Anti-gay activist writing God-centric government textbooks for public schools
David Barton also has plans to write American history textbooks emphasizing the influence of God and religion
David Barton, the evangelical activist and historian, has been contracted to write a God-centric government textbook for use in public schools.
Tim Barton broadcast a meeting on Periscope that he and his father had with representatives from the Dallas-Fort Worth area Gateway Church about drafting a curriculum that could be taught in conjunction with Barton’s Foundations of Freedom DVD series, Right Wing Watch reports.
That DVD series, which features appearances from right-wing law professors and conservative celebrities like Glenn Beck and former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), purports to show how the Founding Fathers used the Bible as a blueprint for America’s constitution and system of law.
In the meeting, Barton told the representatives from Gateway Church that he was undertaking another, similar attempt to create resources that will help insert God into the teaching of American government and history.
“I just contracted,” Barton says, “about two weeks ago, we’re doing a government textbook, a national government textbook but it will be very much in this kind of vein, but it will meet the Texas TEKS [educational] standards and all the national standards for any state, it can be used in any state, except it will have a lot of God in it.”
The Periscope video also shows Barton talking about his concerns about the curriculum standards for things like the Advanced Placement U.S. History course, which he claims paint a negative image of the United States.
The video shows that both Bartons, father and son, believe that history has been corrupted by a liberal bias in education, and claim that even Christian professors or those who work at Christian colleges have been “indoctrinated” into teaching contemporary understandings of American history. They claim the intent behind this “indoctrination” is to keep America secular and erase all references to religion in order to silence Christians. That’s why they claim it’s necessary to return references to Christianity and Christian-based principles back to education and “rewrite” the textbooks “in the right direction.”
Further underscoring the Bartons’ own conservative bias, at one point in the video, Tim Barton goes off on a tangent about how most college students have been indoctrinated to be accepting of transgender identity, to the gasps and exclamations of dismay from the church members in attendance.
“After we get done with this, our next project is to write a history curriculum,” David Barton says in the video. “We’ve got these old history books and you cannot read an old history book without seeing God all over the place because God was just involved.”
Watch a short clip of Barton talking about his work below:
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