct as he gives his followers are valid only for the short interval of time which has still to be lived while waiting for the great things to come … In God’s Kingdom the poor shall be rich, but the rich shall be made to suffer.” As for the religion Jesus founded, Mises was convinced that “A living Christianity cannot, it seems, exist side by side with Capitalism.”

Although I wish they would have named names, the article is a good read and I encourage you to check it out.

David Barton Says His Christian Critics Were Recruited By "Secular Guys"

Just when you think you’ve heard it all…
In a video posted November 9, David Barton told an audience at Ohio Christian University that “secular guys” recruited the Christians professors who critiqued The Jefferson Lies.
Watch:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkqogvjeNbA#t=47[/youtube]
Barton claims his Christian critics were recruited by “secular guys.” Of course, this is flatly false, at least in my case and anyone I know. No one recruited Michael Coulter and me to critique Barton’s book. Furthermore, there are dozens of Christian professors who have critiqued Barton’s work simply because it is the right and honest thing to do.
Jay Richards is a Fellow at the Discovery Institute who recruited 10 scholars to read our book and The Jefferson Lies. None of these scholars were recruited by secular people to critique Barton.
Even the Family Research Council recognized flaws in Barton’s presentations and pulled his Capitol Tour video from view. Also, Focus on the Family edited Barton’s talks to remove two major historical errors. Perhaps Barton is going to include FRC and Focus on the Family among those recruited by the unnamed “secular guys.”
If it is true that Barton has an entire chapter devoted to Getting Jefferson Right, I can’t wait to see it.
In the mean time, I wrote to Dave Garrison at Ohio Christian University with a request to allow Michael Coulter and me to come to the school and present our work. If they really want to get at the truth, they will take us up on the offer.
 
 

Taskmaster of the Mountain: Michael Coulter on Henry Wiencek's Master of the Mountain

Michael Coulter is co-author with me of Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President, and professor of political science and humanities at Grove City College. He recently penned this review of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) for a campus publication and gave me permission to reproduce it here.
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It is almost a cliché to say that Thomas Jefferson’s life – both his words and his deeds – is notoriously difficult to comprehend as a coherent whole. This is particularly the case with respect to slavery.  One can easily find passages in his writings that condemn slavery and the slave trade, yet he owned nearly 600 slaves during his lifetime, many of which he bought and sold.  In his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he makes outrageous claims about the limited intellect, sexual appetites and practices, and character of slaves, yet in some letters he praises some blacks and his slaves carried on essential and somewhat complicated commercial tasks on his estate.  He criticized the mixing of races as being an “abomination,” but he lived in close proximity with many who were mixed race; even more problematic, some evidence suggests an intimate relationship with his slave Sally Hemings.  It is this complexity and contradictory character that led historian Joseph Ellis to call his biography of Jefferson: American Sphinx (Vantage, 1998).
In his book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, Henry Wiencek seeks to both complement and correct some of the previous biographies in this work.  Wiencek is an accomplished author and his work places him somewhere between an historian and a journalist, although he seems closer to the latter because of some limited use of notes and his description of his ‘detective work’ to obtain evidence for this book.  In the 1990s he wrote about social life in American history, such works on homes and plantations in the American south.  More recently, he has turned to the intersection of race, politics and culture, and both historians and public intellectuals praised his An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003).
Wiencek takes on another founder in Master of the Mountain, but this work has had a more mixed reception with some critics offering fulsome praise and others troubled by both the prosecutorial tone and the tendentious use of some evidence.   The work itself is, more or less, a narrative account of the relationship that Jefferson had with his slaves as well as what he wrote about slaves and how he treated slavery as policy issue during his time of prominence in Virginia politics.
Wiencek briefly recounts Jefferson as a young man marrying Martha Wayles and beginning life at Monticello in 1772.  Slaves are intertwined in both of their lives as Jefferson had inherited slaves and Martha had six half-siblings who were slaves who were born during her teen years and early 20s.  Slaves were present at Monticello to assist with managing the household and to assist with raising children as Martha was often in poor health.
Wiencek then turns to the text which every writer on Jefferson must examine: Notes on the State of Virginia.  Jefferson wrote this particular text in the 1780s as a response to some questions addressed to Jefferson by a French diplomat.  Wiencek rather strikingly calls the text a “Dismal Swamp,” because it contains some rather embarrassing statements, and not just by today’s standards.  In Notes, Jefferson ruminates on the intellectual inferiority of blacks and even suggests that black women had sexual relations with apes.  There’s nothing particularly new in Wiencek’s account of the Notes, and there may be nothing new to be said about this strange work.  Nevertheless, a work about the Jefferson and slavery should not be written without some discussion of Notes.
The core of the Wiencek’s work and his central argument is an attempt to explain how Jefferson went from being an eloquent critic of slavery – such as his proclamation of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence or his support for the banning of the importation of slaves in the late 18th century – to being an active user and seller of slaves. Wiencek characterizes Jefferson’s antislavery rhetoric as the product of the revolutionary fervor of the 1770s and early 1780s.  Wiencek then argues that Jefferson was moved by financial reasons to support slavery.  Jefferson both inherited debt as well as slaves from his father-in-law and his own efforts at commercial success were limited.  Jefferson, as Wiencek shows through analysis of Jefferson’s Farm Book, was also a spendthrift.  Wiencek sas that “his laborers became harnessed to a virtuous undertaking; they would save him; and their obligation for his debts quieted his moral conflicts.” (p. 71)
As evidence for this hypothesis, Wiencek discusses Jefferson’s selling of around 160 slaves between 1784 and 1794.  It is certainly hard to reconcile someone both denouncing slaves and also selling them.  But even though Jefferson sold slaves, that did not diminish his total number as Jefferson carefully recorded the children his slaves bore.  Wiencek cites a 1792 letter from Jefferson where Jefferson cites the financial gain that can come from slaves bearing children.  Wiencek interprets this letter as a statement about Jefferson’s personal financial interests, but the letter in context seems to be about the general gain from slaves in Virginia having children.  Also offered as support for his financial explanation of Jefferson’s slaveholding is the will of Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish supporter of the American revolution and friend of Jefferson.  Wiencek several times cites Kosciuszko’s will, which made Jefferson the executor and, in at least one of its versions, would have provided money to Jefferson so that he could free his slaves.  Jefferson is presented by Wiencek as simply neglecting these funds so that he could keep his slaves as a means of making money; however, Wiencek does not fully explain the legal issues related to executing this will.  Even if the money were truly available, the legal difficulties with the Kosciuszko’s will could have prevented him from freeing his slaves through this benefaction.
Many of the other works on Jefferson and slavery consider his statements and his political actions, but Wiencek’s contribution to the Jefferson literature is to assemble the evidence about the lives of slaves at Monticello.  Some of this evidence is from contemporaneous materials or later recollections by family members or employees at Monticello.  From these recollections we learn about commercial activities at Monticello in agricultural, blacksmithing, and even nail making.  The workers were not always compliant, which leads Wiencek to characterize the “Monticello machine [as] operat[ing] on carefully calibrated violence.” (p. 113)
Additional evidence for Wiencek is obtained from archaeologists excavating the Monticello grounds. Wiencek says that “Monticello Mountain itself is one huge document” and it is “an earthen text bearing traces of uncountable stories and a past that stubbornly reasserts its mysteries.” (p. 134) Much of this evidence has only been recently available, and, while Wiencek did not dig up the telling artifacts, he certainly assembles the information in a compelling manner.  Herein one learns about the daily lives of the slaves at Monticello and its generally harsh environment, although Wiencek acknowledges that some of Jefferson’s slaves lived as family units, which was not the practice in most of Virginia.
There is much ground covered in the work, but it seems an omission that more attention is not given to the legal environment of slavery in Virginia.  Wiencek cites the 1782 law which permitted manumission of slaves, and there is a brief account of the two slaves Jefferson freed in the 1790s.  Few details are given about the law or its origin and no details are given about the changes to the law governing manumission made in 1806 and then in 1816. Philip Schwarz’s Slave Laws in Virginia (University of Georgia Press, 2010) offers an incredibly detailed account these laws and the response to the legal changes and this work is not even cited by Wiencek.
Despite some shortcomings, Master of the Mountain is still a significant work insofar as it provides much detail about how Jefferson’s slaves lived as well as Jefferson’s relationships with those slaves.  Moving rhetoric about rights and equality are far from enough.  Commitments to moral and philosophical principles may – and often will – require a sacrifice of what is in our self-interest.  Jefferson was not merely stuck with slaves; he made choices to engage in the buying and selling of human beings and to treat harshly those under his care, and for those choices he should be accountable.

Michael Coulter and I will be on a Blaze webcast at 1pm

Here is the link: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/watch-todays-live-blazecast-one-hour-with-david-bartons-harshest-critics/ (The video is now embedded at this link.)

Michael Coulter and I will be guests with Scott Baker and Billy Hallowell on The Blaze webcast today at 1pm. The Blaze is Glenn Beck’s news website. We will be discussing our book Getting Jefferson Right and related matters.

The link to the live broadcast (saved for later viewing also) will be available on front page of The Blaze around 12:30pm. I hope you will tune in and send us some questions through the hour.