David Kirkpatrick: Putting God Back into American History
David Kirkpatrick, in the NYT (2-22-05):
On a recent evening, David Barton, a leading conservative Christian advocate for emphasizing religion in American history, stood barefoot on a bench in the rotunda of the United States Capitol Building with a congressman by his side and about a hundred students from Oral Roberts University at his feet.
"Isn't it interesting that we have all been trained to recognize the two least religious founding fathers?" Mr. Barton asked, pointing to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in a painting on the wall. "And compared to today's secularists these two guys look like a couple of Bible-thumping evangelicals!" Even Jefferson signed letters "in the year of Our Lord Christ," Mr. Barton told the group. "What would happen if George Bush did that? They'd rip his head off!"
Mr. Barton, who is also the vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, is a point man in a growing movement to call attention to the open Christianity of America's great leaders and founding documents. The goal is to reverse what many evangelical Christians claim is a secularist revision of history, to defend displays of religion in public life and to make room for God in public school classrooms.
Their campaign and the liberal resistance have turned even the slightest clues about the souls of the Republic's great leaders - that Washington left church before communion and almost never referred to Jesus, that the famously skeptical Jefferson attended Sunday services in the House of Representatives, or that Lincoln never joined a church at all - into hotly contested turf in the battle over the place of religion in public life. In a sign of his influence, the California and Texas school boards have consulted Mr. Barton on their curriculums. And sympathetic legislators in a dozen states have passed American Heritage Education Acts intended to protect teachers who discuss religion's role in history_- measures liberals call unnecessary.
Mr. Barton, an expert witness in a case about the public display of the Ten Commandments that is coming before the Supreme Court this week, said he has given his "spiritual heritage" tour of the Capitol more than a hundred times, for scores of Congressmen and thousands of visitors. The contents of articles, books and videos produced by his organization, WallBuilders, about the religious underpinnings of American history have echoed through Christian cable networks, magazines and pulpits around the country.
Custodians of historical sites testify to the currency of similar ideas. When the Mount Vernon Estate and Museum sent out a recent fund-raising letter, for example, "We got more calls on the subject of religion than any other topic," mostly from evangelical Protestants encouraging more discussion of Washington's faith, said James C. Rees, the museum's executive director.
In response to the frequent questions, he said, the museum is installing a replica of Washington's church pew and a video about his church attendance. It is also asking the conservative thinker Michael Novak to write a book about Washington and religion.
But academic historians, including some conservative and evangelical scholars, give the Christian conservative veneration of this history about a B-minus. They say that Mr. Barton is more or less right, as far as it goes, that the founders never guessed that courts would construe the First Amendment to forbid public displays of religion like prayer in the schools. But the 18th-century religious views of the founders hardly fit into contemporary categories like evangelical Protestant or secular humanist. Nor, historians say, do the great leaders' public expressions of faith necessarily tell us much about how their notion of an ideal relationship between religion and government.
"Barton is a very hard-working researcher, but what I guess I worry about is the collapsing of historical distance, and the effort to make really anybody fit directly into the category of the early 21st century evangelicals," said Mark A. Noll, a prominent historian at Wheaton College, a prestigious evangelical school.