The Republican Brain (39 page)

The right's historical revisionism has centrally focused on this single grand episode, for obvious reasons. Just as the Book of Genesis shows God's providential hand in the beginning of it all, conservatives want to read the founding as a Genesis story for America. But they've gotten this most important of series events badly wrong. In fact, they
betray
the truth about America in their abusive retelling and undermine our very heritage, which is permeated with Enlightenment values.

This is the chief reason why it is that in the historical realm, just as in so many others, conservatives more than liberals are at war with reality.

To prosecute its war on early American history, the right of course fields a team of “experts.” There is perhaps none more relied-upon than the aforementioned David Barton, the conservative Christian head of WallBuilders, and a man whom we've already encountered depicting Tom Paine as a supporter of creationism. Barton has led the attempt to depict the U.S., from its founding, as a “Christian Nation,” and in the process, to Christianize our founders, who (especially Madison and Jefferson) were men of the Enlightenment highly committed to creating a republic in which government and church affairs were kept separate.

Barton is a case of a sort that we've seen before: A Christian conservative who felt driven, by God, to go out and start making a political and even scientific argument. In his 1988 book
America: To Pray? or Not to Pray?
Barton argued that the Supreme Court's ban on school prayer in the early 1960s caused all manner of devastating societal consequences. At the outset of the book, he openly relates how God told him to start working on the project. More specifically, Barton writes, God told him to find out when the Supremes banned school prayer, and also to acquire a record of student SAT scores over time. “I had believed that the two instructions were separate and distinct, yet I soon discovered that they were unquestionably related,” Barton remarks—proceeding to show how test scores fell off a cliff just after the expulsion of prayers from schools. So of course, that must have been the cause!

But even more than critiquing the school prayer rulings and attempting to show how they've triggered our moral decline, Barton is known for endlessly trying to prove that the U.S. is a “Christian Nation.” His arguments on this point are many and varied—from counting bibles allegedly procured by the Continental Congress, to claiming that the first Congress under the new Constitution wanted religion taught in schools, to asserting that as president, Thomas Jefferson set aside land for preachers to evangelize to the Native Americans. At the same time, Barton also shows a strong disconfirmation bias against evidence of the U.S.'s secular founding. He seeks to debunk or reinterpret rather large data points like the fact that the U.S. Constitution does not invoke or even contain the word “God,” or the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which stated that “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion . . .”

Kind of hard to argue with—but of course, Barton can.

In one extreme case, Barton has been caught misrepresenting one of the most important founders, Thomas Jefferson. I've already quoted Jefferson's famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, which contains the famous phrase “wall of separation between Church & State.” It is a very devastating piece of counterevidence, as it comes from one of the most influential founders and directly states that such a wall was created by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. However, Barton has claimed that Jefferson also said to the Danbury Baptists that the wall was meant to be “one-directional . . . It keeps the government from running the church, but it makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.” No such claim is to be found in Jefferson's (quite brief) letter.

But if Barton and his acolytes can misrepresent the most important founders, they can also make up new founders—or at least, quote people from the revolutionary era whose views do
not
provide a solid basis for interpreting the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.

Take Patrick Henry, the Virginia theocrat who opposed the Constitution and sought to impose taxes on Virginians to provide income for Christian ministers—about as blatant a church-state melding as you can imagine. Henry clashed regularly with James Madison over church-state matters.

Barton and other conservatives often quote and celebrate Henry, and other so-called “anti-Federalists.” And it must seem irresistible: The anti-Federalists were afraid of too much centralized power and government control, just like today's conservatives are. The only problem is that, as the historian Cecelia Kenyon put it in 1955, the anti-Federalists were “men of little faith.” They didn't believe in the great American experiment, and they actively criticized and opposed it (including complaining about explicitly secular aspects of our Constitution, like its prohibition on religious tests for public office). They were not in favor of the union we live in today (though their plea for a Bill of Rights was ultimately successful).

But it takes far longer to explain this than it takes to quote (or misquote) something uplifting that Patrick Henry said. There is so much bad conservative history about the origins of America that liberal Enlightenment laborers can barely manage to debunk it all.

A case in point is Chris Rodda, an author who has tirelessly attempted to set the record straight about religion and the U.S. founding by refuting right-wing misinformation in her multi-volume, ongoing book project entitled
Liars for Jesus.
As Rodda writes in volume I, one book just wasn't enough for the task:

I found so many lies, in fact, that I soon realized that they weren't all going to fit one book without omitting some of the information that I felt was necessary to thoroughly explain and disprove them. So, I decided to write not just one book, but two – the first focusing mainly on the founding era, up until around the 1830s, and the second covering the rest of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Because most of the lies in the religious right history books are about the founding era, however, the first volume began to get too long, and I was once again faced with the decision of leaving stuff out, or including everything and splitting it up. Since my goal from the beginning was to write a book that left no stone unturned, and provided as much information as possible, I decided to split the first volume into two volumes. This book, therefore, is the first of what will eventually be three volumes.

Poor Rodda! Just as conservatives like Barton expend endless energy trying to “prove” their version of American history, liberals like Rodda expend endless energy refuting them. I'll take Rodda on the facts, but we must remember at all times that the facts aren't the sole issue. It's all about the story, and being able to tell a compelling one. It's about protecting the belief system, one that fulfills the need for certainty by conferring a black and white worldview. Set that up first, and conservatives are capable of generating volumes of misinformation in areas that they care about, and defending it when challenged.

When it comes to the founding of the country, they care deeply indeed.

So what should liberals do? Not refute the nonsense endlessly—I've already done a share of that here, and we can count on liberal Enlightenment laborers like Chris Rodda to carry forward this back-breaking work. But if fact checking is the only approach liberals take, it will be sure to fail. And so will they.

Rather, when it comes to history—and more broadly, the stories we tell about ourselves—liberals should take the
Schindler's List
approach. They should find the most powerful stories from the past that emphasize liberal values—stories that are
true
—and tell them, over and over.

For instance, most Americans don't understand what kind of men the founders really were. They're distant, ethereal figures, rather than flesh and blood men who were not only heroes, but had, in many cases, strong
liberal
and Enlightened views.

And if we should tell stories of the true secular nature of the founding—and the heroism and courage it took to create a nation that tolerated all religions but did not force any one religion on anyone—we shouldn't stop there. Some of the most powerful liberal stories from the American past are about civil rights, about how much more tolerant of a place America has become—though it's still hardly perfect—and how long and terrible a struggle it was to get here.

These stories connect past to present and impart a sense of hope, without ignoring or downplaying the horrors of racism and violence directed at out-groups. And they inspire a chief liberal emotion—empathy. If you want to see a perfect example of how it's done, turn not to an academic book or a liberal factual debunking, but to a country musician. Singer-songwriter Brad Paisley encoded liberal values perfectly in his hit song “Welcome to the Future,” which draws heavily on U.S. history to paint an inspiring story of progress. Its last and most powerful verse runs like this:

I had a friend in school,

Running back on the football team.

They burned a cross in his front yard

For asking out the homecoming queen.

I thought about him today

And everybody who's seen what he's seen

From a woman on a bus

To a man with a dream.

Then Paisley sings, “Wake up Martin Luther, welcome to the future.”

Told well, liberal history will elicit the egalitarian values, and the related empathetic emotions, evoked by these very simple verses. It will be accurate, yes. But it will never forget the importance of the story or why it matters.

The past three chapters have provided a deep immersion in conservative wrongness. I've dragged us across fact-check archives and across subject areas, noting myriad errors, distortions, and misrepresentations.

What's more, none of these errors have arisen by accident. They exist because they serve a psychological purpose or need; and they are defended, in the face of challenge or even unequivocal refutation, through the various mechanisms of motivated reasoning—confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, and so on.

The evidence of conservative error is massive—but I cannot be said to have seriously analyzed the problem unless I turn the tables and look at liberal delusions as well. Such is the goal of my next chapter. In it I'll show some true motivated falsehoods on the left; but I'll also show them being handled very differently than on the right and
not
, overall, being clung to dogmatically (except, perhaps, among a small minority of ideologues) or going politically mainstream.

And why is that? Simply, I'll posit, because liberals need these errors less—and, at the same time, they need accuracy
more.
Liberals are, after all, the children of the Enlightenment. And they don't bow to authority, or pledge allegiance to a team. They want to use science to make the world better, and so if science demonstrates that an alleged “problem” actually isn't a problem then they're happy to shift their views and devote their resources elsewhere. Right?