David Barton's revisionist claim on Founders Friday is bogus

Home 
Disclaimer 
Contents 
For Glenn Beck 
Share This URL 




On his Founders Friday show on Fox, Glenn Beck's guest was 

David Barton, founder and President of Wall Builders, an organization 

committed to tearing down the wall in the United   States between church 

and state. At one point, Barton made a claim that just sounded suspicious. 
Remember Ross' lesson # 8: "...I think we can tell errors where we cannot 

tell what is true (too complex, too subtle, too controversial)."
Barton explaining historical revisionism    
 
Barton: The term revisionist actually became official in 1903 and is 

part of Marxian, socialist propaganda...That's a term that they 

invented. And they said, the reason you do this is because you want 

to separate people from the old and move them in a new direction. 

You want to evolve society. You want transformational change. 

Revisionism was identified as a tool by which you can transform 

a culture. So what we started doing is we had to make all these 

guys look bad. Otherwise we'll get attached to them. So we got to 

make them look like a bunch .....[inaudible]
Beck: Did anybody know that? I didn't know that. 
Barton: When you want to sever yourself from the past, you got to 

make them look really bad. You got to make them look like racists, 

a bunch of bigots, atheists, agnostics….
Was Ross right in this case? No one in Beck’s audience knew this; Beck 

didn’t know this. Something didn't sound right with Barton's claim. 

Extensive research on historical revisionism found nothing close to what 

Barton claimed except from Barton himself and someone else using 

Barton as a reference. Even more astounding information about Barton's 

claim will be shown below, but first, what exactly is historical revisionism?
Readers who know exactly what historical revisionism can skip down to 

barely over half way  to: David Barton's own words.

 
Historical Revisionism
 
From: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/revisionist
re·vi·sion·ism  (r-vzh-nzm)
n.
1. Advocacy of the revision of an accepted, usually long-standing 

view, theory, or doctrine, especially a revision of historical events 

and movements.
2. A recurrent tendency within the Communist movement to 

revise Marxist theory in such a way as to provide justification 

for a retreat from the revolutionary to the reformist position.

 
The second definition is confirmed at: 

 

http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/18506/revisionism.html

 
  From http://www.holocaust-history.org/denial/revisionism-qa.shtml:
As the word implies, historical revisionism is the exercise whereby 

historians revise their opinions on historical events in the face of 

new evidence. It is an essential part of the history writing process. 

"Revisionism" (with quotes) is a distortion of history practiced by 

persons, usually inspired by antisemitism or a desire to rehabilitate 

the Nazis, or both. They deny that the Holocaust -- the attempted 

extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany -- took place. The 

more accurate description of "revisionists", is "deniers". They 

describe themselves as revisionists because they think it gives them 

an air of respectability.[Emphasis added]

 

 
From: http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Revisionist_history    
Historical revisionism
...is the reexamination and reviewing of the stories told as history, 

with an eye to updating them with more recently discovered, more 

unbiased, or more accurate information. Broadly, it is the approach 

that history as it has been traditionally told may not be entirely accurate 

and may be subject to review.    

 
The term historical revisionism is also, however, used by propagandists 

who wish to rewrite history to better support an ideological (and often 

less accurate) position. The term in this sense is most strongly associated 

with Holocaust denial.
So far there is a tie to Communist movement, but it's internal to that movement. 

There's also an idea that revisionism is tied to propagandists, but are there any 

references to American Marxists revising history as Barton claimed?
From: http://history.howstuffworks.com/historians/revisionist-history.htm
Revisionist history is complicated by the fact that people's identities are 

strongly linked to their histories; challenging long-held claims about past 

events draws criticism and controversy. The field itself isn't cut and dry 

-- revisionist historians work from angles. Often, revisionist history is 

from one of three major perspectives:    
·                     Social or theoretical perspective to re-examine the past 

through different lenses
·                     Fact-checking perspe ctive to correct the record of past events
·                     Negative perspective that views revisionism as an intentional 

effort to falsify or skew past events for specific motives    

 
Since the days of ancient Greek and Roman scholars, such as Plutarch and 

Tacitus, people have been editing recorded history. But modern historical 

revisionism originated in the 20th century, after the first global military 

conflict that shocked the world: World War I. [Emphasis added] The aftermath 

of the war would alter the way scholars and laymen alike viewed historical 

preservation.

 
There was more on this from the same website:

 
Just like a journalist must report events devoid of bias, so must the historian. 

But complete objectivity is nearly impossible since history often takes the 

form of a continuous, chronological narrative. That sense of continuity helps 

us grasp concepts, but in reality, events don't happen always in perfect 

sequence like a trail of dominos. The roots of modern revisionism sprang 

from that theoretical struggle for objectivity.

 
Once the dust settled to some degree after World War I, historians were left 

with the enormous task of sorting through the rubble. How would the 

military conflict be depicted in the years to come? How did the countries 

involved contribute to the war? Attempting to answer such questions, 

historians realized that complete objectivity was impossible. Even 

choosing what to include and omit about the war felt subjective.  

[Emphasis added]

 
Barton's rhetoric was matched on the Probe Ministries website.

 
Many historians have wanted to secularize our founders. Take this quote from

W.E.Woodward. He wrote that "The name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned even 

once in the vast collection of Washington's published letters."

 

 
  At the bottom of that article was: Suggested Reading, 
David Barton, Original Intent (Aledo, TX: WallBuilders Press, 1996), Chapter 16.

 

 
David Barton's own words

 
 
Here is what David Barton himself wrote on his own website:
There were many other significant issues that led to our original Fourth of July; 

so why aren't Americans familiar with the rest? Because in the 1920s, 30s, and

 40s, a group of secular-minded writers (including Charles and Mary Beard, 

W. E. Woodward, Fairfax Downey, and others) began penning works on 

American history that introduced a new paradigm. For this group, economics 

was the only issue of importance, so they began to write texts accordingly 

(their approach is now described as "the economic view of American history" 

and since the 1960s has been widely embraced throughout the education 

community). Consequently, since "taxation without representation" was the

economic grievance in the Declaration, it became the sole clause that Americans 

studied.

 
As a result, God is no longer visible in American history; and His absence is now

construed as a mandate for secularism.

 
[...]

 
Americans have been subjected to "revisionism" - defined by the dictionary as 

"the revision of an accepted, usually long-standing view; especially a revision 

of historical events and movements."  [Barton adds] Revisionism attempts to 

alter the way a people sees its history in order to cause a change in public policy.

 
[...]

 
I have spent years collecting thousands of original and priceless documents from

American history in general and black history in particular; God's fingerprints 

are evident throughout. [Emphasis added]

 
Barton's revision of Barton's revisionism revisited
 
A "historian" can determine that "God's fingerprints are evident" in American history 

has the gall to make claims on The Glenn Beck Show that no one supports, not 

even David Barton himself! When Barton claimed that "The term revisionist 

actually became official in 1903 and is part of Marxian, socialist propaganda.," 

he would have been far more accurate if he had replaced "in 1903" with on the 

Glenn Beck Show and "Marxian, socialist" with reactionary Christian as follows:" 

The term revisionist actually become official on the Glenn Beck Show and is 

part of reactionary Christian propaganda. 
The facts of history do not support Beck's and Barton's revised version. 
From Mother Jones magazine, Susan Jacoby wrote: "Revisionist rhetoric

notwithstanding, the founders left God out of the Constitution?and it 

wasn't an oversight." From that report:

 
For the 21st-century apostles of religious correctness, the godless Constitution

—how could those framers have forgotten the most important three-letter word 

in the dictionary?—poses a formidable problem requiring the creation of 

tortuous historical fictions that include both subtle prevarication and 

bald-faced lies.[Emphasis added]

 
Religious reactionaries of the 18th century, by contrast, were honest in 

their attacks on the secularism of the new Constitution. One North Carolina 

minister observed with forthright disgust, during his state's ratification debate, 

that the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to nothing less 

than "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." 

The Reverend John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York minister, declared 

the absence of God in the Constitution "an omission which no pretext 

whatever can palliate" and warned that Americans would "have every reason 

to tremble, lest the Governor of the universe, who will not be treated 

with indignity by a people more than by individuals, overturn from its 

foundation the fabric we have been rearing, and crush us to atoms in 

the wreck."

 
The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new 

nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they 

possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government 

and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the 

new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead 

ceded governmental authority to "We the People…in order to form a more 

perfect Union" was a break not only with historically distant European 

precedents but with recent American precedents, most notably the 1781 

Articles of Confederation, which did pay homage to "the Great Governor 

of the World," and the Declaration of Independence, with its majestic 

statement that "all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain 

unalienable rights."
 
Trust worthy?    
On Founders Fridays, Christian revisionist history is used for propaganda 

to make people wrongly believe that the framers created a Christian 

government. They do this to affect public policy!
___________________________________________ 

Get involved.
Post a Comment
All Comments Approved
Free Speech is Practiced Here
———————————————————————–
Get Involved for 10 Minutes
Share this URL
http://sharethisurlaboutglennbeck.com
Thank you