An Interview with David Barton Part 1

When and why did you start WallBuilders?

Of course, this meant that in order for me to learn which value had been struck down by the Court, I must read the Court cases – dozens and dozens of them. As I read those cases, each time the Court struck down a Biblical value, it explained that it was required to do so because of the intent of the Framers of our governmental documents – that is, the Founders had established a “separation of church and state” requiring a mandatory secularization of the public arena. I accepted the explanation of the court in those cases, for I had often heard (and even been taught) that the Framers were a collective group of atheists, agnostics, and deists, and that America had become the most successful government in the history of the world because it had always jealously guarded a secular, Godless public arena.

As I continued reading those cases, and witnessed the Court suppressing Biblical value after Biblical value with the explanation that it was doing so because it was the Founders’ intent, the thought (and I believe that it was another Proverbs 16:3 thought from the Lord) hit me: “If these activities are so unconstitutional, then why didn’t the Framers stop them?” That is, why was the Court just now striking down activities and expressions that had been considered constitutional for the previous 160+ years? For example, if voluntary school prayer was so obviously unconstitutional, then why hadn’t the Framers stopped it? And if public displays of the Ten Commandments were so anathema, then why hadn’t the Framers prohibited them – why wait 160+ years before striking them down? I pondered long on this question. To find an answer meant that I needed to go backwards in reading court decisions to see how previous courts had dealt with such issues. For the first time, I was now turning my inquiries backward – toward investigating not statistics but history.

I went to our local law library (the Tarrant County Law Library) and asked to read the original decisions of the U. S. Supreme Court beginning with cases in 1789. (Incidentally, in 1789, six Justices were on the Court, appointed by President George Washington. Three of them had signed the Constitution, two had ratified it, and one had been an author of the Federalist Papers – the most famous commentary on the Constitution. It can be asserted with confidence that these six clearly would know what was and what was not constitutional – at least much more so than today’s Justices. If I could just see what these early Justices said about issues also facing modern judges . . .) The law library staff went to pull those early decisions for me, but discovered they were not readily available. In fact, they found those cases filed away downstairs in the basement of the courthouse in boxes that – they said – had not been opened in over 100 years. (Recall that this was before internet made such cases readily available.)