NOTE: This piece was originally published at our Substack newsletter A Public Witness.
In 2011, Warren Throckmorton was a professor at a conservative Christian college when he started writing blog posts about conservative pseudo-historian David Barton. A leading propagandist against church-state separation, Barton often uses inaccurate stories and even made-up quotations to claim the U.S. was founded as a “Christian nation.” Throckmorton’s efforts to debunk Barton’s bad history eventually led to a book coauthored with a colleague: Getting Jefferson Right. Although that work highlighting Barton’s errors helped push Thomas Nelson publishing house to pull Barton’s ironically named book The Jefferson Lies, Barton hasn’t gone away. And neither has Throckmorton, who retired from teaching but keeps challenging Barton.
“These guys just look right in the camera and lie,” Throckmorton told me on the latest episode of Dangerous Dogma as he talked about Barton and protégés like Speaker Mike Johnson. “It’s just so brazen, it’s hard to believe.”
Since the first edition of Getting Jefferson Right by Throckmorton and Michael Coulter came out in 2012, Barton has continued to peddle his revisionist history. And he’s gained the ear of many Republican politicians, including Johnson, Sen. Ted Cruz, Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and people in the Trump White House. So this year, Throckmorton and Coulter released an updated third edition of Getting Jefferson Right. And Throckmorton’s been creating a podcast, Telling Jefferson Lies, to further push back against Barton and his allies (like in an episode earlier this year in which I talked about Johnson falsely claiming Jefferson read a prayer every day).
The third edition of the book is much larger than the first since they added new claims Barton’s been making to pretend Jefferson would essentially be a MAGA Christian Nationalist today. When the guy who literally cut up the New Testament and pushed for a wall separating church and state becomes the poster child for theocracy, it should be obvious someone’s lost the plot. And yet, these lies are spread in the name of making the nation more “Christian,” which Throckmorton said shows what this is really all about.
“Power is a big part of what the attraction is to the [Christian Nationalist] ideology. Power is kind of obscene, but it really serves a psychological purpose,” he told me. “A lot of people are just afraid. They’re afraid of change. They’re afraid of a lot of things, but it drives them to not a very Christian solution. The solution isn’t to grab the sword and cut somebody’s ear off. That’s not the answer, but I’m afraid that’s what we’re seeing an awful lot of.”
Throckmorton’s particularly concerned about the rise of Bartonesque claims this year and next as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026. The bicentennial in 1976 brought a spike in Christian Nationalism, and the Semiquincentennial could as well — especially since the Trump White House has already invited Barton to help plan events. That’s why Throckmorton has a new book coming out next year, The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History. And it’s why he’s urging people who care about church-state separation to challenge the bad history of Christian Nationalists.
“The president has signed several executive orders that directly bear on revisionist history, and we need historians more than ever to step up and respond to this revisionist history,” Throckmorton explained. “I feel like it’s going to be a very important two years. And there’ll be residuals, of course, after that where people’s views of the founding will be shaped and reshaped and very deliberately by the ‘patriotic education’ movement that Trump is trying to revive and that David Barton has been promoting for his whole career.”
David Barton speaking at a rally with U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck on Feb. 21, 2016, in Henderson, Nevada. (Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)
Because of Barton’s influence and Trump’s plans, Throckmorton hopes pastors and other church leaders will help shape local Semiquincentennial events. This includes working “to advocate for studies of books, advocate for civic education, to network with public school teachers, to network with other community leaders to be part of those committees. A lot of what will happen is community based.” He added, “To the degree that people who believe in separation of church and state can be a part of those, I think that’s going to be very valuable because we’ll be able to stick up for good history as those local celebrations are also being planned.”
It turns out that Christian Nationalists don’t just mislead about what the Bible says; they also make up stories about history. And to create a better future, we must not cede the past to those who lie about it.
You can hear more from Warren Throckmorton on this week’s episode of Dangerous Dogma. You can listen to the audio version here (or subscribe in your favorite podcast platform), and you can watch the video version here.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
A Public Witness is a reader-supported publication of Word&Way. To receive new posts and support our journalism ministry, subscribe today.
