It's easy to refute Action Jackson and David Barton. Jay W. Richards, a conservative at the Christian Discovery Institute, accuses Barton of being embarrassing, of factual errors, conspiracy bias, and wrong-headed claims.
Accuracy[edit]
Barton's official biography describes him as "an expert in historical and constitutional issues".
[56] Barton holds no formal credentials in history or law, and scholars dispute the accuracy and integrity of his assertions about history, accusing him of practicing misleading
historical revisionism, "pseudoscholarship" and spreading "outright falsehoods".
[11][12][13] According to the
New York Times, "Many professional historians dismiss Mr. Barton, whose academic degree is in Christian Education from Oral Roberts University, as a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible."
[10]
Jay W. Richards, senior fellow at the Christian conservative
Discovery Institute, said in 2012 that Barton's books and videos are full of "embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims."
[57] The
Southern Poverty Law Center describes Barton's work as "anti-gay" "historical revisionism", noting that Barton has no formal training in history.
[18] A number of writers have called Barton's work "
pseudohistory",
[58][59][60] though this designation has been disputed by Robert Knight of the evangelical
Coral Ridge Ministries.
[61]
"Unconfirmed Quotations"[edit]
In 1995, in response to criticism by historian Robert Alley, Barton conceded, in an online article titled "Unconfirmed Quotations",
[6] that he had not located
primary sources for 11 alleged quotes from
James Madison,
Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin, and
U.S. Supreme Court decisions (hence, the title of the article), but maintained that the quotes were "completely consistent" with the views of the Founders. (By 2007, the article listed 14 unconfirmed quotations.)
[62] In 1996, Rob Boston of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State accused Barton of "shoddy workmanship" and said that, despite these and other corrections, Barton's work "remains rife with distortions of history and court rulings".
[63] WallBuilders responded to its critics by saying that Barton followed "common practice in the academic community" in citing secondary sources, and that in publishing "Unconfirmed Quotations", Barton's intent was to raise the academic bar in historical debates pertinent to public policy.
[62]
In 2006, Barton told the
Texas Monthly, with regard to Jefferson's famous
letter to the Danbury Baptists, that he had never misquoted the letter in any of his publications. The magazine noted that this denial was contradicted by a 1990 version of Barton's video
America's Godly Heritage, in which Barton said:
[6]
The Jefferson Lies[edit]
In 2012, Barton's
New York Times bestseller[64] The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (published April 10, 2012)
[65] was voted "the least credible history book in print" by the users of the
History News Network website.
[66] A group of ten conservative Christian professors reviewed the work and reported negatively on its claims, saying that Barton misstated facts about Jefferson.
[57][67]
In August 2012, Christian publisher
Thomas Nelson withdrew the book from publication and stopped production, announcing that they had "lost confidence in the book's details" and "learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported."
[68][69] A senior executive said that Thomas Nelson could not stand by the book because "basic truths just were not there."
[28] Glenn Beck, who wrote the foreword, announced that his
Mercury Ink imprint would issue a new edition of the book
[70] once the 17,000 remaining copies that Barton bought of the Thomas Nelson edition had been sold.
[71]
A revised edition of
The Jefferson Lies was published by
WND Books in January 2016.
[72]