On today's episode of "WallBuilders Live," David Barton and Rick Green responded to a question from a listener who complained that she was watching a program about extraterrestrials on the History Channel recently in which some professor from Notre Dame University asserted that Thomas Jefferson "hated Christianity and considered it a dangerous religion" that was responsible for atrocities such as the Inquisition.
As if that set-up was not already strange enough, Barton then launched into an explanation that "American Christianity" was nothing like the "European Christianity" that carried out the Inquisition, asserting that, in fact, the Christianity responsible for the Inquisition was not really Christianity at all.
As Barton put it, the Christianity in existence during the Inquisition was one "in which the Bible had no role."
"You had high illiteracy, people did not read, could not read the Bible," he said. "The Bible was not available to them, it was not in their language. Folks who tried to bring the Bible to the common man got themselves killed."
Barton's co-host Rick Green then piped up to declare that "you almost can't call it Christianity; it's really a hijacked religion, it was abuse of power in the name of Christianity."
"That's right," agreed Barton, as he then went on to explain that the Founding Fathers wanted the Bible taught as the foundation of public education in America in order to prevent another Inquisition from ever taking place.
"If you look at the very first public school law passed in America," Barton said, "that act says we just came out of Europe and what they call Christianity over there is full of atrocities. That's not it. We don't want that in America, so in America we're going to make sure that the Bible is the basis of all public schools because if you read the Bible, you won't do those atrocities."
