Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President [Kindle Edition]

Warren Throckmorton (Author), Michael Coulter (Author)

Book Description

Nearly two centuries after his death, Thomas Jefferson continues to be the subject of competing claims about his public policy and his private beliefs.

In Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President, two religious conservatives examines key claims frequently made by other religious conservatives about Thomas Jefferson. Using Jefferson's correspondence, accounts of Jefferson's contemporaries, and other original sources, Throckmorton and Coulter separate fact from fiction. Upon analysis, many claims about Jefferson made by religiously conservative culture warriors don't hold up.

The authors examine the following questions and more.

-Was Jefferson unable to free his slaves under Virginia law?

-Did Jefferson sign his presidential documents, "In the year of our Lord Christ?"

-Did Jefferson and other Founders finance a Bible in 1798 to get the Word of God to America's Families?

-Did Jefferson found the Virginia Bible Society?

-Was Jefferson an orthodox Christian, who only rarely expressed questions about orthodox Christian doctrine?

-Did Jefferson approve laws providing federal funds to evangelize Indians?

-Did Jefferson edit the Gospels of the New Testament to remove sections he disagreed with?

-Did Jefferson found the University of Virginia to be the first transdenominational Christian college?

The aim of the authors is to get Jefferson right.

Getting Jefferson Right is an intellectual and historical take down of David Barton's pseudo-history of Thomas Jefferson by two Christian professors who teach at a conservative Christian college. Michael Coulter and Warren Throckmorton have done their homework. Anyone who reads this book must come to grips with the untruths and suspect historical interpretations that Barton regularly peddles in his books, speaking engagements, and on his radio program. I have yet to read a more thorough refutation of Barton's claims.
--John Fea, Chair of the History Department, Messiah College and author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction

Christians are rightly distressed when American history is purged of its religious elements. But that's no excuse for us to reconstruct the views of Founders such as Thomas Jefferson according to our likeness. In Getting Jefferson Right, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter have done all of us a great service by exposing, carefully and dispassionately, so many of the popular distortions and half-truths about Jefferson. In the process, they have modeled how to deal with historical texts honestly. If you are interested in learning about the real Jefferson, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
--Jay W. Richards, Ph.D. Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute, Co-author of The New York Times bestselling Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It's Too Late

Getting Jefferson Right is an excellent example of the art of historical contextualization, of trying to tell the whole story, not just part of it. For those reasons, the work should become a standard reference.
--Paul Harvey, Religion Dispatches, teaches history at the University of Colorado

I cannot overemphasize the importance of reading Getting Jefferson Right, by Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter. It is a point-counterpoint to David Barton's, aptly titled, The Jefferson Lies. Every evangelical pastor in America, especially African-American pastors, needs to study the facts in Getting Jefferson Right. For too many years, David Barton has misled pastors across America and this book is the perfect tool to help bring us back to the true, undiluted life of Thomas Jefferson.
-Ray McMillian, Pastor, President, Race to Unity

In Getting Jefferson Right, Throckmorton and Coulter confront some of the biggest myths with objective facts. The result is a provocative and informative book that has something to teach everyone."
- Jonathan Merritt, author of A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Warren Throckmorton is Professor of Psychology and Fellow for Psychology and Public Policy at Grove City College. He co-founded the Golden Rule Pledge, an anti-bullying initiative and is co-author or the Sexual Identity Therapy Framework. Michael Coulter is Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Grove City College. He is co-editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia of Social Thought, Social Science and Social Policy.

Product Details

• File Size: 1004 KB
• Print Length: 258 pages
• Publisher: Salem Grove Press (May 1, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007ZUDUAU
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,631 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #43 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > Revolution & Founding

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

102 of 117 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A correction to David Barton's Lies About Jefferson May 5, 2012

By Hrafnkell Haraldsson VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition

In The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (2012) pseudo-historian David Barton employs numerous sins against the rules of logic (straw men and false dilemma's abound), not to mention honesty, in an attempt to "reclaim" Thomas Jefferson as a Evangelical Christian, a Jefferson more useful to Barton's culture warrior goals than the Jefferson of history. In Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President, conservative Christian scholars Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter set the record straight, issuing a much-needed correction to Barton's best-selling book.

This is a point-by-point take-down of Barton's claims and it is brilliantly done, appealing to those same texts Barton uses and showing how Barton cherry-picks Jefferson's words, fails to understand his meanings, or takes them out of context - even inventing "facts" out of whole cloth without substantiated them textually. They show how Barton invents terms (including especially "Academic Collectivism") and misinterprets others, like post-structuralism(Barton even omits the hyphen). Barton's technique is tendentious in the extreme, constructing arguments and terms to attack and destroy.

Throckmorton and Coulter do not cherry-pick Jefferson's words in order to force history to conform to ideology but carefully examine his words, showing the reader where Barton has led them astray. This book is designed to be read alongside Barton's, making the task an easy one. You can go from Barton's carefully numbered lies to Throckmorton's and Coulter's analysis and almost watch the winds clear away the clouds of deceit.

One might accuse Barton of simply not understanding the issues under discussion but the number of times he is caught in an outright lie (for example, with regards the famous Jefferson Bible) make it difficult to accept that Barton is not willfully engaging in a corruption of history for his own ends. The authors explain facets of 18th century history that Barton does not, for example, why documents Jefferson signed contained the words "In the Year of Our Lord Christ" (they were there according to treaty, pre-printed, not hand-written, on the document to be signed); and they show how Barton tells only half the story when he claims Jefferson wanted a Biblical story on the National Seal: Jefferson wanted the biblical story on one side and a Pagan story on the other - the Saxon Pagan leaders Hengist and Horsa. Barton doesn't want his Evangelical fanboys and girls to know about inconvenient facts like this.

They also show how Barton outright lies about Jefferson founding the Virginia Bible Society (Barton doesn't even attempt to prove it - he just asserts it is so) and refute Barton's claim that Jefferson "financed" the first hot pressed Bible (he subscribed to it, like hundreds of others).

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is absolutely essential to read this book if you intend to read Barton's. These men are not atheists: they are both professors at conservative Christian colleges who assert that Christian ethics and belief inform their scholarship. They are both, in the end, honest scholars willing to examine the facts on the ground and render the necessary judgment: in the end, they are everything Barton is not and their book is everything Barton's will never be: history.

This book does suffer from the all-too typical Kindle formatting issues and it is not always clear when blockquotes end and begin. There were initial issues with images not appearing but that has been corrected. Again, five stars and kudos to Mssrs. Throckmorton and Coulter for a job well done.

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A (shouldn't have to be) necessary correction to historical malpractice July 19, 2012

By James V. Holton

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

David Barton has an advantage over real historians in that he is marketing a particular point of view to an audience that is predisposed to believe his "history," and real historians have overlooked or ignored him. But that advantage has become more problematic in recent years as Barton has taken his message mainstream. There have been plenty of responses to Barton, but many have been ad hoc.

Throckmorton and Coulter take Barton on his own terms, as Christians dedicated to the idea of truth (and judging by Barton's response, their refutations have begun to hurt). But their Christianity is not the main focus, getting history right is. And "getting history right" means being honest to the sources and to history as it really was.

The authors have taken a comprehensive look at Jefferson, incorporating Barton's own "Jefferson lies," and done a great service for the truth. They lay out the real Jefferson in a point-by-point refutation of Barton. Their arguments about Jefferson are not new, but in this format they are presented in painstaking detail. They provide the whole truth and its context, not a sales pitch or strawman attacks.

Academics will find this book useful because it provides insight into the cottage industry of religious historical revisionism. Others will find it useful in exposing the real Jefferson and the inaccuracies told about him by Barton and others.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Needed Rejoinder to David Barton from Two Serious Historians September 15, 2012

By Gregory P. Hoadley

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was once a big fan of David Barton. I loved the way that he quoted directly from the original source material to make his case that America was founded upon Christian principles.

I no longer am. Here's why.

Mr. Barton recently came out with a book entitled The Jefferson Lies (TJL). It purportedly deals with modern liberal historical revisionists who have sought to remake Jefferson in their own image. But shortly after its release, a group of Christian historians led by Thomas Kidd openly questioned Barton's methodology. Just a few weeks later, the publisher of TJL, Thomas Nelson, officially disassociated itself with the book.

For a publishing company to do this speaks volumes (no pun intended). It is their way of saying that they consider the book in question to be either fraudulent, dishonest, sloppily researched, or all three.

It was then that I came across Getting Jefferson Right (GJR), which is authored by two historians who profess to be evangelical Christians. In this little book, they take David Barton to task for GJR, as well as citing some of his misleading statements in speeches and earlier works. They show how Barton misconstrues facts (taking Jefferson's statement "I am a Christian" wildly out of context), and uses logical fallacies galore (one of the most obvious being the title to his seventh chapter: "Lie #7: Thomas Jefferson Was an Atheist and Not a Christian," a classic usage of the false dilemma).

But there is far more: as anyone familiar with Barton's work knows, he has often claimed that Jefferson signed legislation that sent federal funds towards evangelizing the Indians. For one intent on proving America's Christian heritage--as many of Barton's readers are--it is a seductive claim. However, the facts do not add up. The truth is that the legislation in question had to do with a decades-old dispute: land had been given to Indians who had previously been evangelized, and was then taken away from them. GJR shows that what Jefferson signed into law was merely the latest attempt to settle a very complicated matter of whether these Christian Indians had a right to their land. Nothing more, nothing less.

Furthermore, when the authors of GJR examine Jefferson's writings, there is no evidence suggesting that he had any interest in evangelizing the Indians. If anything, GJR finds that Jefferson wanted to "civilize" the Indians via Aesop's Fables.

At the heart of the book, though, is an examination of what has been called "The Jefferson Bible."

Barton has claimed that Jefferson simply put the statements of Christ in more or less chronological order. However, GJR reveals Jefferson's outright hostility to orthodox Christianity: he denied the deity, Virgin Birth, miracles, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Our third president literally took scissors to the pages of Scripture which promoted these doctrines which are so essential to the Christian faith. He further claimed that the Apostle Paul distorted Christ's teachings, and that the Gospels were corrupted. More than once, GJR quotes Jefferson as saying that discerning the actual sayings of Christ from the corruptions was as easy as distinguishing "diamonds from dunghills." This latter claim is especially blasphemous, and to my knowledge it is conspicuously absent from any of Barton's treatments of Jefferson.

Finally, crucial passages like chapters 3 and 17 of John, which prove Christ's divine nature, were not included in Jefferson's Bible. Thus, Barton's claim that Jefferson included all of Christ's statements in his "Jefferson Bible" is debunked.

Imagine a modern president saying and doing what Jefferson did: he/she would be castigated as a blasphemer, and would never be given a serious chance of being re-elected. And yet, as the authors of GJR note, Thomas Jefferson said and did these very things.

In all of this, there is both irony and tragedy. The irony is that many Christian "leaders" continue to cite Jefferson as one of the Founding Fathers who promoted (if not personally embraced) Christianity. The tragedy is that this myth, which has been brutally exposed in GJR, is being propagated by men like David Barton, who have strong followings in evangelical America.

Were there Christians among the Founding Fathers? Certainly. Men like George Washington, Benjamin Rush, Patrick Henry, and John Jay certainly apply. But in no way could Thomas Jefferson possibly be numbered among them, as GJR makes plain.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for those who want to honestly examine what Thomas Jefferson truly believed.