David Barton, Ted Cruz & Evangelical Grassroots

Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III, who thought he could squirm out of his former life, I thought a few years ago that I was done. That is, so done with the subject of the Texas ideological entrepreneur David Barton. The self-styled historian had developed a one-man heritage industry out of his insistence that the founding fathers had created America as a Christian nation. Long operating in the same kind of alternate intellectual universe in which figures such as the creationist Ken Ham had operated, Barton collected historical documents and research purporting to show America’s divine origins, Christian heritage, and sacred purpose. His endless supply of quotations and impressive personal library of thousands of original documents from the founding era lent him the credibility of being a true scholar, studying the original texts in the way true Christians were to study the Bible. So did his slams at “Deconstructionism, Poststructuralism, Modernism, Minimalism, [and] Academic Collectivism,” terms he uses to mean, basically, “anyone I disagree with.”