NBC News reports:
Two years before going from a relatively unknown congressman to speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana spoke at a national gathering of Christian lawmakers in North Texas and shared his deep admiration for the man behind the conference: the evangelical activist and self-styled historian David Barton.
Johnson told the audience at the December 2021 gathering that Barton’s teachings — which are disputed by many historians — have had “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do.”
Speaking only hours after Johnson’s election, Barton said on a podcast that he’d already been in touch with Johnson’s team, “talking with them about staff” and offering advice on who the speaker should hire. “They need to be the people with his worldview,” said Barton.
Read the full article.
As Right Wing Watch has exhaustively documented for years, Barton tours the country, telling avid Christian audiences that virtually every line of the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were taken verbatim from the bible. Barton is such a notorious liar that even his own Christian publishing house retracted his book. Give the tweets below a minute to fully load and take a look at Barton’s incessant batshittery.
NEW from me: A look at Speaker Mike Johnson’s ties to evangelical activist David Barton, who’s spent decades fighting church-state separation & who says he’s already in touch with Johnson’s team to offer advice on who he should hire to his staff. https://t.co/5Xdm3L8ROd @NBCNews
— Mike Hixenbaugh (@Mike_Hixenbaugh) October 26, 2023
Christian Nationalist David Barton: The Constitution Gives Christians “More Protection” Than Anybody Else – https://t.co/k5txqxnbDE pic.twitter.com/9xcHaB9lpX
— JoeMyGod (@JoeMyGod) July 31, 2019
David Barton: Americans Have The Right To Own Tanks – https://t.co/pOks4LgYWn pic.twitter.com/zse43Ljcrj
— JoeMyGod (@JoeMyGod) July 3, 2019
David Barton To Glenn Beck: We Can Still Criminalize Homosexuality In America http://t.co/SxL264fm7n
— JoeMyGod (@JoeMyGod) April 17, 2015
David Barton: The Bible Says There Will Never Be A Vaccine For HIV Because God Sent AIDS To Kill Homosexuals: http://t.co/q7biQqrMFi
— JoeMyGod (@JoeMyGod) March 2, 2015
Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton keeps falsely claiming that the Constitution is full of “verbatim quotes” from the Bible. We are starting to think that he doesn’t know what the word “verbatim” means. pic.twitter.com/GZu84BETqe
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) July 25, 2022
Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton baselessly claims the Founding Fathers modeled our government on “the Hebrew Republic” found in the Bible: “There’s so many clauses of the Constitution that we put in there to model the Hebrew republic.” None of that is true. pic.twitter.com/41jwQA8EdB
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) August 2, 2023
Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton claims that Patrick Henry and George Washington quoted numerous Bible verses in their speeches and writings. We decided to take a look at Barton’s “evidence” and—surprise, surprise—he was lying. https://t.co/6U0sfA5eHd pic.twitter.com/fetyq3BxqF
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) September 29, 2022
Seemingly confident in the knowledge that nobody on the right will ever call out his falsehoods, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton is now just making stuff up, asserting that various aspects of the Bill of Rights came directly out of the Bible. pic.twitter.com/sfEdIHU1kU
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) July 17, 2023
Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton doesn’t just lie about history, he also lies about current events, like claiming Democrats tried to impose a gerrymandered election map on North Carolina. That’s exactly the opposite of what happened. https://t.co/akuDkLYMxS pic.twitter.com/BhkvxvYkFL
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 10, 2023
We hate to sound like a broken record, but if Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton is going to keep making false claims, we’re going to keep pointing it out: No, James Kent did not create the federal circuit court system based on the Bible. https://t.co/xG7v7bD7zj pic.twitter.com/SzmWlynPiQ
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 14, 2023
Nobody who has actually read the Bible would conclude, as religious-right pseudo-historian David Barton does, that the message of 1 Samuel where Saul is anointed king of Israel is that spiritual leaders should be choosing our elected officials. pic.twitter.com/dl8Het9tw0
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 10, 2021
Pseudo-historian David Barton is constantly finding new “proof” the US was founded as a Christian nation. Lately, he’s been claiming that 1st & 2nd grade public schools students in 1816 were required to memorize large portions of the Bible. They weren’t. https://t.co/4fWoDnQL0m pic.twitter.com/iam7YY4h7x
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) September 21, 2022