Writing for The74, Mark Keierleber takes a deep dive into the spread of legislation aimed at injecting religion into US classrooms.
Political operative David Barton held up a thick Bible with years of wear on its dark brown cover and proclaimed its pages put Protestant Christianity at the center of the country’s very foundation.
“This is actually printed by the official printer of Congress,” said Barton, a best-selling author and influential far-right Christian nationalist. Barton has spent the last 40 years arguing that the separation of church and state is a myth — and has built a multimillion-dollar media and lobbying operation to influence public opinion and shape laws around the belief that the United States was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation.
At this particular hearing in April, Barton appeared before the Texas House education committee and testified in favor of legislation, since signed into law, requiring that posters of the Ten Commandments be placed inside every classroom in the state’s nearly 9,100 public schools by September. With him, Barton brought a small collection of books he claims were foundational to the country’s public education system until the 20th Century.
Barton isn’t just a primary pitchman for the Ten Commandments law in Texas, his home state, an investigation by The 74 reveals. His fingerprints appear on 28 bills that have cropped up before the legislatures in 18 states this year. A data analysis of the bills exposes how their language, structure and requirements are inherently identical. In dozens of instances, they match model legislation pitched by Barton verbatim.
“It also says it’s ‘a neat Edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools,’” he continued. “It has the Ten Commandments.”
In actuality, Barton lifted language from Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken calling on Congress to sanction a Bible that could also be for “the use of schools.” Christian nationalists have for years falsely claimed the Revolutionary-era printing includes a government promotion of Christianity. Barton has long been accused of taking historical quotes out of context, and in 2012, the Christian publisher of his bestselling book on Thomas Jefferson ceased its production because “basic truths just were not there.”