In a recent op-ed piece Randall Balmer decried the appointment of David Barton as a curriculum consultant to the Texas Department of Education (“The historical malpractice of Texas appointment”; Oct. 4). I know from previous contacts and writings of his that Balmer has no use for Barton, whom he considers fraudulent because of his characterizations of Thomas Jefferson in a book later withdrawn by the publisher. He also considers Barton a “Christian nationalist” (a label shared by the late Charlie Kirk whether deserved or not), defined as someone who seeks to turn or restore America into a Christian nation.
Two planks of Balmer’s platform for secularizing America are the Treaty of Tripoli, which claimed “the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” to appease Muslims in Libya so Marines could enter and deal with Barbary Pirates, and Jefferson’s letter as ambassador to France to Danbury, Virginia Baptists, where he coined the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state.” It should be mentioned that neither of these is a foundational document of our nation in the sense of Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. I have no quarrel with the “establishment” and “free exercise” clauses of the First Amendment, except that they are often breached to suit the purposes of some level of government, (e.g., prosecution of pastors and churches opting to continue worship services during the COVID pandemic).
I consulted with a friend who taught history for several decades at a local high school, and he agreed that, unlike mathematics, which is objective, history can be very subjective, depending on the eyes through which it is viewed. Beginning with the New York Times’ 1619 Project and going through radically altered American history books over several decades (which Phyllis Schlafly described in her book “Child Abuse in the Classroom”), history is replete with the biases of those who record, analyze and teach it. Whose bias one prefers depends on one’s view of where America should be heading.