As the State Board of Education weighs changes to Texas’ social studies standards, the GOP-controlled body is gearing up to receive “expert” advice from a far-right religious activist who claims the Founding Fathers established the U.S. to be a Christian theocracy.
Republican SBOE members Brandon Hall and Julie Pickren last Friday fired off a memo trumpeting the addition of Christian nationalist David Barton as one of the content advisers that will help the board craft a new social studies curriculum. Those new standards will dial up emphasis on Texas and U.S. history, while downplaying world cultures, geography and history.
The memo about Barton, first reported on by the Texas Tribune, suggests members of the Republican-dominated board want to intensify their push to bring fundamentalist Christian beliefs into public school lessons.
Barton is the founder of right-wing Christian advocacy group the WallBuilders, a former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and, according to a claim he aired on a recent podcast, involved in President Donald Trump’s effort to root out Smithsonian Institution exhibits that cast the U.S. in a negative light.
Barton served in a similar advisory role when the SBOE last retooled its social studies curriculum 15 years ago, according to the memo from Hall and Pickren. However, the pseudo-scholar is not without considerable controversy in mainstream educational circles.
For one, even though Barton purports to be an expert on history and constitutional law, he has no formal credentials in either field. Indeed, his only non-ceremonial degree appears to be a bachelor’s in Christian education from Oral Roberts University.
Further, Barton has repeatedly espoused views that fly in the face of years of conventional historical scholarship, including that U.S. separation of church and state is a myth and that private citizens have the right to stockpile nuclear weapons under the Second Amendment.
Barton’s also made troubling claims that the government should “regulate” homosexuality, and he’s downplayed contributions of Black and Latino historical figures including Colin Powell, the first Black U.S. Secretary of State, and iconic labor leader César Chávez.
In 2012, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson yanked Barton’s bestselling bookThe Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson out of circulation, citing its historical inaccuracies, saying the “basic truths just were not there.”
Progressive group Texas Freedom Network, which maintains its own online page debunking Barton’s false historical claims, issued a statement this week warning that the activist’s appointment to a consulting role would politicize what should be an academic process.
“This appointment is a flashing red light warning that the social studies overhaul appears already to be headed off the rails and into a political swamp of misinformation and distortions,” Texas Freedom Network Deputy Director Carisa Lopez said. “The board members who appointed this phony historian clearly care more about pushing a political agenda than teaching millions of Texas kids the truth in our public schools.”
Despite Barton’s questionable reputation in academic circles, SBOE members Hall and Pickren praised him in their memo as a sought-after speaker and author. The pair also cited his “commitment to historical accuracy and his passion for teaching the exccptionalism [sic] of Texas and America.”
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This article appears in Sep. 18-Oct. 1.