The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate. Like Rushdoony the man, members of the movement are often kind in person. They love and care for their children, volunteer in their communities, and establish long friendships—and then they seek to punish those who are different. It is not enough for them to assert that they alone are religiously righteous; they want everyone else to conform to their ideas of righteousness. They save some of their most poisonous words for those who dare to identify as Christians of a different sort. In their eyes, the archest of enemies are the misguided souls who would champion “social justice”—or what Rushdoony would have identified as the most recent incarnation of the Social Gospel. As one Texas pastor said, “If Southern Baptists don’t rise up and take a stand now, then in a few years they will be seeing books in their Lifeway bookstores promoting liberation theology, black theology, and feminism.”90

  Jerry Falwell more than anyone embodied this unsettling mix of love and hate. A jovial presence with an easy manner, Falwell was often celebrated as a “loving man” and “a big heart.” Yet he regularly spewed toxins, as when he blamed “the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” for the September 11 attacks. When the journalist Frances FitzGerald profiled Jerry Falwell for the New Yorker in 1981, she spoke with Reverend Carl McIntire, a pastor in Falwell’s style. “Separation involves hard, gruelling controversy. It involves attacks, personal attacks, even violent attacks … Satan preaches brotherly love in order to hold men in apostasy,” McIntire told FitzGerald. Therefore, he said, aggression “is an expression of Christian love.”91

  CHAPTER 6

  The Uses and Abuses of History

  Sometimes a museum is just a museum. And sometimes it is “an ‘Ark of the Covenant’ for our nation, bearing witness to His goodness.” That’s what the organizers of Revolution 2017 had to say about the Museum of the Bible in advance of their conference there in December 2017.

  At the event, Cindy Jacobs, a featured speaker who identifies herself as an “apostle,” went on to describe the Museum of the Bible as “God’s base camp.” Right there, in the auditorium of the museum, she offered a prophecy: “The army of the heavens marches into Washington, D.C., and marches out of Washington, D.C.” Soon enough, she declared, “they go into North Korea.”

  In order to understand how this museum on the corner of Fourth and D Streets SW, three blocks from the national Capitol, became an Ark, you have to know something about the people behind the museum. I laid plans to visit shortly after the museum opened in November 2017. After catching Jacobs’s incendiary prophecies on YouTube, I also added Revolution 2018 to my schedule.

  Sometime in 2006, the Green family sat down to have a conversation about the true meaning of the Fourth of July. “We saw a film at church right around that time that really opened our eyes to what was going on in our nation,” Barbara Green later recalled, according to the account provided by her son Steve Green in his 2011 book, Faith in America.1 David Green, Steve’s father, remembered the film well. “It was centered on all these people of faith who were signers of our U.S. Constitution,” he said. “It really got my attention, and I decided we needed to make a statement about the godly heritage of our wonderful country.”2

  The Green family, as it happens, were in a position to make quite a statement. David Green is the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby Stores, an Oklahoma-based private retail corporation with eight hundred locations and about $4.5 billion in revenue, and Steve Green is its president. The company is best known to the general public as the plaintiffs in a landmark 2014 case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., in which the conservative majority of the Supreme Court decided 5–4 that business corporations may be said to possess religious belief systems and enjoy the right of freedom of conscience. Even if that means refusing to comply with federal law regarding the provision of comprehensive health insurance to female employees.

  When the Green family sat down for their chat about the Fourth of July, Hobby Lobby was already known for public expressions of religion, running newspaper ads around Christmas and Easter to signal its adherence to conservative Christian beliefs. David Green instructed his son Steve to get ahold of the producer of the marvelous film they’d seen in church and see if he might help them think up an ad for Independence Day that would “express how we feel about our country.”

  The film was the work of David Barton, a former math teacher and administrator at a Christian high school who had reinvented himself as a “historian” of “America’s Christian Founding.” He soon showed up at company headquarters in Oklahoma City bearing a trove of material: “letters, quotes, all sorts of testimonies from all kinds of famous Americans.” At his dad’s urging, Steve Green had put together an ad stocked with “quotes about our Christian nation from the people in leadership—presidents, judges, congressmen, and the like,” all organized under a citation from the Psalms at their most theocratic: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD (Psalm 33:12A).”3

  Like the bulk of David Barton’s own works, the Hobby Lobby ad was a mash-up of quotes wrenched out of context and dragooned into service of the Christian Nation myth. Rob Boston, senior advisor at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and author of Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn’t Give You the Right to Tell Other People What to Do, posted a lengthy rebuttal on the online publication of Americans United remarking that it would “take a small book to dissect” and catalogue all the distortions and calling it “an insult to the intelligence of its readers.”4 Andrew L. Seidel, a constitutional and civil rights attorney with the Freedom from Religion Foundation and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, built an interactive website to nail down as many misrepresentations as feasible.

  The error in the detail was there to provide cover for the great lie at the center of Christian nationalism. What David Barton and the leaders of the Hobby Lobby corporation don’t want you to know is that America’s founders explicitly and proudly created the world’s first secular republic. It seemed the point of the Hobby Lobby ad was not to celebrate America’s history but to counterfeit it.

  As far as the Green family was concerned, however, the ad was a tremendous success, and they have continued to run versions of it every year. Indeed, it was a step in the direction of a still bolder plan to which Steve Green next turned his attention.

  Around the time of the Fourth of July ad, Steve Green and his representatives were scouring the Middle East in search of “biblical” artifacts. It later became evident that they were scouring a little too hard. In 2010, Hobby Lobby agreed to purchase more than 5,500 artifacts for $1.6 million and arranged to have them shipped in packages bearing labels that described contents as “ceramic tiles.” In 2017 the corporation paid a fine of $3 million to settle charges over what the government says were intentionally mislabeled and smuggled goods.

  In the same period that he was acquiring pricy “ceramic tiles,” Green formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation to create the Museum of the Bible. The mission of the museum, he told the IRS, would be “to bring to life the living Word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.” Green would eventually raise and spend $500 million on the project.5

  In anticipation of this new and colossal undertaking, Green decided to consult with the experts. First, he traveled out to Manitou Springs, Colorado, to visit John Stonestreet, a minister associated with the institute founded by Chuck Colson (the ex-convict of Watergate fame who later founded Prison Fellowship) and promoter of the “biblical worldview” through literature, curricula, and youth-focused conferences and seminars. Green also flew out to Cincinnati to consult with Ken Ham at his office in the Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Kentucky. Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, has devoted his career to debunking the science of biology and promoting the vi
ew that the earth and all living things were created just as the Bible says. The third and perhaps most important source of guidance to whom Green turned was David Barton.

  “Tucked away in a tiny Texas town about forty-five minutes west of Fort Worth is the person who arguably has one of the deepest modern understandings of what was going on in the minds of the Founding Fathers when they formed our nation over two centuries ago,” writes Green, who visited with Barton at the latter’s headquarters in Aledo, Texas. Green goes on to recount some of the many pearls of historical insight that he has gleaned from direct conversation with Barton. “A republic is a representative form of government,” Barton told his admirer. “Our forefathers got the idea straight from the Bible.”6

  Flying back home from a visit with the experts, mulling his plans for the Museum of the Bible, Green “realized how privileged I was to spend the time I did with John Stonestreet, David Barton, and Ken Ham—all experts in their chosen fields of study.” His conversations had “provided some important information regarding how and why the biblical worldview really is absolute and absolutely from God.”7 Now he was ready to put that information to work in a giant converted warehouse located three blocks south of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

  One summer day in 1987, as David Barton tells the story, God told him to do two things. First, he was to look up the day that the Supreme Court ruled against school-sponsored prayer. Second, he was to gather the data on the past couple decades’ SAT scores. At the time, Barton was a thirty-three-year-old math teacher and school principal at the Aledo Christian School, which grew out of a church started by his parents in Aledo, and his bachelor’s degree in Christian education came from Oral Roberts University.8

  SAT scores, Barton discovered, had been on a steady climb until 1963, when suddenly they dropped as if “they were tumbling down a steep mountainside.” Around the same time, he noticed, the rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and violent crime began to rise. How to explain this mysterious collapse in the statistics of American educational and social well-being? Then he looked at the Supreme Court records, and that’s when it hit him: in 1962, in the case of Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court yanked God out of America’s classrooms. A year later it nailed the schoolhouse doors shut with the case of School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp, in which the Court declared that school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional. There, Barton claimed, was the explanation for the crisis in America!

  Of course, Barton could just as well have blamed the decline of public education on the Beach Boys, who also happened to make it big in 1962. In order to pin the blame for declining SAT scores on the Supreme Court’s school prayer decisions, Barton also has to overlook the massive changes in American education at the time. Many of them involved the expansion of the school systems to include previously excluded and disadvantaged groups of people, which predictably resulted in a significant increase in the number of test-takers and a decrease in average scores. But clearly Barton does not seem to know or care about the troves of sociological research on the subject. He also exhibits little interest in the actual history of religion in public schools, which would show that the majority of the nation’s school districts had minimized or ceased the practice of school-sponsored, sectarian prayer long before the Supreme Court allegedly “kicked God out of the classroom.”

  But the biggest lie in Barton’s first stab at history is what he takes to be its biggest truth. Once upon a time, in his telling, America was united around a common religion that served as the foundation of the republic—until secularists commandeered the Supreme Court and ruined everything. The reality is that America was a pluralistic land from the beginning and the United States was founded as a secular republic. Thomas Jefferson said it best when he pointed to the First Amendment and said with awe that it erected “a wall of separation between Church & State.”9 It is why he declared, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, “that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”10 This is why the Treaty of Tripoli of 1798, endorsed by John Adams and other members of America’s founding generation, declared explicitly (and uncontroversially) that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”11

  The next big lie in Barton’s history is about American education. In his telling, American schools were all about God until the Supreme Court decided to throw American heritage to the secular winds. In reality, Massachusetts passed the first law prohibiting the use or purchase of schoolbooks “which are calculated to favor any particular religious sect or tenet” in 1827, and in 1837, Horace Mann, often hailed as “the father of American public education,” declared that public schools should be nonsectarian—meaning that schools should restrict religious teachings to commonly shared Protestant values, which he, a Unitarian, regarded as universal and believed could be taught without offending any sectarian sensibilities.12

  In the middle decades of the nineteenth century an influx of immigrants from Catholic countries sparked bitter and bloody conflicts over religion and public schools in Boston, Maine, Ohio, and elsewhere. At the time, public school textbooks were filled with anti-Catholic tropes, and Protestant nativists sought to exclude Catholic teachings and texts from the schools. Catholic parents and religious leaders, naturally reluctant to have their children inculcated in undermining stereotypes, asked, in vain, for a share of tax money for their own school systems. In the early 1840s, the growing Catholic immigrant community began to pressure school officials to allow their children to read from their Bible, the Douay-Rheims translation, at school.

  The conflict took a violent turn in Philadelphia in 1844, when Protestants and Catholics hit the streets for two separate weeks of rioting; when it was over, at least twenty-five residents of the City of Brotherly Love were dead. This episode and others persuaded much of the American public of the inequity and unsustainability of public school–sponsored religion in a diverse society. “Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions,” said President Ulysses S. Grant in 1875. “Keep the church and state forever separate.”13

  Indeed, the pair of Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that Barton blames for America’s downfall were easily decided. They received the support of six out of seven (Engel v. Vitale) and eight out of nine (Abington v. Schempp) justices, because for a period of four decades or so that began with a pair of landmark decisions in 1947 and 1948, the judiciary had arrived at a straightforward and consistent philosophy intended to answer to the principle of church-state separation, and the decisions answered to those precedents.

  These Supreme Court rulings were far from outlier decisions. In fact, they had ample precedent in the states. To give just two examples, the Supreme Court in Wisconsin struck down government-sponsored prayer in schools in 1892 and the Nebraska Supreme Court did the same in 1902.

  None of this seemed to matter to Barton. As patient as he was ambitious, Barton soon moved on from the SAT-prayer nexus to other mythical episodes in American history. “To retake lost ground quickly is not the strategy prescribed by the Lord Himself,” he wrote. “Commit yourself to this engagement for the long haul—for the duration; arm yourself with the mentality of a marathon runner, not a sprinter. Very simply, be willing to stay and compete until you win.”14 He established WallBuilders, which bills itself as a service for protecting America’s Christian heritage and sells books, videos, and merchandise to an eager segment of the public. He has since risen to become the most celebrated and broadly influential Christian nationalist historian in America, leading pastors and politicians on tours of Washington, D.C., to indoctrinate them with the correct talking points on “America’s Godly heritage.” At speaking engagements, his longtime ally Newt Gingrich advises audiences to read Barton’s work, saying, “It’s amazing how much he knows and how c
onsistently he applies that knowledge.”15 Mike Huckabee once said, “I almost wish that there would be … a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced—forced at gunpoint, no less—to listen to every David Barton message.”16 Sam Brownback, currently the U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom, said Barton is providing “the philosophical underpinnings for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today—bringing God back into the public square.”17 Although he does not mention him by name, Vice President Mike Pence duplicates some of Barton’s talking points. Barton advises right-wing policymakers and lawmakers in charge of approving public school curricula, and frequently teams up with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins for radio appearances and other events.

  Yet, even as Barton rose to prominence, the characteristic features of his approach to the rewriting of history never changed. Bartonian historiography invariably begins with the myth of the golden age—the idea, in essence, that America was once a single nation with a single God. It goes on to describe a fall and a cause for grievance as the righteous lose their hold, thanks to the actions of secular liberals. The story of the past thus leads inexorably to a political prescription for the future, which for the most part involves retaking the court system and the rest of government and turning it over to Bible believers.

  The historical errors and obfuscations tumbled out of Barton’s works fast and furious. Intent on demonstrating that the American republic was founded on “Judeo-Christian principles,” Barton reproduced an alleged quote from James Madison to the effect that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of American civilization. Chuck Norris, Rush Limbaugh, Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, and countless other luminaries of the right recycled the quote in so many iterations that it has become a fixture of Christian nationalist ideology. Yet there is no evidence that Madison ever said such a thing.