David Barton slanders Thomas Paine

It pains me to see David Barton, an evangelical christian, slander the founding fathers so terribly. Barton is not a historian. He has a bachelor's degree in Christian Education from Oral Roberts University. Though his writing is predicatably popular among conservative Christian Americans his transgressions as a researcher recently led his publisher - Thomas Nelson -  to yank his controversial book Thomas Jefferson Lies off the shelves.

I was personally pushed over the edge by Barton's cavaleir reference to of one of the most progressive freethinkers in American history - Thomas Paine. Watch the following clip in which Barton asserts that the founding fathers had decided creationism should be taught in public schools in the late 1700's and that Thomas Paine spearheaded the campaign. Nevermind how wildly out-of-context this attribution is considering the theory of evolution was not fully formed until nearly a century later.

If only Barton ever actually read Thomas Paine he would have come accross some of these gems...

"The chrstian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun."

or...

"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."

Or any single page of Thomas Paine's lengthy diatribe on the man-made myths rampant throughout the bible entitled the Age or Reason.



Listen to the episode of all things considered below. Numerous errors in David Barton's scholarship are pointed out. Barbara Bradley Hagerty makes clear Barton is flat out lying in his pro-christian propaganda.