For the last several election cycles, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton has been traveling the country as part of a "Faith Wins" campaign aimed at mobilizing conservative Christians to vote and get involved in politics.
Earlier this month, the "Faith Wins" campaign briefly merged with the "Courage Tour," which was launched by Christian nationalist and unabashed Trump cultist Lance Wallnau for the purpose of training conservative Christian activists how to gain political power now in preparation for ruling and reigning when Jesus Christ returns.
When the "Courage Tour" made a stop in Michigan, Barton was among the featured speakers and, predictably, he used his time on stage to spread Christian nationalist disinformation that had first been debunked by Right Wing Watch back in 2022.
"What I'm going to show you is the report of the superintendent of education in public schools in New Jersey in 1816," Barton said. "They're talking about the first and second classes—we would call it first and second grades—here's what they're learning ... It says, 'All the scholars of the first and second classes commit to memory portions of New Testament or Psalms, a lesson of the catechism, and several hymns and the texts of the preceding sabbath.'"
"We're talking first and second grade," Barton continued, "'One of the scholars has committed a memory the Book of John, and the first 30 Psalms together with Psalm 119.' ... It says, 'The majority have committed to remember the Gospel by John.' Every first and second grader memorizes the Book of John, but we did have one guy that was so smart, he memorized 30 chapters out of Psalms and Psalms 119, but everybody does the Gospel of John."
"That's first and second grade public schools in New Jersey in 1816," Barton declared.
Barton's claims are entirely false.
First of all, these were not first and second graders, as Barton claimed, as the document he cited explicitly states that students in this school were “divided into seven classes” based upon their reading and writing abilities and that “most of the children in the fifth class were unable to read when they entered school.” As such, the students in "the first and second classes" were obviously older students who had advanced reading and writing skills relative to their classmates.
Secondly, and most importantly, this was not a report from the New Jersey superintendent of public education, as Barton claimed, but rather a report from the board of directors of the Free School Association of Elizabeth-Town, which was a Sunday school.
The document Barton used as the basis of claim very clearly states that the students were “taught on the Lord’s day, immediately after the conclusion of public worship in the afternoon" and even notes the existence of “two other Sunday schools” that were not under the board’s control.
As professor John Fea, chair of the History Department at Messiah University and author of “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?,” told Right Wing Watch in 2022, a search of American newspapers and periodicals published in the early 1800s “clearly show that this is a Sunday School.”
“This once again shows that Barton fails to understand the larger context of the periods from which he cherry-picks his facts,” Fea told Right Wing Watch. “It would have taken Barton less than an hour, with the historical databases available to professional historians, or even just a search on Google Books, for him to dig up multiple primary sources showing that the ‘Free School Association of Elizabeth-Town’ was, in fact, a Sunday School. In fact, ‘public schools’ as we know them today did not exist in the early decades of the 19th century. This is the kind of sloppy work—void of any concept of context or change over time—that has characterized Barton’s entire career as a Christian Right activist who raids the past for something useful to help him advance his political agenda in the present.”
Despite the fact that Barton's claim was exposed as false well over a year ago, it remains a key part of his presentations to this day. And it remains a key part of his presentations because Barton doesn't actually seem to care about the truth since his primary objective is finding ways to use these sorts of myths about America's supposed Christian history to promote his own modern-day right-wing political agenda.
Barton has been at this for years. No matter how many times his bogus Christian nationalist history is debunked—by Right Wing Watch, journalists, and real historians—Barton’s false claims about American history have been embraced across the religious right and Republican Party. Just this weekend, Barton was a featured speaker at the GOP convention for his home state of Texas, where the Texas Tribune reported that Christian nationalists joined with far-right billionaires to push the state GOP even further in the direction of dogmatic authoritarianism.
