14 Bible Verses: How David Barton Misuses History and Scripture for Political Purposes – By Kyle Mantyla (Right Wing Watch) / Sept 9, 2022
There is perhaps nobody more responsible for the widely held belief among right-wing activists that the United States was founded to be an explicitly Christian nation than religious-right pseudo-historian David Barton. Despite the fact that Barton’s misuse and misrepresentation of both American history and the Bible have been well-documented, his work has played a key role in laying the foundation for the Christian nationalist worldview being widely espoused today by Republican leaders and their right-wing political allies.
Recently, Barton delivered a presentation at Radiant Church in Colorado which provided a helpful example of how he misrepresents history and scripture to create false impressions that support his Christian nationalist political agenda.
In his presentation, Barton focused on a speech delivered on June 28, 1787 by Benjamin Franklin during the Constitutional Convention, in which Franklin suggested that those gathered turn to God in prayer for help in drafting the Constitution:
The small progress we have made after 4 or five weeks close attendance & continual reasonings with each other — our different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many noes as ays, is methinks a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the Human Understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those Republics which having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution now no longer exist. And we have viewed Modern States all round Europe, but find none of their Constitutions suitable to our circumstances.
