Chapter review: The Uses and Abuses of History

Drat! I thought this was going to be a short review. Crud, foiled again. Darn those Christian nationalists! -- Germaine, 2021

Context

Chapter 6, The Uses and Abuses of History, is in investigative journalist Katherine Stewart’s 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: The Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Stewart spend 10 years in a deep dive into the powerful American Christian nationalism (CN) political movement. CN is now a dead-serious, anti-democratic global movement to Christianize and save the entire planet from whatever CN believes it needs to be saved from. 

In my mind, this book describes what increasingly looks to me like a nascent, early, form of some maybe milder variant of the utter brutality of totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt described in her 1951 masterpiece of human savagery, mass murder and brutal oppression, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 

It is still early days for this new form of oppression, or righteous enlightenment if that is how one wants to see it. CN ideology-dogma is cloaked in the righteousness and infinite love of the its vision of God. It is hard to tell what this ravenous (or loving) beast is going to evolve into.  

I feel no affinity or sympathy for what CN is and how it does its work. It scares the hell out of me because it is based on endless lies, deceit, emotional manipulation and motivated reasoning. The CN political and religious movement epitomizes moral cowardice because it relies on ruthless dark free speech to (i) accumulate power and wealth for people at the top, and (ii) enforce God's strict laws and morals on all of the rest of us. 

The Museum of the Bible - fabricating history

Stewart centers chapter 6 around a powerful CN propaganda factory and training site called the Museum of the Bible. She discusses the backers, thinkers and lies-based propaganda tactics that the museum is based on. It is not a real museum because it is based on a fabricated CN version of history. This CN operations site claims to be nonsectarian, but it is purely Christian sectarian. The most influential people behind CN operate there at least intermittently. Wealthy donors like the DeVos family, heirs to the Amway fortune, and David Green, founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby Stores[1], and his family (Steven Green, president of Hobby Lobby) are anti-democratic, autocratic and aggressive about spreading the CN's lies about history, especially American history. 

As usual for CN operations, this political operation gets religious tax privileges to subsidize the spread of its lies and slanders throughout the US and rest of the world. The CN leadership are hard core globalists and dead serious about converting the entire planet to belief in their false version of history and Christianity.

David Barton: the creator-in-chief and proselytizer-in-chief of CN’s fake history

David Barton rose from a math teacher and religious school administrator in the small town of Aledo in Texas to one of the top influencers and propagandists in the CN movement. He created TV ads and other materials that were and still are loaded with lies and out of context distortions of various truths. The religious right has fallen for all of it. Barton produced a film was shown at churches that depicted the Founding Fathers as Christian nationalists who founded a Christian nation based on Barton’s version of history. Like Barton’s other productions, it was a pack of lies and distortions. Nonetheless, that film was what snagged the Green family, with their power and wealth, and hauled them into the CN movement. 

Barton had refashioned and sold himself to the religious far right as a “historian” of “America’s Christian Founding.” Over time, Barton’s writings came to be scrutinized by real historians who debunked Barton's version of history and all the lies it was and still is based on. But that didn't matter for far right Christians. They and the Green family loved it and bought it all. The Green family hired Barton to produce ads that lie about America founded as a Christian nation. Stewart writes:

Like the bulk of David Barton’s own work, the Hobby Lobby ad was a mash-up of quotes wrenched out of context and dragooned into service of the Christian Nation myth. Rob Boston, senior advisor at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, .... posted a lengthy rebuttal .... remarking that it would “take a small book to dissect” and catalog all the distortions and calling it “an insult to the intelligence of its readers.” 

The error in the detail there was to provide cover for the great lie at the center of Christian nationalism. What David Bartion and the leaders of the Hobby Lobby corporation don’t want you to know is that America’s founders explicitly and proudly the world’s first secular republic. It seemed the point of the Hobby Lobby ad was not to celebrate America’s history but to counterfeit it. (emphasis added)

The Green family went on to set up a tax privileged 501(c)(3) nonprofit and raise about $500 million for the Museum of the Bible, which was intended “to bring to life the living word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation [whatever that means -- White Supremacy?], and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.” 

Some of Barton’s and CN’s escapades

To shorten this long, sordid story, here are some highlights of the lies and distortions that chapter 6 is loaded with.

Barton’s one-way wall of separation: According to Barton, the first Amendment was “never intended to separate Christian principles from government.” Instead the wall of separation of church and state “was originally introduced as, and understood to be, a one-directional wall protecting the church from the government.” None of Barton’s assertions here are true. All are factually false. Barton and CN clearly want the government (1) to be powerless over what they want to do, and (2) to be powerless to prevent CN from turning government into a Christian theocracy and forcing their faux religion on all of us.

Barton’s fans: Mr. Barton has some enthusiastic fans, including the Green family, the DeVos family Newt Gingrich Mike Huckabee and etc. The chapter mentions a slew of such fine folks. Their enthusiasm is palpable. For example, Huckabee once said “I almost wish there would be a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced -- forced at gunpoint no less -- to listen to every David Barton message.” That’s real enthusiasm! 

Fact-checking blows up: By 2000, real historians were fact-checking Barton’s version of history and publishing works showing how false it was. Fact-checking didn't work. Instead, it backfired. Stewart writes:

Yet the adverse coverage did little to stop the Barton juggernaut. If anything, it affirmed his authenticity in the eyes of his followers. .... Barton’s demagoguery met with immediate scrutiny. According to National Public Radio, “We looked up every citation said was from the Bible but not one of them checked out. The History News Network soon named [Barton's 2012 book] The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson ‘the least credible history book in print.’ .... At the root of all the controversies over Barton’s work, one inevitably finds the same fundamental falsification of American history. Christian nationalism, by its nature, must deny the extraordinary achievement of America‘s founders in creating the world’s first secular republic and replace it with the kind of shabby religious-nationalist mythology that characterizes reactionary movements around the world. .... But it makes a certain kind of sense: you have to tell lots of little lies to promote one big lie.

But none of that mattered. Barton’s pseudo-history is too valuable to the Christian nationalist machine to let facts and scholarship get in the way, and his standing with his own audience has continued to soar. 

The situation with Barton’s The Jefferson Lies book got to be so nutty that his publisher decided to stop printing and distributing the book. That’s real crackpottery in action.

Secrecy is de rigueur: The CN movement likes to operate as quietly as possible, for obvious reasons. In 2004 the GOP hired Barton to help Bush and other Republicans to win elected offices. Barton flogged the evangelical community relentlessly for votes. Stewart writes: “His efforts, he told the online magazine Beliefnet, were ‘below the radar . . . We worked our tails off to stay out of the news.’ The effort proved critical in clinching George W. Bush’s narrow win over John Kerry.”

Barton on voting and civic duty: Stewarts writes: “President Donald Trump, he has said, is running on a ‘CEO model.’ Christians who fail to support the Trump presidency are ‘taking a very selfish view of what we do with voting. It’s not your vote, it’s God’s vote,’ says Barton. .... he paired up with evangelists Lance Wallnau, who wrote a book comparing Trump to king Cyrus, and Andrew Wommack, who has said opposition to Trump is ‘demonic deception’ and ‘one of the signs of the End Times.’”

Clearly, a citizens civic duty (a/k/a one’s duty God) is to vote for who CN leadership tells people to vote for and what their duty is after voting, i.e., support who the CN told them to vote for.

Yanking God out of public schools caused SAT scores to drop: According to Barton, in 1987 God told him to look up the date when the Supreme Court ruled against school-sponsored prayer and the trend in SAT scores before and after that date. The data indicates that in 1963 SAT scores stopped increasing and began a sharp decline. That was right after (1) the 1962 Supreme Court decision in Engel v. Vitale where, as Stewart put it, the court “yanked God out of America's classrooms,” and (2) a 1963 Supreme Court decision that school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional. 

As we all know, correlation does not necessarily mean there is causation. But that inconvenient truth does not faze CN or Barton. Barton simply ignored massive changes in 1963 that expanded school systems to reach previously disadvantaged children. That correlated with, probably at least partly caused, increased numbers of test takers and decreased the average SAT scores. Barton also ignored the inconvenient fact that by the time of the Engel v. Vitale decision, most public schools had already kicked God out of the classrooms. 

Conclusion

Chapter 6 goes on and on like this, e.g., Barton calls the Bible “the document that is the true founding document of America” and characterizes the CN mission as one to “eradicate Bible poverty” by evangelizing “unreached people groups.” This review doesn't even include a description of what CN is doing to public school textbooks nationwide and how it has penetrated the US military and is spreading their poison and lies there with official military support. This chapter is just as much fun as a barrel of enraged monkeys (snakes?), because something about like that is what it describes.

One last thought, CN and Barton have lofty goals and they are patient, willing to work as long as they live. They acknowledge that they, or at least the CN ideology and dogma, are in this war forever.

Footnote: 

1. The Green family was the plaintiffs in an important religious Supreme Court decision in the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. dispute. In that case, the five CN judges on the court decided that secular business corporations can possess religious belief systems and have the right to exert their freedom of conscience. According to Stewart, “Even if that means refusing to comply with federal law regarding the provision of comprehensive health insurance to female employees.” As is common for the CN crowd, the Green family is preoccupied with sex and the sex lives of everyone around them. They demand that people they can control adhere to their beliefs about contraception and abortion as much as they can force their power on others. Obviously, they want the power to force their beliefs on all Americans, whether they want it or not.