An Interview with David Barton Part 3

When and why did you start WallBuilders?

For example, the work on which the Framers said they most heavily relied in framing the Declaration of Independence was the Two Treatises of Government – a theological work written in 1690 that references the Bible over 1,700 times in demonstrating the proper operation of civil government. Additionally, it turns out that of the 56 individuals who signed the Declaration of Independence, 24 held degrees that we today would characterize as seminary or Bible school degrees. Furthermore, I even found that the first Bible printed in the English-language in America had been printed by the U. S. Congress in 1782! The records in Congress describe that Bible as “a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools,” and it even contains a congressional endorsement in front of that Bible: “Whereupon, Resolved, That the United States in Congress assembled . . . recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.” (I now own one of the original copies of that Bible, which today has become one of the rarest books in the world. In 1782, 20,000 copies were printed; today, 26 copies remain.)

At the time I started this historical inquiry, I could probably call by name only a dozen of the 200+ individuals we now call Founding Fathers; today, I now know a great deal about probably half of the 200 – and I am still learning. Additionally, over those years of searching, we have amassed some 70,000 documents (either originals or photocopies) from before 1812, and I personally own thousands of the hand-written documents and works of those who framed and signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, etc.

This is one of the reasons that so many of the charges against me from the Left are so ludicrous. Probably their most-repeated and most-widely circulated charge is that I make up history – that I am rewriting it. I don’t have to make it up; I can show you the originals. The only “rewriting” I am doing is of the modern secularist revisionism that has occurred over the past half-century – that is, I am taking our history back to what actually happened rather than what secularists wished had happened. I have also been appointed by State Boards of Education to help write the history and government standards for their students, and have been selected to help write history textbooks for public schools. Throughout both the standards and the textbooks, I consistently emphasize students seeing and reading original documents; original documents speak for themselves and rarely need – and even less rarely authenticate – the spin that academians feel obsessed to place upon them.