The “least credible history book in print.” That’s the honor voters bestowed on David Barton’s 2012 book about Thomas Jefferson, which rewrote the third president as a modern God & Country evangelical and distanced him from that whole slavery mess. The book was ultimately withdrawn from publication by Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson, but neither the withdrawal nor the spate of scathing reviews slowed Barton down. If anything, his star has risen even further: today, Barton is constantly found onstage alongside the biggest names in the Christian nationalist movement.
Despite regularly playing second-fiddle to movement leaders like Lance Wallnau and Andrew Wommack, Barton’s role in the movement is vital. American Christian nationalism is built atop a fraudulent telling of American history – one in which the Founders were evangelicals who wrote the Constitution based on the Bible, never intended for any separation between church and state, and envisioned the United States as an explicitly Christian nation forevermore. On that pseudohistoric foundation, the movement decrees itself the arbiter of Real America, and cleanses itself of any qualms about pursuing a course which would radically redefine the republic their revered Founders actually founded.
As the movement’s chief historian, Barton’s job is to tell, and sell, that version of history. For years, Barton has done just that, studiously rewriting the history of the decades around the nation’s founding in ways best suited to his political project. He travels and speaks to church groups to propagate his version of events, and has even waded into Colorado politics in the past, highlighting how little difference he sees between his roles as historian and activist.
Colorado-based Andrew Wommack Ministries has long been Barton’s partner in the work of rewriting history, frequently featuring the pseudohistorian as a guest at conferences and events. Barton is also a founding board member of Wommack’s Truth & Liberty political organization, which has become a prominent voice in Christian nationalist circles nationwide and provides Barton with a regular platform.
With Trump returning to the presidency, though, Truth & Liberty no longer seems content to parrot Barton’s rewriting of the nation’s founding. Now, they are extending Barton’s tactics to subjects far more recent – they are rewriting the history of the last four years, and they are doing it for the exact same reason they cling to their rewritten version of the founding: to justify what they plan to do next.
We’ve set aside this day as Americans to recognize the goodness of God in our nation,” Truth & Liberty Executive Director Richard Harris told the camera during the organization’s November 27 broadcast. “And I’ll tell you what, with the election of Donald Trump, the magnitude of what that means – not only for the country but for the world – what a Thanksgiving Day it’s going to be tomorrow, as Christians all over the nation are recognizing the sovereign hand of almighty God in saving this nation from the Marxist, woke, devilish, demonic, LGBT, ungodly takeover that we were experiencing.”
And just like that, only a few minutes into the hour-long broadcast, the rewrite of recent history had begun. I take no issue with Harris’ right to criticize and disagree with Democrats, but his immediate departure from the plane of reality is eyebrow-raising. Having lived in the United States for the last four years, I seem to have missed the Woke Demonic Marxism. Maybe it was hiding inside all of the corporate subsidies.
The broadcast did not improve from there. For the next hour, Harris and his guest gave thanks to God for delivering the nation from a version of recent history which simply did not occur.
“I’m telling you, those were dark days,” Harris solemnly intoned, casting his audience’s memory back to early 2021. “You’ve gotta remember that time. January 6th had occurred, Joe Biden had been inaugurated President…Christians were being deplatformed and censored all over the place.”
As with the Woke Demonic Marxism, I appear to have missed that last bit: the mass deplatforming of Christian social media accounts after Joe Biden’s inauguration. In Harris’ telling, the swearing-in of the most openly Christian president since Jimmy Carter brought about the mass censorship of Christians.
Only, it didn’t. No such thing ever occurred. In reality, there was no mass censorship or deplatforming of Christians, and even organizations focused on monitoring Christian persecution around the globe report no persecution of Christians in the United States.
Harris could only conjure one remarkably weak example to support his claim.
“Even here at Truth & Liberty, we were looking into getting some online services from a particular company,” he said on the broadcast. “When they began to ask us, ‘So what do you guys really stand for?’ and we told them unabashedly that we stand for faith and family and Biblical values, they wouldn’t service us anymore.”
But Harris’ contributions to the rewriting of recent history were outdone by the apocalyptic misrememberings of his guest, Janet Porter. A frequent guest on Truth & Liberty – where she has suggested outlawing LGBTQ-related speech in schools – Porter is perhaps best known as the spokeswoman for Alabama judge Roy Moore’s U.S. Senate run, which was derailed when the judge was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women.
“We’ve been living in a police state,” Porter dramatically told Harris on the late November broadcast. “There’s lawfare against anyone who disagrees with the administration. We saw conservatives like Mike Lindell and Roger Stone and so many others have the pre-dawn raid, even President Trump himself,” Porter went on.
Not only is Porter’s overall claim ridiculous – no serious person believes that those prosecutions were politically motivated – it does not even align with the timeline she is attempting to rewrite: Stone’s house was raided by the FBI in 2019, while Donald Trump was president. If that was lawfare or a political prosecution, then it was lawfare or a political prosecution carried out by Donald Trump.
“This is really what we’ve been living under, but God has given us a reprieve,” Porter said, concluding her recitation of events which never happened. “We now have freedom again.”
It may sound dramatic to conclude that the Christian nationalist movement is rewriting recent history to justify their plans for the second Trump administration – and it is dramatic, but it’s also true. They have not even been particularly coy about it. The American Christian nationalist movement did not invent or perfect these tactics. They have been used by authoritarian movements around the globe for the last century – often churned-out by leaders to give footsoldiers a narrative to cling to through long struggles, and a balm to salve their consciences after doing what they have been instructed to do – and they have worked.
It doesn’t matter if you or I believe their altered version of history; it only matters if their followers do.
By casting the nation as having been delivered from “the Marxist, woke, devilish, demonic, LGBT, ungodly takeover” Harris implicitly frames the Trump administration as being on the side of all that is good, light, and divine.
By depicting Christians as having been persecuted during the Biden administration, Harris and Porter pave the way for Christian nationalists to rationalize persecuting others as self-defense.
And by phrasing the return of Donald Trump to the White House as the return of freedom itself, as Porter did, they elide the fact that they plan to use that “freedom” to strip freedoms from millions of others.
Porter made no bones about that last bit. In fact, she told Harris exactly what she thinks they should pursue as a top priority once Donald Trump brings freedom back:
“There is hope for things like a federal heartbeat bill,” Porter told Harris, before pivoting to political comms. “I would not bill it as a national abortion ban,” she said. “It’s a ‘reasonable restriction,’ right? It’s ‘trusting the science.’”
“We could see that pass through Congress.”
