In its latest attempt to give the appearance of concern about complaints of religious intolerance, the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) recently conducted a five-day “investigation” that (big surprise) found that there were no problems at all, save for the occasional minor incident that could always be resolved at the lowest level.

Heading the investigation was retired Air Force General Patrick Gamble, a former Commandant of Cadets at USAFA, and the investigative team included a former USAFA dean and two former USAFA department heads — certainly no chance that this team would want the Academy to come out smelling like roses, is there?

These were some of the findings in Gamble’s report, released on April 15:

“Cadets’ acceptance of those with different beliefs is exceptional. USAFA should be recognized for its institutional leadership in this area.”

“We found widespread agreement that everyone throughout the chain of command has been given and is giving appropriate guidance with respect to official neutrality, not only among religions, but also between religious and non-religious beliefs.”

“Cadets and permanent party expressed a near-uniform belief that they can (and do) make their own choices to participate – or not – in religious activities, without repercussion. Reports of actual pressure to participate were rare and easily resolved by simply expressing that the invitation or speech was unwelcome.”

“Cadets are not unduly stressed about possible pressure to join or conform to a religion, and the majority clearly feels empowered to deal with unwanted approaches. Across the board, cadets disavow that any favoritism or retribution would accrue based upon religious or non-religious affiliation.”

“Cadets clearly feel that they have the ability to resolve a conflict over religious tolerance and freedom, usually by addressing the issue head-on, by themselves. Alternatively, they have great confidence that their chain-of-command will be able to help them if called upon. The Superintendent was specifically lauded for his leadership in this area several times by faculty, staff, and cadets.”

“The cadets with whom we talked trusted the various mechanisms internal to USAFA (including the cadet chain of command, the Interfaith Council, PEERS, AOCs/AMTs, and chaplains). These reporting mechanisms were deemed responsive and effective. In view of certain media reports of claims to the contrary we looked hard, but found no direct or supportable widespread evidence of cadets resorting to the use of outside agencies or organizations.”

“We found no evidence in our interviews at any level that anyone fears for their physical safety based upon their religious beliefs or non-belief.”

How could Gen. Gamble’s findings, described as an “assessment of the current religious climate at the US Air Force Academy,” be so drastically different than what was just reported by cadets and faculty last fall in the Academy’s biannual “Climate Survey,” in which 353 cadets (almost 1 out of every 5 survey participants) reported having been subjected to unwanted religious proselytizing, and 23 cadets (13 of them Christians) reported living “in fear of their physical safety” because of their religious beliefs?

The answer is simple: 40 percent of the Academy’s cadets and 53 percent of the faculty staff members participated in the Climate Survey, confident that this anonymous survey really was anonymous, while only a few dozen faculty and staff members and only about a hundred cadets (barely more than 2 percent) were willing to participate in Gamble’s investigation, due primarily to fears that the interviews with Gamble’s team would not be kept confidential. In other words, the cadets who have actually experienced problems did not participate, allowing Gamble to base his findings on a sampling consisting of cadets who at best just haven’t personally experienced the problems reported in the Climate Survey, and at worst included those who are among the perpetrators of these problems.

As one Academy faculty member wrote to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) after reading Gamble’s report, which includes a section on the investigation’s methodology: “You don’t do proper research with a self-selected sample — unless, of course, you are fishing for the answers you already want. … Frankly, General Gamble, I expected better. This Gamble Report would be laughed out of committee as even as a master’s degree proposal. It doesn’t even make a good term paper.”

Another faculty member, referring to a faculty meeting at which the Gamble report was addressed, wrote: “What struck me as odd was that the Dean told everyone that the study used a random sample of cadets and faculty. A random sample? I think not. The cadets and faculty self-selected to provide interviews.” This faculty member went on to tell MRFF that, at this same meeting, the dean proceeded to quote the Bible while addressing another item on the agenda, writing: “Are we to trust our leadership with improving the religious atmosphere if they are the ones quoting scripture? She made no attempt to apologize for the remark. I’m not even sure if it registered that she just quoted the Bible during a staff meeting.”

MRFF also heard from numerous cadets after the Gamble report was released. Not surprisingly, with the report pointing out that Gamble’s team had “read media releases from both inside and outside USAFA concerning charges made by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation,” there was some talk about MRFF upon the report’s release. As one cadet reported in the following email excerpt, the Gamble report was touted as “a defeat for Mikey Weinstein [the founder and president of MRFF] and his Forces of Satan.”

“I am USAFA cadet about to finish my third year here (cadet second class) and have not been a MRFF client before today. I am of the Christian faith (Lutheran). I do not have very much time to express my views as we’re at the end of a very demanding semester (my major is xxxxx) and I still have final projects due shortly and then finals week. The report which came out yesterday by the retired general (Gamble) on the USAFA religious climate has been making its way around the Cadet Wing. I was in an informal but serious meeting in my cadet squadron yesterday when the topic of this report came up. There was an Air Force Officer and an Air Force NCO there talking with us as well. A very senior cadet leader (that’s how I will describe him or her) said, ‘This is a clear victory for the Gospel of our Lord and Savior and just as certain a defeat for Mikey Weinstein and his Forces of Satan.’ I was really surprised twice with that mean statement. First, that it was even said like that at all in response to the Gen. Gamble report findings. Second, that nobody, not even the USAF Officer or USAF NCO, said or did anything to oppose that terrible statement. I didn’t either. I didn’t want to get onto the wrong radar screen here at USAFA with regards to religion. I’ve seen what happens if you do.”

MRFF currently has over 260 clients at the Air Force Academy, including both cadets and faculty and staff members. Many of these clients belong to a group of over a hundred Academy cadets who, in order to maintain good standing among their peers and superiors, are actually pretending to be fundamentalist Christians. They leave Bibles, Christian literature, and Christian music CDs lying around their rooms; they attend fundamentalist Christian Bible studies; they feign devoutness at the Academy’s weekly “Special Programs in Religious Education” (SPIRE) programs. They do whatever they have to do to play the role of the “right kind” of Christian cadets, in constant fear of being “outed.” As the leader of this “underground” group of cadets wrote: “If any of us gave even the slightest indication that we weren’t one of their number, our lives would be even more miserable than they already are due to the fact that we are all living lies here. Despite the Cadet Honor Code we all lie about our lives. We have to.”

In the same email, the cadet quoted above explained how the reaction to the Gamble report led them to join this “‘pretend to be an evangelical Christian’ group,” as they called it.

“Just one example of many I could talk about is Gen. Gamble says in his report that a polite ‘no thank you’ to Christian religious proselytizing is just fine and dandy. It is not for at least two reasons, Mr. Weinstein. First, if you try to be polite and say ‘no thanks’ to them they NEVER stop asking you repeatedly to reconsider. Second, you KNOW that eventually you are going to get ‘them’ mad at you by always ‘politely declining.’ I and many other cadets have seen and experienced this over and over again. This is why there is a large group of USAFA cadets (larger at least than the size of the group that Gen. Gamble says he interviewed) who pretend to be evangelical Christians in order to just be left alone. I was only vaguely familiar with that group and its ties to MRFF until what happened yesterday with that ‘celebration’ statement regarding the Gen. Gamble report being made about you and your ‘Forces of Satan’ in front of all the other cadets and that USAF Officer and NCO with absolutely noone saying a word of protest or discontent. I guess my reaction of shock was picked up by another cadet who is in that ‘pretend to be an evangelical Christian’ group. He or she spoke to me right afterwards and now I, too, am with them. And now I, too, am with MRFF.”

Now, why would over a hundred cadets (many of whom are actually Christians, but the “wrong kind” of Christians, i.e. Catholic or mainline Protestant) feel that they have to pretend to be something they’re not when Gen. Gamble’s team found that: “Cadets and permanent party expressed a near-uniform belief that they can (and do) make their own choices to participate – or not – in religious activities, without repercussion.”

Needless to say, none of the cadets who are pretending to be fundamentalist Christians participated in Gamble’s investigation. They were afraid to. One of MRFF’s faculty member clients, however, did participate. This faculty member was David Mullin, a Presbyterian who had recently stepped up to be the plaintiff in MRFF’s effort to block former Marine Lt. Clebe McClary, a fundamentalist Christian speaker to whom “USMC will always mean U.S. Marine for Christ,” from speaking at the Academy. Mullin, having already outed himself as a religious “dissenter,” didn’t think he had anything more to lose by speaking to the Gamble team, but shortly thereafter, his dog Caleb (a service dog trained to assist Mullin, who has a medical condition that causes dizzy spells) was poisoned while waiting in Mullin’s office while he was teaching a class. Caleb, who nearly died, required three blood transfusions after being rushed to an emergency veterinary facility.

But it doesn’t take something as dramatic as a dog being poisoned to send the message to the USAFA cadets that God comes first at the Academy. This message is drummed into their heads at every opportunity. In February, for example, at the Academy’s annual National Character and Leadership Symposium (NCLS), the message was made clear by Paula Gould, wife of Academy Superintendent Lt. General Mike Gould.

Mrs. Gould, herself a former officer in the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve Command, began her presentation by talking about an entirely appropriate and relevant subject — the discrimination she had to overcome as one of the first female Air National Guard pilots. But she quickly turned to other not so appropriate subjects, like how cute her husband is, and how she knew she had found the right guy when he took her to church on one of their first dates. (I don’t think anything more needs to be said about the complete impropriety and downright bizarreness of Mrs. Gould talking to an audience of Academy cadets about how cute their Lt. Gen. Superintendent is like they were a bunch of her girlfriends.) The rest of Mrs. Gould’s presentation consisted of showing a slide show of family photos, and repeatedly stating that the priorities of both herself and her incredibly cute husband are: “God first, family second, and job third.” According to Mrs. Gould, if you follow these priorities, “you’re gonna make it easier on yourself” and “live with joy in your life” because “you’re doing the good, the just, the right thing.”

Here are some video clip highlights from Mrs. Gould’s NCLS speech:

Among the many heartwarming family photos shown by Mrs. Gould during this speech was one of the Gould family with Chad Hennings, who happened to be one of the other speakers appearing at this year’s NCLS. Hennings, an Air Force Academy graduate who went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys, now runs a ministry called “Wingmen,” whose stated goal is “to bring men together in a neutral setting where we can develop relationships with other men of God and deepen our relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Much of Chad Hennings’s NCLS speech sounded like it was straight out of an episode of Glenn Beck — how our culture is declining and we’re going the same route that led Germany into becoming Nazi Germany, etc. He also talked about a bunch of books that could easily be Glenn Beck’s recommend reading list, including one by an author who’s been a guest on Beck’s show, and just happens to also be a speaker for Hennings’s Wingmen ministry. And, naturally, Hennings’s speech was also chock full of Bible quotes.

Hennings has been lauded as a “Christian Fighter Pilot” by someone who should know — Air Force Maj. Jonathan C. Dowty, who runs a blog called “Christian Fighter Pilot,” and published a book with the same name. Maj. Dowty, a 1999 graduate of the Air Force Academy, is also a member of the Officers’ Christian Fellowship (OCF), a military-wide organization of over 15,000 officers, which is very active at the Air Force Academy. The OCF has never been shy about its goals, frequently stating that its “vision” is: “A spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Last September, a blog post by Maj. Dowty, whose obsession with Mikey Weinstein and MRFF has led him to write well over a hundred blog posts attacking Weinstein and/or MRFF, was included in the Air Force Academy’s “Falcon Clips” email. These daily emails, which go out to all Academy cadets, staff, and faculty, begin with the statement: “MESSAGE SENT ON BEHALF OF THE SUPERINTENDENT,” and the description: “The Falcon Clips attachment is a daily compilation of local and national news stories relevant to the Air Force Academy and military personnel.” The September 21, 2010 Falcon Clips included an item that was neither a local nor a national news story, but a diatribe against MRFF from Maj. Dowty’s “Christian Fighter Pilot” blog, titled “Bat Signal busted, Weinstein declares war back on.” This blog post was the second of the fourteen “news” items in the Academy-wide email, and was listed under the heading “SUPT COMMENTARY.” Scores of outraged cadets and faculty members contacted MRFF about the Academy’s distribution not only of a non-newsworthy rant by a blogger, but the endorsement of a blogger who is an active duty Air Force officer promoting Christian supremacy in the military.

As one Academy faculty member, an active duty USAF officer, wrote to MRFF upon seeing Maj. Dowty’s post in the Falcon Clips: “How can we look upon our senior staff as defenders of the Constitution when they clearly endorse this pro-Christian supremacy commentary? When they don’t take a hard stance against this type of behavior, what are we to think as their subordinates? This is why I am always reluctant to air my grievances — what will they do to me because I don’t support their beliefs?”

The situations might be different — the Gamble investigation, the Academy’s National Character and Leadership Symposium, the distribution by the Academy’s superintendent of an inappropriate blog post — but the reaction is always the same. Cadets, and even faculty members, who don’t fit into the Academy’s prescribed religious mold are afraid to speak out, always coming back to that question: “What will they do to me because I don’t support their beliefs?”

In each of the last two Congresses, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) introduced his resolution for an annual spiritual heritage week. This resolution, packed with a seventy-five “Whereas” clause litany of Christian nationalist historical revisionism, was first introduced in the 110th Congress as H. Res. 888, then in the 111th as H. Res. 397, and now it’s back as H. Res. 253, reintroduced by Forbes on May 5.

When the GOP’s favorite pseudo-historian David Barton was on the Daily Show the other night, he boasted to Jon Stewart about so many members of Congress coming to him for historical information. Well, one of these members of Congress is Randy Forbes, one of Barton’s most active minions in Congress and a frequent guest on Barton’s radio show. And there couldn’t be a better example of Barton’s frightening influence in Congress than Forbes’s masterpiece of historical revisionism — his “Spiritual Heritage Week” resolution. As I detailed the last two times this thing was introduced, almost all of the historical misrepresentations and outright lies in Forbes’s insanely long list of “Whereas” clauses come straight from Barton.

I have too much new stuff to write to spend time writing something new about this resolution, and it’s completely unnecessary for me to do so anyway because the lies of David Barton and Randy Forbes haven’t changed. So, I’m just going to repost my post from the last time this shining example of dishonesty and Christian nationalist propaganda was introduced, which contains links to the whole series of posts I wrote over on Talk2Action the first time it was introduced back in 2008.

I know this is really long for a blog post, but I don’t know any other way to show people just how devious and insidious these liars are, and how much David Barton is influencing Congress. As the great Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Originally posted on May 6, 2009 as “It’s Back — Randy Forbes Reintroduces His Religious Heritage Week Resolution.” (Just substitute H. Res. 253 for H. Res. 888 or H. Res. 397. The text of H. Res 253 isn’t up yet, but they rarely change much when they repeatedly reintroduce these kinds of resolutions.)

In the last Congress, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) introduced H. Res. 888, a resolution for an annual religious heritage week. That resolution, packed with a seventy-five “Whereas” clause litany of Christian nationalist historical revisionism, although managing to get ninety-three historically ignorant co-sponsors, never made it to the floor, thanks to the efforts of several organizations and a whole bunch of bloggers who launched a massive letter writing and email campaign against it within days of my first post about it last January.

Well, Forbes is trying again with H. Res. 397, introduced on May 4. This time he’s calling it “America’s Spiritual Heritage Week,” but his list of historical distortions, misrepresentations, and lies has not changed. Therefore, my debunking of his historical hogwash, used last year to stop H. Res. 888, isn’t changing either. Because of the number of lies in Forbes’s resolution, I wrote my rebuttal in nine parts, the first of which is repeated here. Links to the other eight parts, a new one written each time last year’s H. Res. 888 got more co-sponsors, are at the end of this post.

The resolution, which purports to promote “education on America’s history of religious faith,” is packed with the same American history lies found on the Christian nationalist websites, and in the books of pseudo-historians like David Barton. The resolution’s seventy-five “Whereas” clauses are followed by four resolves, the second and third of which are particularly disturbing.

Resolved, That the United States House of Representatives –

(1) affirms the rich spiritual and diverse religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history, including up to the current day;

(2) recognizes that the religious foundations of faith on which America was built are critical underpinnings of our Nation’s most valuable institutions and form the inseparable foundation for America’s representative processes, legal systems, and societal structures;

(3) rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation’s public buildings and educational resources; and

(4) expresses support for designation of a ‘America’s Spiritual Heritage Week’ every year for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.

Originally posted at talk2action.org on January 4, 2008:

I cannot possibly address all seventy-five “Whereas’s” in Mr. Forbes’s ridiculously long list here, so I have chosen fourteen, focusing mainly on those relating to our country’s founding era.

“Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible;”

The unnamed study referred to by Mr. Forbes in this statement was conducted by Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston, whose findings were published in a 1984 article in The American Political Science Review. Misrepresentations of Lutz’s study have been around for years, created by taking a particular figure from the study’s findings, but omitting crucial parts of Lutz’s explanations of these findings. The following is a typical, and slightly more detailed version than that presented by Mr. Forbes, currently being used by the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools (NCBCPS).

“A study by the American Political Science Review on the political documents of the founding era, which was from 1760-1805, discovered that 94 percent of the period’s documents were based on the Bible, with 34 percent of the contents being direct citations from the Bible.”

The NCBCPS gives two statistics in this version, claiming that 34% of the contents of the documents studied were direct citations from the Bible, and in an even more astounding claim, that a whopping 94% of the documents of the period were based on the Bible. So, where do these numbers come from?

The 34% comes from the following chart in Lutz’s study:

From this chart it does appear that 34% of the documents included in Lutz’s study cited the Bible. That’s because they did. And, without Lutz’s explanation of this figure, this chart seems to support the assertion that the Bible, more than any other source, influenced the political thought of the founders. So, the Christian nationalist history revisionists simply omit the explanation that follows.

“…From Table 1 we can see that the biblical tradition is most prominent among the citations. Anyone familiar with the literature will know that most of these citations come from sermons reprinted as pamphlets; hundreds of sermons were reprinted during the era, amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published. These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations…”(1)

The 916 documents included in the study were not official documents, legislative proceedings, etc., but writings “printed for public consumption,” such as books, newspaper articles, and pamphlets. Only items of over 2,000 words were included. Taking into account that three-quarters of the biblical citations came from the subcategory of sermons, which comprised only 10% of the category of pamphlets, the Bible is really in the same range as Classical influences for documents that weren’t sermons.

This explains the 34%, but what about the even more far-fetched claim that 94% of the documents of the period were based on the Bible? Well, that comes from a video put out by pseudo-historian David Barton. Barton somehow concluded from his own “study” that 60% of the documents of the period were based on the Bible, and then just added the 34% from Lutz’s study, ending up with a total of 94%.

Of all the findings in Lutz’s study ignored by the revisionists, however, none are as important as those found in the section of his article entitled “The Pattern of Citations from 1787 to 1788.” As seen in the earlier chart, Lutz broke down the number of citations by decade. In addition to this, he singled out the writings from 1787 and 1788, and then further separated these writings into those written by Federalists and those by Anti-federalists. Lutz found few biblical citations during these two years, and, very interestingly, not a single one in any of the Federalist writings. The following is from what Lutz wrote about the two year period in which the Constitution was written and debated in the press.

“The Bible’s prominence disappears, which is not surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say. The Anti-Federalists do drag it in with respect to basic principles of government, but the Federalist’s inclination to Enlightenment rationalism is most evident here in their failure to consider the Bible relevant.”(2)

See also http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/4/15/04011/4130

“Whereas throughout the American Founding, Congress frequently appropriated money for missionaries and for religious instruction, a practice that Congress repeated for decades after the passage of the Constitution and the First Amendment;”

I would ask Mr. Forbes to provide even a single example of such an appropriation. The best he will be able to do will be to misconstrue a few provisions from Indian treaties, as is done by the Christian nationalist history revisionists.

The revisionist version of American history is full of tales about government efforts to promote Christianity to the Indians, and these tales, which contain little truth to begin with, are often turned into vague statements, such as that in Mr. Forbes’s proposed resolution, used to imply that our early Congresses funded religious education for the American people. The reason for the use of legislation regarding Indians to create these lies is simply the availability of material that can be turned into lies. There were no actual instances, for example, of the early Congresses passing legislation that aided sectarian schools for children who were American citizens. There was, however, cooperation between the government and the Indian mission schools of the 1800s. Although the government’s reasons for this were always secular, such as in an 1819 bill that appropriated a small amount of money for Indian mission schools to add agriculture education to their curriculums, the fact that this cooperation existed means there are actual acts, reports, etc., that can be misrepresented or misquoted, turning them into vague claims, like that of Mr. Forbes, that the government funded religious education. The same is true of Indian treaties. Congress never provided funding for any religious purpose for the American people. It did, however, appropriate funds to fulfill treaty provisions, which occasionally included things such as the building of a church, but even these cases were rare.

Of the hundreds of Indian treaties made during the first fifty years following the ratification of the First Amendment, only nine contained provisions related in any way whatsoever to religion, and only four of the nine contained an explicit provision for the building of a church or the salary of a religious teacher. Several of these were nothing more than provisions compensating missionaries for the churches and other buildings they lost when Indian land was ceded and/or relocating the missionaries to the land reserved to the Indians in the treaty. Another example, the 1794 treaty with the Oneida and other tribes, included a provision to build a church to replace a church that the British had burnt down when these tribes sided with the Americans during the Revolutionary War. In this same fifty year period, only one treaty provided direct funding to schools run by a religious organization. This was an 1827 treaty with the Creeks, which provided funding for the tribe’s three existing schools, which had been established by missionaries. This is the basis of Mr. Forbes’s claim that our early Congresses “frequently appropriated money for missionaries and for religious instruction.”

“Whereas upon approving the Declaration of Independence, John Adams declared that the Fourth of July `ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty’;”

Like the historical revisionists, Mr. Forbes has selectively quoted from John Adams’s letter, making it appear that Adams thought the Fourth of July should be a religious holiday. The following was Adams’s entire statement (Adams, of course, assumed at the time that the Second of July, not the Fourth, would become Independence Day):

“The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”(3)

Restored to its context, it is clear that Adams’s statement was merely a prediction of the various ways in which the day might be commemorated in the future, not an opinion that it should be a religious celebration. By “ought to,” Adams did not mean “should,” but merely that he thought these ways of celebrating were likely, a common usage of the word “ought” at the time.

“Whereas 4 days after approving the Declaration, the Liberty Bell was rung;”

In reality, the Liberty Bell was never rung in conjunction with the reading of the Declaration of Independence. The belfry of the State House had deteriorated so much by 1776 that ringing the bell was impossible. The bell ringing myth began in 1847 with a fictional story written by George Lippard. In Lippard’s story, published in the The Saturday Currier, the aged bellman at the State House was waiting in the belfry, ready to ring the bell the minute that Congress declared independence. But, after waiting for some time, he began to have doubts that this was really going to happen. Then, the bellman’s grandson, who was listening at the doors of the Congress, suddenly shouted, “Ring, Grandfather! Ring!” The popular myth of the ringing of the bell on July 8, the day the Declaration was read to the public, evolved over the years from a combination of Lippard’s story and an assumption by people unfamiliar with the condition of the State House belfry in 1776 that the bell would have been rung for such an important event as the reading.

“Whereas the Liberty Bell was named for the Biblical inscription from Leviticus 25:10 emblazoned around it: `Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof’;”

In order to associate the Liberty Bell, and particularly its biblical inscription, with the American Revolution, revisionists must disregard its real history. The only connection between the Liberty Bell and the Revolution is that it happened to be the bell that hung in the building where the Continental Congress met. The inscription, which is preceded in the Bible by a reference to “the fiftieth year,” was chosen a generation before the Revolution by a now obscure Quaker, Isaac Norris, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Governor William Penn’s Charter of Privileges, the 1701 document that secured the religious freedom and other rights of the colonists and formally gave the Pennsylvania Assembly the expanded legislative powers that it had already begun to exercise.

At the time of the Revolution, and for many years after, the bell was simply called the State House bell. The majority of the signers of the Declaration probably had no idea what was inscribed on it. It wasn’t dubbed the “Liberty Bell” until 1838, when it was adopted as a symbol of liberty by a Boston abolitionist group, and a poem entitled The Liberty Bell was reprinted from one of the group’s pamphlets by William Lloyd Garrison in his anti-slavery publication The Liberator. In the decades preceding this, the bell had become so insignificant that, in 1828, the City of Philadelphia had actually tried to sell it as salvage.

“Whereas in 1777, Congress, facing a National shortage of `Bibles for our schools, and families, and for the public worship of God in our churches,’ announced that they `desired to have a Bible printed under their care & by their encouragement’ and therefore ordered 20,000 copies of the Bible to be imported `into the different ports of the States of the Union’;”

First of all, the first two quotes in this statement, which Mr. Forbes claims were “announced” by Congress, were not the words of Congress, but come from the petition of a group of Philadelphia ministers. Second, Congress did not import any Bibles.

In 1777, three ministers from Philadelphia, Francis Alison, John Ewing, and William Marshall, came up with a plan to alleviate the Bible shortage caused by the inability to import books from England during the Revolutionary War. The ministers’ request for help from Congress, and Congress’s consideration of the ministers’ petition had to do with the problem of price gouging during the war.

The ministers’ idea was to import the necessary type and paper, and print an edition of the Bible in Philadelphia. The problem with this plan, however, was that, if the project was financed and controlled by private companies, the Bibles would most likely be bought up and resold at prices that the average American couldn’t afford. What the ministers wanted Congress to do was to import the materials and finance the printing, as a loan to be repaid by the sale of the Bibles. As Rev. Alison explained in the petition, if Congress imported the type and paper, and Congress contracted the printer, then Congress could regulate the selling price of the Bibles.(4)

The petition was referred to a committee, which concluded that it would be too costly to import the type and paper, and too risky to import them into Philadelphia, a city likely to be invaded by the British, and proposed the less risky alternative of importing already printed Bibles into different ports from a country other than England. If Congress did this, they would still be able to regulate the selling price and be reimbursed by the sales.

What appears in the Journals of the Continental Congress after the committee’s report is the following motion.

“Whereupon, the Congress was moved, to order the Committee of Commerce to import twenty thousand copies of the Bible.”(5)

The problem for those who claim or imply, as Mr. Forbes does, that the Bibles were imported is that, although this motion passed, it was not a final vote to import the Bibles. It was a vote to replace the original plan of importing the type and paper with the committee’s new proposal of importing already printed Bibles. The vote on this motion was close — seven states voted yes; six voted no. A second motion was then made to pass an actual resolution to import the Bibles, but this was postponed and never brought up again. No Bibles were imported. This little problem is solved in the religious right history books by either misquoting the motion to turn it into a resolution, or omitting the motion altogether and ending the story with some statement implying that the Bibles were imported.

See also Chapter 1 of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History, “Congress and the Bible,” at http://www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_chap_1.pdf

“Whereas in 1782, Congress pursued a plan to print a Bible that would be `a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools’ and therefore approved the production of the first English language Bible printed in America that contained the congressional endorsement that `the United States in Congress assembled … recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States’;”

Congress did not “pursue a plan to print” this Bible, as Mr. Forbes claims, nor did they “approve the production.” Robert Aitken was already printing his Bibles as of January 21, 1781 when he petitioned Congress.

There are many versions of this story in the religious right American history books, all worded to mislead that Congress either requested the printing of these Bibles, granted Robert Aitken permission to print them, contracted him to print them, paid for the printing, or had the Bibles printed for the use of schools. Congress did none of these things. All they did was grant one of several requests made by Aitken by having their chaplains examine his work, and allowing him to publish their resolution stating that, based on the chaplains’ report, they were satisfied that his edition was accurate. The words “a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools” are taken from a letter written by Aitken,(6) not the resolution of Congress.

Aitken actually asked Congress for quite a bit more than they gave him. In addition to his work being examined by the chaplains, Aitken requested that his Bible “be published under the Authority of Congress,”(7) and that he “be commissioned or otherwise appointed & Authorized to print and vend Editions of the Sacred Scriptures.”(8) He also asked Congress to purchase some of his Bibles and distribute them to the states. None of these other requests were granted. The only help Aitken ever got from Congress was the resolution endorsing the accuracy of his work.

The actual resolution of Congress is selectively quoted various ways, such as Mr. Forbes’s version — “the United States in Congress assembled … recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States” — omitting that Congress also had a secular reason for recommending Aitken’s Bible, and, in many cases, to make it appear that the resolution was a recommendation of the Bible itself, rather than a recommendation of the accuracy of Aitken’s work.

This was the entire resolution:

“Whereupon, Resolved, That the United States in Congress assembled, highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied from the above report, of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorise him to publish this recommendation in the manner he shall think proper.”(9)

The secular benefit of this resolution, omitted in the revisionist history books, was that it acknowledged “an instance of the progress of arts in this country.” Publicizing the accuracy of Aitken’s Bible was a great way to promote the American printing industry. Few American printers at this time were printing books, and the books that were printed were not only more expensive than those imported from England, but had a reputation for being full of errors. Congress knew that as soon as the war was over and books could once again be imported, any progress that the book shortage had caused in the printing industry would end. The war had created an opportunity for American printers to prove themselves, and Robert Aitken had done that. Printing an accurate edition of a book as large as the Bible was a monumental task for any printer, and Congress wanted it known that an American printer had accomplished it.

Despite a seven year interruption in the availability of Bibles, the recommendation of Congress, and over a year with no competition from imports, Aitken was unable to sell many of his Bibles. Another attempt in May 1783 to get Congress to buy them — this time to give as gifts to the soldiers being discharged — failed, and Aitken ended up losing over £3,000 on the 10,000 Bibles he printed.

See also Chapter 1 of Liars For Jesus, “Congress and the Bible,” at http://www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_chap_1.pdf

“Whereas the 1783 Treaty of Paris that officially ended the Revolution and established America as an independent begins with the appellation `In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity’;”

This reference to the trinity was not an acknowledgment by the government of the United States that America was a Christian nation. It was an acknowledgment by the government of Great Britain that England was a Christian nation. “In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity” was just the customary way that Great Britain began their treaties and other documents. The United States had nothing to do with this wording.

The trinity opening appears only in treaties that were drafted by the agents of other governments, and then signed by the United States. This happened three times — the 1783 treaty with Great Britain, the 1822 Convention with Great Britain, and an 1816 treaty with Sweden and Norway. When it was the other way around, and treaties with these same nations were written by the agents of the United States government, they did not contain any such acknowledgment. Also absent was the phrase “by the grace of God,” which preceded the name of a Christian monarch when the Christian nation wrote the treaty, as well as the lengthy strings of other titles, both religious and otherwise, that typically followed the names of both monarchs and their agents. The United States apparently just didn’t care if an someone happened to be a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, or who was the most Serene or Illustrious.

This simple opening statement from an 1818 convention with Great Britain is typical of the manner in which conventions and treaties written by the government of the United States began.

“The United States of America, and his Majesty the King of Great Britain and Ireland, desirous to cement the good understanding which happily subsists between them…”(10)

“Whereas in 1795 during construction of the Capitol, a practice was instituted whereby `public worship is now regularly administered at the Capitol, every Sunday morning, at 11 o’clock’;”

This one originated in an article by David Barton entitled “Church in the U.S. Capitol”:

“Significantly, the Capitol building had been used as a church even for years before it was occupied by Congress. The cornerstone for the Capitol had been laid on September 18, 1793; two years later while still under construction, the July 2, 1795, Federal Orrery newspaper of Boston reported:

“City of Washington, June 19. It is with much pleasure that we discover the rising consequence of our infant city. Public worship is now regularly administered at the Capitol, every Sunday morning, at 11 o’clock by the Reverend Mr. Ralph.”

This was the entire notice, exactly as it appeared in the Federal Orrery:

“CITY of WASHINGTON, June 19.

“It is with much pleasure that we discover the rising consequence of our infant city, Public worship is now regularly administered at the capitol, every Sunday morning, at 11 o’clock by the reverend mr. Ralph, and an additional school has been opened by that gentleman, upon an extensive and liberal plan.”(11)

In 1795, the Rev. Ralph was preaching in a converted tobacco shed at the foot of Capitol Hill that was being used as an Episcopalian church, not in the Capitol Building, which was barely under construction at the time. In this notice, the word “capitol,” with a lower case “c,” was referring to the city, not the building.

“Whereas in 1789, Congress, in the midst of framing the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, passed the first Federal law touching education, declaring that `Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged’;”

Recently, the Christian nationalist history revisionists have begun to refer quite often to this unnamed first federal education law, quoting what Mr. Forbes has quoted here. But, the law they are referring to was not an education law. It was the Northwest Ordinance. Despite the careful phrasing such as calling it a “law touching education,” this is a deliberately deceptive way to make the best use of the appearance of the words “religion” and “schools” in the same sentence by linking this to the framers of the First Amendment.

The education provision in Article III of the Northwest Ordinance was the work of a Massachusetts man named Manasseh Cutler, a minister, former army chaplain, and one of the directors of the Ohio Company of Associates, the land speculating company whose large land purchase necessitated the writing of the ordinance. But, the original wording of Cutler’s education provision clearly gave the government of the Northwest Territory the authority to promote religion. As much as Congress had to go along with the demands of the Ohio Company, this apparently went too far. The following was the original wording.

“Institutions for the promotion of religion and morality, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”(12)

And, this is what appeared in the ordinance.

“Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Congress kept enough of the original wording to appease Cutler, but stripped the provision of any actual authority to promote religion or religious institutions. The final language that ended up in Article III only gave the government authority to promote education. The first part of the sentence was turned into nothing more than an ineffectual opinion of what was necessary to good government. When the Congress of 1789 reenacted the ordinance, they knew Article III didn’t give the government any power to promote religion. There was no conflict with the First Amendment.

In addition to this, what few people realize is that Article III of the Northwest Ordinance was never even used. It was replaced in the enabling act for the state of Ohio, the very first state to be admitted under the ordinance. The substituted education provision in the 1802 enabling act for Ohio was similar to that in the 1785 Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of lands in the Western Territory, the ordinance that was replaced in 1787 by the Northwest Ordinance. It provided land grants for schools in lieu of the vague statement about encouraging schools in Article III of the Northwest Ordinance. The same provision was made for subsequent states.

See also Chapter 2 of Liars For Jesus, “The Northwest Ordinance,” at http://www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_chap_2.pdf

“Whereas the constitutions of each of the 50 states, either in the preamble or body, explicitly recognize or express gratitude to God;”

This one comes from a list compiled by William Federer, first appearing on WorldNetDaily on October 11, 2003 as an article entitled “Separation of God and State?” Since then, this list has become one of the most widespread pieces of “Godspam,” often emailed under the title “All 50 States Can’t Be Wrong!” Federer’s article began with the following assertion:

“America’s founders did not intend for there to be a separation of God and state, as shown by the fact that all 50 states acknowledged God in their state constitutions…”

This is followed by a list of all of the states, accompanied by excerpts acknowledging God from each of their constitutions, all but four from the preambles. This list, however, is extremely deceptive because, in order to find these religious acknowledgments, Federer had to pick and choose particular versions of many of the state constitutions.

For thirteen of the states, Federer did not use the the original constitutions, but instead chose later versions, rewritten during the second half of the 1800s and the early 1900s, another era in our country’s history when a movement to push religion into the government was making some headway.

For three states, Federer shifted gears and chose the original constitutions rather than later versions because these three, although acknowledging God in the preambles to their Revolutionary War era constitutions, omitted these acknowledgments when revising their constitutions in the first few years following the ratification of the federal Constitution.

For four states that have never acknowledged God in the preamble to any version of their constitutions, Federer deviated from his format of quoting the preambles and resorted to using excerpts from the religious freedom sections, which, of course, acknowledged God in some way or another in the course of guaranteeing freedom of worship.

Then, there are five oddballs, also deceptively presented by Federer, but in ways that don’t exactly fit into any of the above categories.

With only four exceptions, the remaining twenty-five states are those that weren’t admitted until long after all of “America’s founders” were dead and buried. Obviously, nothing in the constitutions of these twenty-one states — admitted between 1845 and 1959 — can be considered to be a reflection of the intent of these founders.

Only four of the fifty acknowledgments of God quoted in Federer’s list — those from the constitutions of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and New York — were written by anyone who could be counted among “America’s founders.”

For a breakdown of the states included in each category, and quotes from and links to the various state constitutions, see http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/4/7/145545/5578

“Whereas President Jefferson not only attended Divine services at the Capitol throughout his presidency and had the Marine Band play at the services, but during his administration church services were also begun in the War Department and the Treasury Department, thus allowing worshippers on any given Sunday the choice to attend church at either the United States Capitol, the War Department, or the Treasury Department if they so desired;”

The source of the myth that Jefferson was responsible for the Marine band playing at these religious services is Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of Samuel Harrison Smith, a Philadelphia newspaper editor who moved to Washington in 1800 to establish a national newspaper, The National Intelligencer. Selective quoting of Mrs. Smith’s description of Sundays at the Capitol, found in The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard) from the Collection of Her Grandson, J. Henley Smith, gives the impression that what took place there were serious religious services, which, most importantly, were attended by Thomas Jefferson. Judging by Mrs. Smith’s entire description of these services, however, which appear to have been the weekly social event more than religious services, it’s not surprising that Jefferson, who complained about the lack of any social life in Washington, was such a “regular attendant.”

“…I have called these Sunday assemblies in the capitol, a congregation, but the almost exclusive appropriation of that word to religious assemblies, prevents its being a descriptive term as applied in the present case, since the gay company who thronged the H. R. looked very little like a religious assembly. The occasion presented for display was not only a novel, but a favourable one for the youth, beauty and fashion of the city, Georgetown and environs. The members of Congress, gladly gave up their seats for such fair auditors, and either lounged in the lobbies, or round the fire places, or stood beside the ladies of their acquaintance. This sabbathday-resort became so fashionable, that the floor of the house offered insufficient space, the platform behind the Speaker’s chair, and every spot where a chair could be wedged in was crowded with ladies in their gayest costume and their attendant beaux and who led them to their seats with the same gallantry as is exhibited in a ball room. Smiles, nods, whispers, nay sometimes tittering marked their recognition of each other, and beguiled the tedium of the service. Often, when cold, a lady would leave her seat and led by her attending beau would make her way through the crowd to one of the fire-places where she could laugh and talk at her ease. One of the officers of the house, followed by his attendant with a great bag over his shoulder, precisely at 12 o’clock, would make his way through the hall to the depository of letters to put them in the mail-bag, which sometimes had a most ludicrous effect, and always diverted attention from the preacher. The musick was as little in union with devotional feelings, as the place. The marine-band, were the performers. Their scarlet uniform, their various instruments, made quite a dazzling appearance in the gallery. The marches they played were good and inspiring, but in their attempts to accompany the psalm-singing of the congregation, they completely failed and after a while, the practice was discontinued, — it was too ridiculous.”(13)

Like Mrs. Smith’s account, that of British diplomat Sir Augustus Foster, paints a very different picture of early Washington and the Capitol church services than the Christian nationalist history revisionists. After a brief description of the shocking behavior of the ladies from Virginia in Washington, Foster continued with the following.

“In going to assemblies one had sometimes to drive three or four miles within the city bounds, and very often at the great risk of an overthrow, or of being what is termed ‘stalled,’ or stuck in the mud. …. Cards were a great resource during the evening, and gaming was all the fashion, at brag especially, for the men who frequented society were chiefly from Virginia or the Western States, and were very fond of this the worst gambling of all games, as being one of countenance as well as of cards. Loo was the innocent diversion of the ladies, who when they looed pronounced the word in a very mincing manner….”

“Church service can certainly never be called an amusement; but from the variety of persons who are allowed to preach in the House of Representatives, there was doubtless some alloy of curiosity in the motives which led one to go there. Though the regular Chaplain was a Presbyterian, sometimes a Methodist, a minister of the Church of England, or a Quaker, or sometimes even a woman took the speaker’s chair; and I don’t think that there was much devotion among the majority. The New Englanders, generally speaking, are very religious; though there are many exceptions, I cannot say so much for the Marylanders, and still less for the Virginians.”(14)

More serious, and very sparsely attended, religious services were, in fact, held in other public buildings. These solemn, four hour long communion services were held in buildings under the control of the executive branch, which is pointed out, of course, to make Jefferson responsible for these services, although there isn’t one shred of evidence that the organizers of the services asked Jefferson for permission to hold them.

See also http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/8/25/23580/0933, and pages 442-447 of Liars for Jesus.

“Whereas Thomas Jefferson urged local governments to make land available specifically for Christian purposes, provided Federal funding for missionary work among Indian tribes, and declared that religious schools would receive ‘the patronage of the government’;”

There are three distinct lies in this sentence. And, although each is created by misrepresenting a single incident, all are pluralized, creating even bigger lies.

The first item, that Jefferson “urged local governments to make land available specifically for Christian purposes,” is copied verbatim from David Barton’s article “The Founders on Public Religious Expression.” The only source cited by Barton for this vague claim is an exchange of letters between Jefferson and John Carroll, the Bishop of Baltimore, in 1801. Carroll wanted to purchase a lot in Washington D.C. to build a church on, and apparently thought that sending his application to Jefferson rather than the Board of Commissioners might get him some preferential treatment and a better price, not because he wanted to build a church, but because Jefferson would remember his patriotism and services to the country during the Revolutionary War, when he volunteered to accompany Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and his cousin, Charles Carroll, on their 1776 diplomatic mission to Canada.

Reading only the reply from Jefferson to Bishop Carroll, it would appear that Jefferson did try to influence the commissioners. But, Jefferson was exaggerating quite a bit when he told Carroll that he had recommended to the commissioners “all the favor which the object of the purchase would wage” and “the advantages of every kind which it would promise.”(15) In reality, he barely gave an opinion on the subject, leaving it entirely up to the commissioners to decide if there was any advantage to accepting the application, and putting absolutely no pressure on them to do so. This was Jefferson’s letter to the Board of Commissioners.

“I take the liberty of referring to you the inclosed application from Bishop Carrol & others for respecting the purchase of a site for a church. it is not for me to interpose in the price of the lots for sale. at the same time none can better than yourselves estimate the considerations of propriety & even of advantage which would urge a just attention to the application, nor better judge of the degree of favor to it which your duties would admit. with yourselves therefore I leave the subject, with assurances of my high consideration & respect.”(16)

No new Catholic church was built in Washington until two decades later, and that was built on privately donated land, so it appears that the commissioners must have turned down Bishop Carroll’s application.

The second item, that Jefferson “provided Federal funding for missionary work among Indian tribes,” is based on a single treaty with the Kaskaskia, signed by Jefferson in 1803, which included a provision for a $100 annual salary for a priest for seven years, and $300 towards the building of a church. Of the over forty treaties with various Indian nations signed by Jefferson during his presidency, this is the only one that contained anything whatsoever having to do with religion. This had nothing to do with converting the Indians, as the words “missionary work” imply. The Kaskaskia were already Catholic, and had been for generations. These things were what the Kaskaskia wanted, and this being a treaty with a sovereign nation, there was no constitutional reason not to provide them.

The third item, that Jefferson “declared that religious schools would receive ‘the patronage of the government’,” is based on a letter written by Jefferson to the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans on July 13 or 14, 1804. The nuns, like many of the territory’s inhabitants, were concerned about the status of their property when the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803. A wide variety of rumors were being spread by anti-American natives of New Orleans, and among these were two about the convent — one that the United States government planned to confiscate the convent’s property and immediately expel the nuns from the country, and another that no new novices would be allowed to enter the convent, but that the government would let the nuns who were already there stay, and then take the property after they all died off. The territorial Governor, William C.C. Claiborne, temporarily managed to convince the nuns that their property was safe and that the United States government would never interfere with a religious institution, but then an incident occurred in which local authorities working for the federal government did shut down a church to prevent a riot between the followers of two rival priests. This renewed the nuns’ fears, and they wrote to Jefferson requesting to have their property officially confirmed to them by Congress. Jefferson knew that there was no point in laying the convent’s request before Congress because they were not yet making determinations about land claims in the territory, so he replied by assuring the nuns that their property was secure even without an official confirmation, and that they shouldn’t have any problem with the local authorities, but if they did they would have the protection of his office. Because he used the word “patronage,” however, the history revisionists imply that he meant financial aid.

“Whereas Justice William Paterson, a signer of the Constitution, declared that ‘Religion and morality … [are] necessary to good government, good order, and good laws’;”

This isn’t a quote from William Paterson. It’s from an item in the May 24, 1800 issue of the United States Oracle of the Day, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire newspaper, describing the opening of the Circuit Court there. Apparently, the reporter heartily approved of the politically biased election-year remarks of the far from impartial Justice Paterson who, in charging the Grand Jury, openly condemned the “Jacobin” Republicans and praised the “righteous” Federalists.

“Circuit Court. On Monday last, the Circuit Court of the United States was opened in this town. The Hon. Judge Paterson presided. After the jury were empanelled the judge delivered a most elegant and appropriate charge. The Law was laid down in a masterly manner; Politics were set in their true light by holding up the Jacobins as the disorganizers of our happy country, and the only instruments of introducing discontent and dissatisfaction among the well-meaning part of the Community. Religion and Morality were pleasingly inculcated and enforced as being necessary to good government, good order, and good laws; ‘for when the righteous are in authority the people rejoice.’”

And, finally, while the first resolve of H. Res. 888 397 asserts that the U.S. House of Representatives “affirms the rich spiritual and diverse religious history” of our country, in every one of Mr. Forbes’s “Whereas’s” that mentions a particular religion, that religion is, of course, Christianity.

“Whereas in 1854 the United States House of Representatives declared ‘It [religion] must be considered as the foundation on which the whole structure rests … Christianity; in its general principles, is the great conservative element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of free institutions’;”

“Whereas in 1870, the Federal government made Christmas (a recognition of the birth of Christ, an event described by the U.S. Supreme Court as ‘acknowledged in the Western World for 20 centuries, and in this country by the people, the Executive Branch, Congress, and the courts for 2 centuries’) and Thanksgiving as official holidays;”

“Whereas the United States Supreme Court has declared throughout the course of our Nation’s history that the United States is ‘a Christian country’, ‘a Christian nation’, ‘a Christian people’, ‘a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being’, and that ‘we cannot read into the Bill of Rights a philosophy of hostility to religion’;”

1. Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No. 1, March 1984, 192.
2. ibid, 194-195.
3. John Adams to Abigail Adams Philadelphia July 3, 1776, Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, vol. 4, (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976), 376.
4. Papers of the Continental Congress, National Archives Microfilm Publication M247, r53, i42, v1, p35.
5. Worthington C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, vol. 8, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907), 734.
6. Papers of the Continental Congress, National Archives Microfilm Publication M247, r48, i41, v1, p63.
7. ibid.
8. ibid.
9. Gaillard Hunt, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, vol. 23, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), 574.
10. Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, vol. 8, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1867), 248.
11. Federal Orrery, Boston, July 2, 1795, vol. 2, no. 74, 289.
12. Roscoe R. Hill, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, vol. 32, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1936), 318.
13. Gaillard Hunt, ed., The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard) from the Collection of Her Grandson, J. Henley Smith, (New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 14-15.
14. Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington: Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Woman Sees Them (Hartford, CT: A.D. Worthington & Co., 1873), 61.
15. Thomas Jefferson to Bishop John Carroll, September 3, 1801, The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651-1827, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, #19966.
16. Thomas Jefferson to William Thornton, Alexander White, and Tristam Dalton, Commissioners, September 3, 1801, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 3, District of Columbia Miscellany, 1790-1808, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, #586.

My eight subsequent posts on H. Res. 888:

More Reasons To Fight H. Res. 888 - 1/18/08
Congressman Randy Forbes — David Barton’s “Hero” – 2/6/08
Borat “Star” Co-Sponsors House Resolution 888 – 2/14/08
Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen? — Another Lie from H. Res. 888 – 2/21/08
H. Res. 888 — It’s Got Lots of Footnotes! – 2/24/08
35% of House Republicans Support Christian Nationalist History Revisionism – 2/26/08
Ron Paul co-sponsors H. Res. 888 – 2/28/08
Randy Forbes and Military Chaplains — More Crap From H. Res. 888 – 3/11/08

OK, I’m about to do what will either be the smartest or the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

After watching Jon Stewart’s interview of pseudo-historian David Barton last night, and the extended interview online this morning, I wasn’t sure what to do. Jon did as good a job as he could against the fast talking Barton — better than anyone else I’ve seen debate this very slick character — but missed several opportunities to really nail him.

After nine years of battling Barton’s lies, the first three or four of which were spent writing my book, Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History, I’m at a point of utter frustration as I watch this Christian nationalist liar get more and more influential. Jon Stewart’s interview was the tipping point. If Jon couldn’t nail this shameless and obvious history revisionist to the wall, I don’t know who can.

A lie can be told in a few words. Debunking that lie can take pages. That is why my book, (which is only the first volume of what will be a three volume series), is five hundred pages long. Nobody is going to be able to adequately prove to any audience that Barton’s lies are lies in an interview like Jon Stewart did last night, and David Barton is never going to agree to debate anyone that he knows can defeat him.

A few hours ago, I was about to sit down at my computer to do my usual thing — write about the Daily Show interview, and debunk the specific lies that Barton was able to get in. But instead I found myself staring at the big Ben Franklin poster on my wall, and changed my mind. Sure, I could write about the particular snippets of disinformation and dishonesty that spewed forth from Barton during this particular interview, but what good would that do? Been there; done that. Then, staring up at the face of Ben Franklin, it was his words, “Do well by doing good,” that suddenly popped into my head.

“Do well by doing good” — the words of a man who could have become outrageously wealthy by patenting his inventions, but decided to just let everybody have them for the public good — have now been stuck in my head for hours, and aren’t going to leave until I do what I’m about to do — give my book away for free.

Can I afford to do this? No. Do I need to do this? Yes! Will lots of people download it and read it? I have no freakin’ idea. It’s just what I need to do to bee able to look Ben Franklin in the eye on that poster on my wall.

If you haven’t seen it already, please watch the Daily Show interview, particularly the online extended interview. Then download my book and read it, or watch the videos on my website. I’ll be outside on this beautiful spring day playing with my dog, knowing that I’ve now done everything I possibly can to fight the scourge of David Barton.

But Bachmann’s admiration of history revisionists wasn’t the thing that really caught my attention in her speech at the conference. It was her detailed account of her family history, aimed at emphasizing her Iowa roots to this audience of Iowans. It was when Bachmann said she was a 7th generation Iowan, descended from Norwegians who immigrated to Iowa in the 1850s, that I started paying attention, simply because it would be mathematically improbable for a Bachmann, who is in her mid-fifties, to be the 7th generation descended from people who immigrated in the 1850s, unless each of her direct ancestors had had a child when they were extremely young. After catching this one obvious lie, I just couldn’t resist doing a little fact checking on the rest of Bachmann’s story. What I found was that Bachmann’s version of her family’s history was as much a work of fiction as anything found in one of David Barton’s books. She wants the people of Iowa to see her as one of them, so she simply changed her family history.

Here’s the video of Bachmann telling her story:

Here’s the transcript:

“Are you all Iowa pastors that are here tonight? Is that what I understand? Oh, well good. That’s why I feel so at home tonight, because I’m with Iowa pastors. I don’t know how many of you know, but I was born in Iowa. I was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and grew up in Waterloo. I grew up in Cedar Falls. And actually, I’m not just an Iowan, I’m a very special kind of Iowan. I’m an ‘Iwegian.’ Now, who knows what an Iwegian is? Okay, there’s a few of those. I’m actually even more than just an Iowan. I’m a 7th generation Iowan. Our family goes back to the 1850s to the first pioneers that came to Iowa from Sognfjord, Norway, where it was about two percent of the land was tillable. And these were not dumb Norwegians. They were very smart. They heard about Iowa, and they said, ‘It’s about a hundred percent fertile land there. Let’s go to Iowa.’

“So they came to Iowa, and they literally felled the trees and built wagons and they plowed the fields. And they were godly people, because there were about eighty Norwegians that went ahead of them, and they got a letter back. It was called the Muskego manifesto, and in the Muskego manifesto it said, ‘We find in America that we have civil and religious liberty, and here we can choose whatever profession we want, and noone tells us what profession we go in. This we consider more wonderful than riches.’ And my great-great-great grandfather, Melchior and Martha Munson, read those words, along with other people in their valley, and they said, ‘This is it. This is our ticket.’ And they got in their mind and in their heart what we all now know as the American dream. And so they sold everything they had — the farm, the land , the cattle, the livestock — everything that they had. They were in their late forties. I looked up the family history. Their parents lived to be just about five years older than they were when they sold everything and took their five children and bought boat tickets to come to Iowa. Isn’t this an amazing story? This is your story, too. It isn’t just my story. This is the story of America.

“And so they literally had the clothes on their backs, a couple of belongings that they could hold. Thirteen weeks it took to get across the ocean, to get to Quebec. But once they got to Quebec, they took almost half as long again to make it overland to finally get to Iowa, where they encountered the worst winter in fifty years. Then the next year — you had a winter like that — the worst flooding in forty-two years. The next winter after that, they had the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded. Now, this is Iowa? They thought this was the land of milk and honey. Then, the year after that, locusts came and ate everything that was their crop. But they kept going, and they persevered, and they were people of faith, and they lived and cried and laughed, and started the first Lutheran church in their area, and they were wonderful, godly men and women of faith, and I am so proud of these people of whom I am descended from. And I’m so thankful for the faith that they faithfully brought down through the family, and now to the seventh generation here in the United States.”

Since Bachmann said her great-great-great grandparents, whose names she provided, emigrated from Norway to Iowa in the 1850s, I searched the 1860 federal census for them. I started by searching for a Melchior Munson in Iowa, but came up empty. But, since unfamiliar foreign first names like Melchior were often misspelled or Americanized when written down by census workers, I didn’t think it was unusual not to find him on the first shot. So I tried Martha Munson, Melchior’s wife, since Martha was a common name that wouldn’t be misspelled. Still nothing. So I broadened my search to include sound-alike last names for Munson, in case it was their last name that was misspelled. Still nothing. Giving my search one last shot, I removed all search parameters except the first name Martha and the last name Munson, including any sound-alike last names. It was only then that I found Melchior and Martha — but not in Iowa. They were in Wisconsin.(1) So, there went that part of Bachmann’s ‘Iowanizing’ of her family history. Her great-great-great grandparents hadn’t gone from Quebec to Iowa. They had settled in Wisconsin.

And what about all those hardships that Bachmann says her ancestors persevered through during their first few years in Iowa — the worst winter in fifty years, the worst flooding in forty-two years, the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded, and a plague of locusts to boot? Well, obviously, none of this happened in Iowa, because her ancestors weren’t in Iowa. And it didn’t happen in Wisconsin either. This all happened in the Dakota Territory. That’s where Melchoir and Martha Munson and their children were from 1861 to 1864.(2) Like many Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Wisconsin, the Munsons set out for the Dakota Territory once Congress made it a territory in 1861.

A number of early histories of the Dakota Territory document that the winter of 1861-1862 was a bad one, which led to flooding when the ice in the Missouri River broke up and blocked the river in the spring of 1862; that the summer of 1863 was very dry, but the settlers still had a good harvest; and that 1864 was the year of the severe drought and the year that grasshoppers came.

According to the 1870 book Outlines of History of the Territory of Dakota, the flood in the spring of 1862 caused the settlers to have to temporarily evacuate, and specifically mentions Elk Point, which is where the Munsons had settled, as being among the places that had an especially good harvest that year, with “all kinds of crops yielding bountifully,”(3) and “The year 1863 was very dry in Dakota, but notwithstanding the drouth, wherever crops were planted and well tended, they yielded well.”(4)

An 1881 book, History of Southeastern Dakota, provides a more detailed account of the weather and natural disasters that occurred in 1862 and 1864.

“In March, 1862, during the breaking up of the Missouri River, that great stream became gorged with ice below the mouth of the Dakota River, and the waters were thrown over the banks, covering nearly the whole valley for sixty miles to Sioux City. The settlers were driven from their homes by the floods, and were obliged to flee to the high lands, with their families and their herds, for safety. The preceding winter had been one of terrible storms and drifting snows, causing much suffering in the poorly constructed houses of the pioneers, and in some cases death from freezing; while the great prairie fires of the previous autumn had brought much disaster to property and danger to life. The season of 1862 following, however, proved to be one of comparative prosperity to the husbandman; the harvests were bountiful, immigration increased, and towns and villages sprang to view along the wooded streams.”(5)

“The season of 1864 was a sad one for the settlements. Not only did lurking Indians hang upon the border for robbery and rapine, but unremmitting drouth and clouds of grasshoppers swept the bloom from the fields and verdure from the plains, and with the approach of autumn, the despondent farmers repaired with their teams to the neighboring States, to bring in supplies upon which to subsist until another hervest-time. The prospects for the future were indeed gloomy, and many of the earliest settlers abandoned the Territory for the purpose of making homes elsewhere.”(6)

But it’s not just where these events occurred that Bachmann is lying about in her revisionist version of her “Iwegian” family history. According to Bachmann, her ancestors “kept going, and they persevered, and they were people of faith.” But did her faithful ancestors really persevere and keep going? Well, no. They were among the settlers written about in the History of southeastern Dakota who “abandoned the Territory for the purpose of making homes elsewhere.” That’s how Melchior and Martha Munson ended up in Iowa — seven years after they came to America. By the time the Munsons abandoned the Dakota Territory in 1864, there was a well established Norwegian community in Chickasaw County, Iowa, so that’s where they stopped and resettled. Clearly, Iowa was never the intended destination of Bachmann’s great-great-great grandfather and grandmother when they left Norway in 1857, as she claims.

Bachmann’s revisionist version of her family history also makes it sound not only like her ancestors’ original destination was Iowa, but that they were among the first Norwegians to venture there, and that the impetus for their decision to go there was a letter referred to as the “Muskego manifesto.” This is a load of bull. First of all, the Muskego manifesto came from Wisconsin, not Iowa. Second, there were a hell of a lot more than “about eighty Norwegians that went ahead of” Bachmann’s great-great-great grandparents. The eighty who signed this letter that, according to Bachmann, inspired her ancestors to follow were just eighty out of thousands of Norwegian immigrants who were already in Wisconsin. Norwegians began arriving in Wisconsin in 1836. By 1850, seven years before Bachmann’s ancestors arrived, there were over 8,000 Norwegians in the state, and by 1860 there were about 44,000. And finally, the Muskego manifesto was written in 1845, twelve years before the Munsons decided to leave Norway. It was one of many letters written by Norwegian immigrants in the mid-1840s that were published in the newspapers in Norway. What was going on was a battle of pro-emigration and anti-emigration letters in the press. There were letters complaining about everything from taxes to rattlesnakes to Mormons, and imploring friends and relatives to forget about coming to America, and other letters, like the Muskego manifesto, disputing the claims in the anti-emigration letters and encouraging Norwegians to emigrate.(7) Besides the fact that these letters came from Wisconsin, and not from Iowa, are we seriously supposed to believe that this letter that Melchior and Martha Munson might have seen printed in a newspaper in 1845 is what made them suddenly decide to pick up and leave Norway twelve years later in 1857? This ludicrous connection is undoubtedly just something that Bachmann concocted after stumbling across the Muskego manifesto in her “research.”

Now, getting back to that 7th generation claim that made me suspicious of Bachmann’s whole story in the first place.

The Munsons were Bachmann’s paternal grandmother’s branch of the family. Bachmann’s father, David John Amble, born in Minnesota in 1929,(8) was the son of Anna T. Munson.

Anna T. Munson, born in Kansas in 1903, was the daughter of Thomas Wilhelm Munson. (Anna T. Munson lived in Iowa from 1905 until she married Bachmann’s grandfather, Jesse Alvin Amble, in 1927, and moved to Minnesota, where he was born and raised.)(9)

Thomas Wilhelm Munson, born in 1880 in Chickasaw County, Iowa, was the son of Halvor Munson.(10) (Thomas Wilhelm Munson moved to Kansas shortly after getting married in 1902, but moved back to Iowa in 1905, which is why Bachmann’s grandmother, Anna, was born in Kansas.)

Halvor Munson, born in Norway in 1846, was the son of Melchior and Martha Munson, and was one of their five children who immigrated to Wisconsin with them in 1857.(11) (Halvor Munson was fifteen years old when the family moved from Wisconsin to the Dakota Territory in 1861. He shortly thereafter joined the Union Army, and served for three years, after which he worked for the government for another three years. He did not move with his parents to Iowa in 1864, but moved there three years later in 1867.)

So, no matter how you count it, Bachmann is not 7th generation. If you consider the first generation to be the first ancestor who was born in America, as most people do, Bachmann would be 4th generation. If you allow for the ambiguity of the term “first generation” to include the immigrant ancestor, and count her great-great grandfather Halvor Munson, who came from Norway as a child, she’s 5th generation. And if you count Melchior and Martha, she’s 6th generation. Still one short of seven.

In addition to lying about her family history in her speech in Iowa, Bachmann, who actually was born in Iowa, but moved to Minnesota as a child, also made it clear that she herself was an Iowan, saying, “I was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and grew up in Waterloo. I grew up in Cedar Falls.” But during her 2008 campaign for reelection in Minnesota, when it was more advantageous for her to be a Minnesotan, her campaign website emphasized her Minnesota roots with a section on its “About” page titled “Rooted in Minnesota,” which began, “Michele grew up in Anoka.”

If Bachmann’s presidential aspirations don’t work out and she has settle for running for reelection to Congress, I wonder how her constituents in Minnesota will feel about her denouncing her Minnesota roots in favor of being an Iowan.

1. 1860 Federal Census; Census Place: Utica, Crawford, Wisconsin; Roll: M653_1402; Page: 914; Image: 188; Family History Library Film: 805402. (Click here to view census page image.)
2. Account of Martha Munson Steensland, daughter of Muns Munson, in Melchior and Martha Munson Family History, 1812-1989. Muns Munson was one of two children born to Melchior and Martha Munson after they arrived in Wisconsin. According to his daughter’s account, Muns, who was born in 1858, was three years old when the family left Wisconsin for the Dakota Territory, and seven years old when they left the Dakota Territory and resettled in Iowa, making their years in the Dakota Territory 1861-1864, dates which correspond with several other sources.
3. James S. Foster, Outlines of History of the Territory of Dakota and Emigrant’s Guide to the Free Lands of the Northwest, (Yankton, Dakota Territory, 1870), 11.
4. ibid., 19.
5. History of Southeastern Dakota: Its Settlement and Growth, (Sioux City, Iowa: Western Publishing Company, 1881), 21.
6. ibid., 24.
7. A selection of these letters, including the Muskego manifesto, can be found in Land of Their Choice: The Immigrants Write Home, (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 1955).
8. 1930 Federal Census; Census Place: Adams, Mower, Minnesota; Roll: 1108; Page: 1B; Enumeration District: 1; Image: 578.0. (Click here to view census page image.)
9. 1910 Federal Census; Census Place: Jacksonville, Chickasaw, Iowa; Roll: T624_396; Page: 3B; Enumeration District: 0045; Image: 1136; FHL Number: 1374409. (Click here to view census page image.)
10. ibid.
11. 1860 Federal Census; Census Place: Utica, Crawford, Wisconsin; Roll: M653_1402; Page: 914; Image: 188; Family History Library Film: 805402. (Click here to view census page image – the handwriting is hard to read, but Halvor is the 14 year old son listed.)

An article on the official U.S. Army website about this team of chaplains, stationed in the bowels of Afghanistan, begins:

“Sitting on a toilet isn’t a place one would normally expect to think about God. But the two-man chaplain team at Spin Boldak wants Soldiers to do just that.”

The article goes on to describe the chaplains’ unusual (and unconstitutional) bathroom outreach ministry:

“Holy Crap: Chaplain’s Thought of the Week, where Bible verses and inspirational messages are posted on the doors of bathroom stalls, is just one of the many creative programs run by this holy team.”

I think we can truly say at this point that the U.S. military might as well be using the Constitution as toilet paper.

The entire goal of Barton’s “Faith 102″ class was to prove that even the two least religious founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, had no intention of separating church and state. Since I’d already debunked many of these lies before, and I was very busy over the summer at my “day job” with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, I decided to throw together a few videos debunking them using clips my previous videos. I only had time to get to seven of Barton’s “Faith 102″ lies, but plan to get to the rest in the new year.

Barton’s lie that more than half the signers of the Declaration of Independence were ministers (he also used this one in his first Beck U class):

Barton’s lie that Benjamin Franklin chose to begin a treaty in the name of the trinity:

Barton’s lie that Thomas Jefferson started church services at the Capitol (should be watched along with the next video about the Marine Band):

Barton’s lie that Thomas Jefferson told the Marine Band to play at church services:

Barton’s lie that Thomas Jefferson sent Christian missionaries to evangelize the Indians:

Barton’s lie about why the Danbury Baptists wrote to Thomas Jefferson, and what his reply meant:

During this Beck U class, Barton once again told his lie about Thomas Jefferson dating his documents “in the year of our Lord Christ,” a lie that he told on Beck’s show that I debunked in my “No, Mr. Beck…” video series, so here’s that video again:

A little background: I’ve been working with Sgt. Griffith for the past few months on an event he’s organizing in response to the Billy Graham Evangelical Association’s “Rock The Fort” event, which was held on the parade field at Fort Bragg in September. Although a number of organizations objected to a military installation officially sponsoring this Billy Graham event, which was clearly designed to make converts of soldiers at the post, the event went on as planned. In defense of the event, the post commander issued a statement saying that any other group that wanted to hold a similar event would be given the same approval and support that “Rock The Fort” had been given. I immediately called Mikey Weinstein, the boss of me at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), and said that we needed to take Fort Bragg up on its offer and tell them we want to hold a comparable event for non-theists. Just as we were discussing the feasibility of putting on an event on the same scale as the Billy Graham event, we got an email from Sgt. Griffith, who had had exactly the same idea. And, thus, a beautiful partnership was born. From my very first phone conversation with Sgt. Griffith a few days later, I knew we had a soldier with the brains, guts, and determination to pull this off. Other organizations quickly got on board — the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Americans United, the Military Association of Athiests and Freethinkers, American Atheists, and the Stiefel Freethought Foundation — as did a bunch of great entertainers and speakers, including the illustrious Ed Brayton, who has agreed to emcee the event. The event, tentatively scheduled to take place in April, is called Rock Beyond Belief.

Now, getting back to the Army’s “Soldier Fitness Tracker” survey …

After taking the survey, and finding out that, as a non-believer, the Army considers him unfit to serve, Sgt. Griffith sent out an email to all the organizations and individuals involved in Rock Beyond Belief, and people sprang into action. MRFF has a prominent law firm on it, and several of the bloggers among the recipients of the email immediately posted about this jaw droppingly outrageous “religious test.”

One of these blog posts, written by Al Stefanelli, has now gone viral. Al’s post, which begins, “Did you know that the United States Army is concerned with the spiritual well-being of their soldiers? Did you know that if you choose not to believe in the supernatural that the United States Army can consider you unfit to serve?,” can be found here, and a follow-up post here.

Over the past few years, I’ve written quite a bit about “Spiritual Fitness,” as the Army calls it, and included a section about it in a chapter I wrote for the recently released book Attitudes Aren’t Free: Thinking Deeply about Diversity in the US Armed Forces, published by Air University Press, the publishing arm of the Air Force’s Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base. Here’s what I wrote about it in the book:

Spiritual Fitness

“Spiritual fitness” is the military’s new code phrase for promoting religion, and the religion being promoted is Christianity. There are spiritual fitness centers, spiritual fitness programs, spiritual fitness concerts, spiritual fitness runs and walks, and so forth.

This year, for example, Fort Eustis, Virginia, and Fort Lee, Virginia, have been holding a spiritual fitness concert series. At Fort Eustis, it’s actually called the “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert Series.” This is a Christian concert series. All of the performers are Christian recording artists. Photos from one of the Fort Lee concerts show crosses everywhere, and one photo’s caption even says that the performer “took a moment to read a Bible passage” during her set. In some cases, attendance at Christian concerts held at basic training installations has been mandatory for the Soldiers in training.

In March 2008, a program was presented at a commander’s call at RAF Lakenheath, England. This commander’s call was mandatory for an estimated 1,000 service members, and the PowerPoint version of the presentation was e-mailed to an additional 4,000-5,000 members. The “spiritual fitness” segment of this presentation was titled “A New Approach to Suicide Prevention: Developing Purpose-Driven Airmen,” a takeoff on Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. The presentation also incorporated creationism into suicide prevention. One slide, titled “Contrasting Theories of Hope, 2 Ultimate Theories Explaining Our Existence,” has two columns, the first titled “Chance,” and the second “Design,” comparing Charles Darwin and “Random/Chaos” to God and “Purpose/Design.” Darwin, creationism, and religion are also part of a chart comparing the former Soviet Union to the United States, which concludes that “Naturalism/Evolution/Atheism” lead to people being “in bondage” and having “no hope,” while theism leads to “People of Freedom” and “People of Hope/Destiny.”

(My entire chapter, “Against All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic,” can be downloaded here.)

Since the publication of the book, MRFF has found out that not only were the “Spiritual Fitness” concerts at Fort Eustis exclusively Christian, but that soldiers were actually punished for choosing not to attend them. We have also received many more complaints about a plethora of other ways in which Christianity is being pushed on our service men and women under the guise of “Spiritual Fitness,” such as the new “Spiritual Fitness Center” at Fort Hood, which, while claimed by the Army to not only be non-Christian but completely non-religious, is chock full of crosses and other displays promoting evangelical Christianity. Check out this video tour filmed by a soldier at Fort Hood for MRFF.

Make no mistake: “Spiritual Fitness” is just a clever term concocted by the military to flagrantly violate the Constitution and promote religion.

(This video also includes a special “treat” — my cheesy guitar rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.)

Here’s the transcript of what I said in the video, and images of the actual charts from the Lutz study, for those who can’t watch videos at work or have slow connections:

The study referred to by Beck and Barton was conducted by Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston. Lutz published his findings in a 1984 article in The American Political Science Review, and misrepresentations of it began appearing a few years later. The first one was in John Eidsmoe’s 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, which was soon followed by the version most often seen today — the one created by David Barton in his 1988 book The Myth of Separation.

What revisionists like Barton typically do to distort this study is to accurately present some of the charts of the study’s findings, but omit the parts of Lutz’s explanations of these findings that explain what the numbers in the charts actually mean. That way they can just replace the real explanations with whatever they want their followers to think the numbers mean.

So, let’s start with what Barton said on Beck about the writings of the founders: “34% of their quotes came out of the Bible.” That comes from this chart in Lutz’s study.

Now, based on this chart alone it really does appear that 34% of the citations in the documents studied came from the Bible. That’s because they did. And, without Lutz’s explanation of this figure, this chart would seem to support Barton’s claim that the Bible, more than any other source, influenced the political thought of the founders.

But let’s take a look at Lutz’s explanation of that chart:

“…From Table 1 we can see that the biblical tradition is most prominent among the citations. Anyone familiar with the literature will know that most of these citations come from sermons reprinted as pamphlets; hundreds of sermons were reprinted during the era, amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published. These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations…”

So, in other words, about three-quarters of all the Bible citations that make up that 34% came from sermons, a sub-category of just one of the categories of the types of documents used in the study, and “anyone familiar with the literature,” as Barton incessantly claims to be, would know that. And this bumps the Bible down into the range of classical influences for all the documents that weren’t sermons, and moves the enlightenment and whig influences into the number one and two spots for all the documents that weren’t sermons.

But, of all the findings in this study that are omitted by Barton and the other revisionists, none are nearly as important as those found in the section of Lutz’s article titled “The Pattern of Citations from 1787 to 1788.”

As seen in the first chart, Lutz broke down the number of citations from all sources by decade.

But, in addition to this, he also singled out the writings from 1787 and 1788, the crucial two year period when our government was actually being formed. The revisionists completely omit this part of the study. Why? Because Lutz found hardly any biblical citations during the time that the Constitution was being written and debated in the press, and, on top of that, not a single one of these biblical references were found in any of the federalist writings in support of the Constitution. The only ones he found were used by the anti-federalists to argue against the Constitution.

Here’s what Lutz wrote about this.

“The Bible’s prominence disappears, which is not surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say. The Anti-Federalists do drag it in with respect to basic principles of government, but the Federalists’ inclination to Enlightenment rationalism is most evident here in their failure to consider the Bible relevant.”

But omitting pesky little parts of the study like this one, and merely misrepresenting the study’s 34% Bible citation figure wasn’t good enough for David Barton, so he found a way to inflate that figure, making a whopping 94% of the quotes used by the founders come from the Bible. How did he do this? Well, he took the other sources listed in the study, like Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke, and then claimed that because some of these other sources “derived their ideas from the Bible,” the founders were indirectly quoting the Bible when they cited these other sources. Barton somehow determined by this method that an additional 60% of the citations in Lutz’s study came from the Bible, added this 60% to the already misrepresented 34% from the actual study, and, voilà, 94% of all quotes used by the founders came from the Bible.

In his article, Lutz said that more of the biblical citations he found came from the Book of Deuteronomy than any other book in the Bible, which is why Glenn Beck said that Deuteronomy is “the most quoted out of any of our founding documents.” But, besides all those quotes from Deuteronomy, Barton, in his “study,” added things like the founders getting the idea for the concept of the separation of powers from the Book of Isaiah, because Isaiah 33:22 says, “For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, and the Lord is our king.” So, there you have it: three branches of government, and they’re all “the Lord.” He’s the judge, the lawgiver, and the king. It’s exactly the same as our government — except for that pesky checks and balances thing, and that minor detail of not having a king who controlled everything.

Barton first published published his “findings” in his 1988 book The Myth of Separation, and repeated it in one of his videos, and from there it spread. Here’s Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana using Barton’s 94% statistic and other claims in the House of Representatives back in 1993, citing Barton’s book nearly verbatim.

Now, I haven’t heard Barton use his pumped up 94% statistic in a while, but this really doesn’t matter because once Barton puts something out there it takes on a life of its own, and continues to be used whether Barton himself is still using it or not.

In April 2007, it showed up in an article on WorldNetDaily titled Bringing the Bible Back Into Public Schools, by Chuck Norris, a board member and spokesman for the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools (NCBCPS). Norris was regurgitating the even more distorted version of Barton’s claim about the Lutz study that’s found on the NCBCPS website’s “Founding Fathers” page. The NCBCPS people claim that it was actually the Lutz study, not David Barton, that “found that 94% of the documents that went into the Founding era were based on the Bible,” and that it’s not just that 34% of the citations Lutz found were from the Bible, but that “34% of the contents” of these documents “were direct quotations from the Bible.” This is what I mean by Barton’s lies taking on a life of their own. It’s like a game of what I call “fundy telephone.” Barton puts out the original lie, and it gets repeated over and over for years — in this case over two decades — eventually becoming an even bigger lie than Barton started.

And, the use of Barton’s lies by the NCBCPS brings me to my final point. Barton does nothing to stop this, even when he obviously has the power to do so. Barton is on the advisory board of the NCBCPS, but apparently his “advice” doesn’t include stopping this curriculum from using bogus quotes that even he himself advises his followers not to use.

Quite a few years ago, after being called out on some of his bogus founders’ quotes, Barton put out a list of “Unconfirmed Quotations,” and advises the readers of his website to “refrain from using them until such time that an original primary source may be found.” And yet six of these bogus quotes from Barton’s own “Unconfirmed Quotations” list, among them the infamous James Madison Ten Commandments quote, appear in the NCBCPS curriculum. So what, exactly, is NCBCPS advisory board member Barton advising this organization on? How to promote his lies and get them into our public schools?

And, just last week [video was made back in July] on Glenn Beck, John Hagee repeated one of these bogus quotes that Barton put out there, but now advises his followers not to use: the one about George Washington saying, “It’s impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible,” while fellow guest Barton just stayed silent and listened to someone spread a quote that he knows is bogus to millions of gullible Americans.

I sometimes get criticized, even by those who think that Barton is a complete charlatan, for coming right out and calling him a liar. They ask me how I can be sure that he’s intentionally lying, and not just a really crappy historian. Well, it’s moments like that one with John Hagee that expose him as the liar that he is, and that is exactly what I will continue to call him.

(The text version for this one is just a transcript of what I said in the video, so if you think it sounds exactly like what I said in the video it’s because it is. I started including transcripts with my videos after getting a bunch of requests from people who have slow connections or can’t watch videos at work.)

Barton has been using this lie for a very long time. In an ten year old article on his WallBuilders website, he wrote: “While President, Jefferson closed his presidential documents with the phrase, `In the year of our Lord Christ; by the President; Thomas Jefferson.’” In that article, Barton’s footnote for this claim is: “For example, his presidential act of October 18, 1804, from an original document in our possession.” A typical revisionist tactic, which Barton used in this footnote, is to take their claim, which isn’t even true in the first place, and word it in a way that makes it sound like something happened multiple times or was the regular practice of whoever they’re lying about. In his footnote, Barton does this by beginning with the words “for example.” On Beck’s show, he kept referring to Jefferson’s documents (plural), as if the document he was showing was just one example of many.

A few years later after Barton started using this lie about Jefferson, the late D. James Kennedy, in his 2003 book What If America Were a Christian Nation Again?, repeated the lie, writing: “I have a photocopy of the conclusion of one of the many documents that he signed as president, and it says, `In the year of our Lord Christ 1804.’ He was the first president, and to my knowledge, the only president who did that. Jefferson, the anti-Christian, the irreligious infidel, said that it is Christ who is our Lord, and no one else.”

At the time that I was working on my book, which I started writing around the same time that D. James Kennedy’s book came out, I had no idea what this mystery document that Barton claimed to possess might be. I knew it had to be some kind of document that already had the date on it, and was simply signed by Jefferson, because the claim that Jefferson personally dated any of his documents “In the year of our Lord,” let alone “In the year of our Lord Christ,” was just too ridiculous. In fact, Jefferson sometimes went out of his way to make it clear to everybody that he wasn’t just overlooking using the phrase “In the year of our Lord,” but was deliberately omitting it, particularly in documents that he was writing to abolish something religious, using phrases like “in the Christian computation,” and “of the Christian epoch.” Anyway, my best guess at the time as to what Barton’s mystery document might be was a pardon, since there was, in fact, a pardon signed by Jefferson that would have coincided with the date cited by Barton in his footnote. It didn’t occur to me at the time that it might just be a routine preprinted form, which, as I’ll explain in a minute, is exactly what this document is. So, I might have been off when I took a stab at guessing what Barton’s mystery document might be, but, as I had suspected, it is not a document that Jefferson personally wrote and dated, but an already written document that he merely signed.

When I made my first YouTube videos in March of last year, (in response to Barton bashing me on his radio show), I still didn’t know what the document was, even though he had showed a corner of it on the video screen during his presentation that I had attended a few months earlier. But, about a week after I put my videos up on YouTube, Barton suddenly posted the document on his website — well, sort of. The document that Barton posted was not dated October 18, 1804, as the footnote in his earlier website article stated, but September 24, 1807. But, this doesn’t really matter. Both documents, the 1804 one that Barton shows a corner of in his presentation, and the 1807 one now posted on his website are the same thing. They’re ship’s papers. These documents, carried by all American ships leaving the United States, were a fill-in-the-blanks form with columns translated into several languages. Each president signed hundreds of these forms, leaving all the other information blank, and then the blank signed forms were sent in bulk to the customs officials at all the ports, where they were filled out as needed for departing ships.

Not to digress from the story too much, but I did wonder why Barton didn’t just post an image of the 1804 ship’s papers that he had been claiming for a decade to have in his possession. The only reason I could think of is that he never did actually have the original 1804 document that he claimed to have. The image of it that he showed video screen could be a photocopy and nobody would know the difference since he never pulls out and waves around the original document like he does with other documents he’s showing on the screen. He probably just looked for an original after the fact, and bought the 1807 one. If this is the case, Mr. Barton should know that there is currently one up for auction that’s only one day off from the date of that 1804 one he claims to own. He could buy that one and easily get away with claiming that he just had a typo in the date in his old article. But, like I said, it really doesn’t matter whether it was an 1804 or 1807 ship’s papers. They’re exactly the same because they were a preprinted form. So, let’s get back to the story.

The primary purpose of a ship’s papers, sometimes called sea letters or passports, was to provide proof of the nationality of the ship’s owner if the ship was stopped by a foreign power. This became enormously important in 1793 when George Washington proclaimed the neutrality of the United States in the war between France and England, as I’ll explain in a minute when I get to who really chose the language of this form.

Now, Barton claims in his description of the form on his website that “this is the explicitly Christian language that President Thomas Jefferson chose to use in official public presidential documents,” and said on Glenn Beck that “Jefferson added in the year of our lord Christ.” This is a flat out lie. Actually, it’s two lies. Jefferson absolutely did not choose the language on this form, and he was not the only president who signed these forms that were dated that way. So did Washington and Adams before him, and Madison and Monroe after him. While the ship’s papers form remained virtually the same from 1793 until well into the late 1800s, the name Christ was eventually dropped from the date on it, but that didn’t happen until somewhere in the 1820s or 1830s.

The reason Barton lies about Jefferson being the only president to sign these documents is pretty obvious. As he claims in his presentations, other early presidents only dated things “in the year of our Lord,” but Jefferson — the least religious of them all — the man who coined the phrase “separation between church and state” — well, he went even further and added the name Christ! And his audience, of course, believes him.

So, if it wasn’t Jefferson, who actually did choose the language of these ship’s papers? Well, that would be the High and Mighty Lords of the States-General of the United Netherlands. The language to be used on ships’ papers was annexed to the 1782 Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the Netherlands, and the twenty-fifth article of the treaty itself stipulated that this was the wording that would be used. At the time this treaty was made, the Netherlands was still the Republic of the United Netherlands, which was a Christian republic where every public official had to be a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, and their official documents were full of religious language. Now, John Adams did sign this treaty and agree to this wording, but as the foreign minister of a country that hadn’t even officially gained its independence yet, who was having a hell of a time even getting the powers of Europe to recognize the United States and make treaties with this brand new country, he would hardly have been in a position to argue with the eight High and Mighty Lords negotiating the treaty over the way they dated their ships’ papers, and an inconsequential detail like this would obviously have been the furthest thing from his mind anyway.

Now, between 1782 and 1793, the United States wasn’t really all that diligent about keeping to the precise ship’s papers wording from the 1782 Netherlands treaty, or even making sure that all ships were carrying papers. In fact, some of the ships’ papers from George Washington’s first term were even dated A.D. instead of “in the year of our Lord Christ.” But this changed when Washington proclaimed the neutrality of the United States in the war between France and England. Now the identification of ships was a high priority matter of national security. American merchants needed to be able to prove to the ships and officials of the “belligerent powers,” as they were called, that they were from a neutral country, and the United States government needed to prevent foreign ships from fraudulently obtaining American papers. So, in a May 1793 Treasury Department circular to all the customs officials, Alexander Hamilton made it clear that everything was immediately going to start being done by the book.

Enclosed with each of Hamilton’s circulars were copies of latest version of the Dutch and English translations, with instructions on exactly how they were to be filled out, specifying that “the following instruction to fill the Dutch copy is to be precisely followed.” The language of this new version was word for word from the 1782 treaty with the Netherlands, which was suddenly important because Holland was one of the belligerent powers. The new ships’ papers being printed had translations of the Netherlands treaty wording in three languages — Dutch, French, and English. Treaties with France and England also required that ships carry papers, but only the Netherlands treaty stipulated that the specific wording had to be used. A few years later, there was a treaty with Spain that also required American ships to carry papers, so a fourth column with the Spanish translation was added. What Barton has is a piece of one of these four language ship’s papers, showing two of the columns.

But here’s the most interesting part of the story. Every president and secretary of state, whose signature was also required on these forms, was falsely swearing an oath when they signed them! Why? Because the “in the year of our Lord Christ” line was actually part of the oath section of the form. What the presidents and secretaries of state were actually signing was an oath that they were witness to the administering of the oath taken by the captain of the ship, where the captain was swearing that the ship was American owned. They were also swearing that they had signed the document and affixed the Seal of the United States to it on the date that that was filled in on it by the customs official. Now, since the president and secretary of state were just signing hundreds of these forms ahead of time to be sent to all the ports, they never witnessed the ship captains taking their oaths, and obviously weren’t signing the forms on the date that they were swearing they had signed them on. I even found one dated in July 1794 that was signed by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. What’s wrong with that? Well, Jefferson had resigned as secretary of state seven months earlier in 1793. And there’s another by James Madison that’s actually signed the day before his inauguration, so Madison signed them before he was sworn in and sent them ahead of time to the ports and they started using them before Madison was actually inaugurated. So, apparently, none of our early presidents or secretaries of state had any problem whatsoever falsely swearing they had witnessed something they didn’t witness and swearing they had signed a document on a date that they didn’t really sign it on, even when that document was dated “in the year of our lord Christ.”

There’s a fundamentalist ministry operating at the Air Force Academy called Cadets For Christ. This ministry is part of the “shepherding” movement, using cult-like tactics by which the cadets recruited by ministry leaders Don and Anna Warrick are separated from their families and anything else that might interfere with their brainwashing. In the shepherding movement, the female is the “sheep” and the male is the “shepherd,” and a woman’s sole purpose in life is to be a good wife and mother, subordinating herself to her male shepherd.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been contacted by a number of parents of Academy cadets who have fallen prey to the Warricks’ ministry, and one of these families has been brave enough to go public with their story.

Peter and Jean Baas, the parents of 2010 Academy graduate Lauren Baas, are now completely estranged from their daughter. Why? Because the Baas family is Catholic, and therefore, according to the Warricks, unsaved. While at the Academy, Lauren Baas, who entered the Academy with dreams of becoming an Air Force pilot, was prepared for what can only be described as an arranged marriage by the Warricks, and is now engaged to her shepherd. A woman, of course, is destined by God to be a good wife and mother and serve her shepherd, not be an Air Force pilot and serve her country.

Lest anyone think that the “sheep and shepherd” terminology might be an exaggeration, just take a look at Lauren Baas’s “Baa Baa Sisterhood” cookbook.

Part of the Baas family’s going public with their story was to write a “holiday letter” to the Warricks, with an introduction to Air Force Academy superintendent Lt. Gen. Mike Gould, to whom the letter was also sent. I urge everyone to read this letter, which can be found here. Reading the words of one of the families ripped apart by this Air Force Academy sanctioned ministry is the only way to even begin to fathom what the Warricks are doing to the cadets who fall under their influence.

Now, on to the latest development.

Last week, Jean Baas was contacted by the Air Force Academy’s head chaplain, Col. Robert Bruno, who informed her that the Academy had received thirty-five letters in support of Cadets for Christ, but only nine opposing the ministry. The nine letters opposing the ministry were not solicited, but presumably just sent by people who had read about what Cadets for Christ had done to the Baas family. Most of the thirty-five in support of the ministry, on the other hand, were solicited by Don Warrick in an October 31 email, which began: “The Wing Chaplain at the Air Force Academy and our Board thought it would be helpful if we had on file at the Chaplain’s office letters from present and past cadets, parents, board members, and other friends of Cadets for Christ.”

In a September 28 letter to the Secretary of Defense, which was posted on Huffington Post and elsewhere, MRFF had included quotes from some of Jean Baas’s emails to MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein, and demanded an investigation of Cadets for Christ. MRFF did not name the Baas family by name in that letter, but began publicly using their name shortly thereafter.

This led Anna Warrick to send the following email to the Cadets for Christ flock sometime in mid-October:

“A quick update on the Mikey Weinstein situation. We have been interrogated by the Chaplain’s office and are at least at this time in the clear from the superintendent’s office. Even though the underground newspaper wrote a questioning article in regard to Lauren’s mother and her accusations. Lauren came out for the Fall Retreat and she and Andy seem to be doing well although a bit “ruffled” by all the accusations even towards Andy and his lovely family. It appears that Mikey is not sure this is a situation that is worth his efforts so for now a relatively quiet time. We have some great upperclassmen who were curious about what was being said and liked the group well enough that they stayed…guess ther (sic) is some humor in that. We decided to move the small group Wednesday studies at USAFA back to our house so we will not use any USAFA facilities which is what Mr. Weinstein seems to target…this too is working well for all of us.”

Apparently, by the end of October, the Warricks had realized that the “Mikey Weinstein situation” was not going to go away, and that they were going to need to start stockpiling some ammo, prompting Don Warrick to send out his October 31 solicitation for letters of support, entitled “Want To Do A Favor For Cadets For Christ?,” which went to over a hundred people, about a quarter of them current Academy cadets. The flock was instructed to address their letters to Air Force Academy chaplain Lt. Col. J. Daniel Brantingham. A follow-up email was sent out by Warrick on November 9, thanking those who had already sent their letters to Lt. Col. Brantingham, and asking those who hadn’t already sent theirs to do so.

So, since the Air Force Academy has apparently decided to base its decision on whether or not to take proper action regarding Cadets for Christ on a “vote,” tallied by how many letters of support and how many letters of opposition it receives, I think it only proper for MRFF to solicit letters in the same way that Cadets for Christ is doing.

Therefore, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the Baas family thought it would be helpful if we had on file at the Chaplain’s office letters from friends of the United States Constitution, religious freedom, and everyone who feels that the United States Air Force Academy should be encouraging women to aspire to something more than being subservient “sheep” to their male “shepherds,” in opposition of Cadets for Christ.

Emails should be addressed to:

USAFA head chaplain Col. Robert Bruno at robert.bruno@usafa.edu, chaplain Lt. Col. Dan Brantingham at james.brantingham@usafa.edu, and, just for good measure, USAFA Superintendent Lt. Gen. Mike Gould at mike.gould@usafa.edu