1.On a recent evening, David Barton, a leading conservative Christian advocate for emphasizing religion in American history, stood barefoot on a bench in the rotunda of the United States Capitol Building with a congressman by his side and about a hundred students from Oral Roberts University at his feet.
2.“Isn’t it interesting that we have all been trained to recognize the two least religious founding fathers?” Mr. Barton asked, pointing to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in a painting on the wall. “And compared to today’s secularists these two guys look like a couple of Bible-thumping evangelicals!” Even Jefferson signed letters “in the year of Our Lord Christ,” Mr. Barton told the group. “What would happen if George Bush did that? They’d rip his head off!”
3.Mr. Barton, who is also the vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, is a point man in a growing movement to call attention to the open Christianity of America’s great leaders and founding documents. The goal is to reverse many evangelical Christians claim is a secularist revision of history, to defend displays of religion in public life and to make room for God in public school classrooms.
4.Their campaign and the liberal resistance have turned even the slightest clues about the souls of the Republic's great leaders -- that Washington left church before communion and almost never referred to Jesus, that the famously skeptical Jefferson attended Sunday services in the House of Representatives, or that Lincoln never joined a church at all - into hotly contested turf in the battle over the place of religion in public life. In a sign of his influence, the California and Texas school boards have consulted Mr. Barton on their curriculums. And sympathetic legislators in a dozen states have passed American Heritage Education Acts intended to protect teachers who discuss religion’s role in history -- measures liberals call unnecessary.
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