Yesterday I picked up our car from the mechanic and stopped at the grocery store to pickup a few groceries.
When I pulled up to the grocery store, a story about my favorite guy David Barton was on.
David Barton is the guy I would have become if I continued on the trajectory that I was on as a senior in high school. He’s an activist posing as a “historian” and he uses botched and misleading information and rhetoric to steer otherwise good people into thinking the history of the world and especially the United States is quite different than what most everyone learns in classrooms.
David Barton says things that I was taught at Wesleyan Christian Academy in a class called “Understanding the Times,” which was a curriculum based on biblical revisionism.
When I left Wesleyan, I was gung-ho for the LORD. And I repeated stuff teachers taught me in so many situations. I was the cat’s pajamas. I thought I was smarter than everyone, because I was armed with logic laced in Jesus’s own awesome word.
I was a warrior for Christ, and, frankly, I felt welcome, inspired and confident as that person.
When I took the “facts” learned from these courses into the classrooms at a private Presbyterian college, it was made clear that stuff I was repeating was not factual. It was frustrating when I would raise my hand in class and the teachers looked at me like I had three heads and penises for eyelids.
These were Christians. How could they disagree with me?
Researched further, the smallest bits of information I learned in those high school classes were lies, which lead me to wonder if everything I was taught were lies.
When I was growing up, my mom put a spank-load of influence on telling the truth. And I mean telling the truth to the T. If the slightest bit of information was off, my mom — or the end of a .5″ thick paddle let me and my deceitful ass know.
So when further research lead me to uncover the truths of those classes, I became more and more angry.
David Barton and the classes that are still being taught at my old high school make people stupider.
And they don’t care.
Barton doesn’t care.
And his audiences eat it up, because it makes them feel all horny about Jesus.
Barton, I believe, is a version of the old me, but no one helped him see that he’s just a cocky asshole with a shitload of bad information.
And who would do that now? He’s making a killing off his direction in life.
And that’s all that matter.
Yank my suckling mouth from a teat of flowing cash, and I would grow corrupt to get my mouth back on it, too.
Well, the story on NPR is here. I listened to the damn thing twice, just in case I missed something.
I highly recommend listening to it.
And I imagine because some of my readers are anti-NPR, they won’t. But there is for and against in this liberal story. I felt it was a bit balanced as I don’t like the writer much ( BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY) because she kowtow to woo on her segments.
The good news is Barton’s publishers listened to the report and they have done their own research and they’re pulling the book off the shelves.
Mind you. This is not a book with low sales.
This is a book that has made many high sales lists.
So if a greedy old book publisher — in this piss-poor economy — is pulling Barton’s books … you know something smells shit-ass rotten in Denmark.
I say it’s too late. Barton isn’t to be stopped. And if I were a praying man, I’d pray that Barton would become enlightened to his deceitful bullshit.
But we know that doesn’t work.
Zondervon will get behind that rag of crap and private school teachers without a shred of respect for erudition will put that in the hands of their stupid little students.
And we’ll all suffer for it later.
Posted by Jeremy 
