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Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History Vol. 1

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"Liars" seems a harsh term to apply to professed Christians and until lately I had--admittedly without paying too much attention--assumed that Christian fundamentalists were engaged in wishful thinking and selective quotations when they complained about activist judges subverting both the Constitution and the clear intent of the Founding Fathers to establish a Christian government. But after reading Ms. Rodda's book I realize that there is something going on far beyond taking words out of context. When she digs out the words and records that clearly demolish the assertion that no "wall of separation" between church and state was ever intended, "liars" does seem the appropriate word. Those of us who fear that the intrusion of "faith based" activities into our government and the flow of subsidies, in the guise of "contracts", to favored churches, is a step toward a theocracy, will find much useful and carefully documented information in "Liars for Jesus".

I am the author of the foreword for Liars for Jesus (The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, vol.1)

For years segments of the religious right have been speaking out against what they have perceived as the historical revisionism of the Bible. This makes their attacks and distortions on the real history of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States very ironic and it would be funny if it wasn't doing so much damage to the religious freedom this country was built upon.

Chris Rodda works to set the record straight and she does it with extensive documentation showing how these distortions are intentional and aimed at leading many well intentioned Christians into false conclusions about the faith and the intentions of our Founders. Reading this book you will be amazed by how far these distortions go ranging from creating false rationizations to carefully cropped quotes ripped from their context to repeating known undocumented and questionable quotes as reliable truth. All these and more are used by the Liars for Jesus to create a psuedo-history of the birth of our nation. Alerted by the evidence of Rodda's detailing of the recorded history you may angered by the fact that this pseudo-history is being marketed to home-schoolers who will never learn the truth and by the fact these lies are making their ways into textbooks for public classrooms.

Liars for Jesus by Chris Rodda is one of the best written and most important books about contemporary American politics that I have read in years. The only problem with this book is that it was apparently published with the author's own money, making its availability somewhat limited. This book should be widely read and discussed, because it helps explain why the Christian Right seems so incomprehensibly loony to most of us who are not part of that movement, and, conversely, why they attack the rest of us with such unfettered zeal.

There has been a series of revisionist "history" books published since the end of WWII which give a "Christian" version of American history that attempts to paint the Founding Fathers and subsequent American culture in a way that is in agreement with contemporary Fundamentalism. We have now had a couple of generations of conservative Christians who have been buying into this version of history and reacting angrily to an America that assumes fundamental principals like the separation of church and state to be at the core of what America stands for.

Author Rodda systematically lists and then busts a series of myths that these spurious history books have generated. She leaves no stone unturned in doing so.

Things get really scary when she starts quoting Supreme Court opinions written by Rennquist, Thomas and Burger, and it becomes apparent that members of our highest court do not know the difference between real history and Fundamentalist wishful thinking.

The book is a fascinating study in how the desire for a different set of facts can, over time, morph into an alternative if deluded "reality".

Lies for Jesus abound. This is not a new phenomenon, as Ms. Rodda points out in her book, but the lies have greatly proliferated in the age of the Internet. It is sometimes difficult for concerned citizens and concerned Christians to refute the lies which appear to come from authority. Ms. Rodda takes the words of those so-called authorities and shows them for what they are. Her sources are impeccable.

As an Episcopalian, I was quite shocked to learn that the Liars for Jesus have stolen words out of my own Book of Common Prayer to further their questionable agenda.

Those liars do great damage to our religious freedom, a freedom that generations upon generations have fought and died to protect.

I am SO thankful contorters like Barton are being exposed. And Chris Rodda has the new support of a very respected historian. I heard a recent review of Barton on a podcast by Clay Jenkinson, one of the first winners of the nation's highest award in the humanities, the Charles Frankel Prize. When commenting on the historical accuracy of the founding fathers, Jenkinson stated, "Well the worst is this fellow from Texas named David Barton, who has written a book about original intent in which he has gone through and falsely combed the founding fathers to get their most Christian sayings and compiled them in this book, out of context - to the exclusion of their broader way of seeing the world, and saying, see - they were all Christians and ... Jefferson was a Christian, and Madison was a Christian, and Franklin was a Christian, and do you know what? He is just plain wrong and a fraud. And he has been shown to be a fraud." Jenkinson concludes by saying Barton's work "is false, malicious, and irresponsible and it has to be countered. We have to tell the truth about history." Thank you Chris Rodda for fighting for the truth.

I am most of the way through this book, and becoming more appalled as I go along. I was a fundamentalist Christian for more than four decades. I homeschooled our son for several years. I knew that the religious right misrepresents the truth.

However, I didn't know how deep it went, nor did I realize how deliberate it was. I somehow thought that, like me, these fundies/evangelicals meant well, and just misunderstood history because they were biased while researching. I didn't realize they were simply lying. There is no other way to explain what they have done, and Chris makes this so clear.

Her research is extensive, yes. But just as important, she writes beautifully (I was frankly astonished at the level of writing coming from someone who didn't even set out to write a book in the first place).

When I'm finished with the book, I know I will not remember a tenth of what she wrote. I'll have to use the book for reference for years to come. But what I will remember is how deliberately and how frequently the religious right lies. These people are influencing an entire generation of homeschooled and Christian schooled kids, who then grow to adulthood not only without the facts, but with mythology borne of deliberate deception to take its place.

This is an important book. Thank you, Chris.

As a blogger at Talk to Action (a pro-faith, pro-religious freedom site) and key employee at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which defends the religious freedom rights of our soldiers, author Chris Rodda frequently comes into contact with Christianists. These people by definition, with the exception of some Reconstructionists, attempt to unconstitutionally leverage the power of government in spite of the Constitution's establishment clause. They desire and work vigorously to promote their faith and their understanding of "God's laws" through government means while simultaneously and unconstitutionally compromising the religious freedom and other liberty rights of people that do not share their religious and political beliefs and objectives, including millions of devout American Christians.

Anyone who has even casually studied Christianists can easily come up with a list of defining attributes, one being they all in some combination develop, promote, or believe in a false history of our nation's founding and the character of our founding framers, again with the exception of a few Christian reconstructionists, who advocate we peacefully overturn our Constitution and install a fascist, theocratic state. This revisionist effort is so pervasive in within this movement many even home-school their children to deprive them of an accurate rendering of American history, not to mention, which is always coupled to the promotion of religious notions as superior explanations of nature at the expense of scientific understandings.

Why? With the exception of a tiny percentage of far-left fringe groups, most Americans look to our founding as a great moment in history where principles and ideals worthy of defense were ratified in our beloved Federal Constitution. We also recognize our founding was only the beginning of our perfecting the union given the existence of slavery and government's unequal protection of our rights during that time and even still today. This legacy of shared greatness with room for improvement fuels the motivation by nearly all political advocates to claim their political objectives are superior to their opponents' since its more consistent with our founding ideals.

The problem for Christianists when looking to our founding was that our framers (the key subset of the founders who designed and implemented our form of gov't) created and successful championed the ratification of a radical Constitution given its power was delegated from "we the people" rather than some sect's understanding of God delegating laws and authority to the government. This resulted in a secular government where most of these framers, especially Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and possibly Washington and Madison also held religious views that even today would most likely practically prohibit them from being able to get elected president by the general populace given their rejection of orthodox, Trinitarian Christianity for what Dr. Gregg Frazer aptly describes as theistic rationalism. These framers were also perfectly comfortable creating a society where everyone enjoyed "freedom of conscience" and where the government neither encouraged nor prohibited any one sect's interests. And in spite of their views, all of these men along with other key framers were strongly on the side of keeping religion and the state separated, partially in hopes of seeing religious sects evolve to more rational beliefs (the latter strongly argued for by both Jefferson, Madison, and Adams along with founder Tom Paine).

Therefore a market opportunity to achieve money, fame, and political power is exploited by some on the Right to create propaganda to be used by the Right to achieve power, legislate laws, and publically finance endeavors directly in conflict with our Constitution and its ideals while falsely promoting they are actually in adherence.

Sadly, our current set of historians have turned mostly a blind eye to such shenanigans given the propagandists, such as David Barton, Tim LaHaye, and D. James Kennedy are not historians; I therefore presume our historians believe these propagandists are not worthy of their attention. A perfectly frustrating example is highly respected historian Gordon Wood's excellent critique of this generation's approach to writing history about our founding The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History. While Wood takes on some of the controversies known only within a relatively small circle of academics and quite frankly - relatively inconsequential, he completely avoids covering how more than 30% of our population have a false understanding of American history given the pervasiveness of Barton and his ilk's propaganda that is distributed by way of books, churches, blogs, and viral emails.

Therefore, Ms. Rodda's book is a welcome entry. While there are other books that address the problem of historical revisionism by Christianists, Rodda takes on their lies headfirst. Rather than building a thematic analysis of our founding in light of modern day propaganda, Rodda instead directly fisks their lies. Rodda takes 10 chapters, each to fisk one particularly big lie by the propagandists, and then goes on to provide three additional chapters to refute some of the lies about Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Blackstone. While this covers only a minority of the lies these propagandists spread, Rodda's efforts comes in at a hefty 496 pages and is noted as "Volume I".

If you are looking for a thematic analysis, I've read several good treatises, though none are perfect:

The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness

The Myth of Christian America : What You Need to Know About the Separation of Church and State

The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

Rodda also distinguishes herself from these other efforts in two ways. Besides meticulously footnoting her book; she provides a website that provides anyone the ability to actually view the scanned primary and secondary source material used by her to fisk the liars' lies, including exposing how they mistranslated their sources to provide mutated meanings. In addition, Rodda provides ample evidence to the extent frauds like Barton will go by scrutinizing his claims through researching his footnotes to prove he misquotes his sources, takes our founders statements completely out of context, uses discredited sources, and sometimes just makes stuff up. Given the popularity of the propagandists' work within social conservative circles, Rodda's fisking piles on to the already overwhelming evidence of the intellectual dishonesty of social conservatives and their leaders. Propagandists like Barton count on their audience - not known for their intellectual curiosity, lack of skepticism towards their authority figures, and honesty - to trust him. This has become so bad we still have home-schooled children being taught a false history using discredited history printed in their textbooks, even those published in 2009 that even Barton has conceded was wrong several years ago - including quotations Barton spread that were never said by the founders and whose ideas were directly contradicted by their actual speeches and writings.

The one problem with this book is Rodda's lack of access to a good editor. While Rodda meticulously and effectively tears these propagandists apart, I fear its overkill in terms of the number of words it takes if one wanted to read the book from start to finish. This is primarily not because of Rodda's writing skills, it takes many more words to correct a lie than it takes to tell one. Rodda is fine writer and thinker and provides compelling, obviously honest yeoman work. Therefore, I recommend reading the book in-between other books by breaking up your reading by chapter. And given the fact that these propagandists and their followers continue to perpetuate these lies even after being caught and even after conceding they lied, Rodda's efforts serves the reader well as a great reference book when these false claims are re-presented in the public square, as they most assuredly will for decades to come.

Liars for Jesus is a fabulous book. It is meticulously researched, and handily debunks several 'lies for jesus,' including distortions of history regarding the treaties with the Barbary states, lies about Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others.

The big thing that struck me about the book is the thoroughness of the author's research. I was very impressed by this.

Chris Rodda takes many quotes from noted christian history revisionists, such as Stephen McDowell and David Barton, and undoubtedly proves why their distorted versions of history are wrong using a variety of historical sources, such as archived documents from the Library of Congress and original documents written by the founders.

If you are one who is doubtful about the information put forth by some christians about the founding of the united states then this book is for you. Even if you aren't doubtful and are a christian I would still recommend this book because of the quality of research that was done for it. It just might change your mind.

I purchased this book to read on my iPad (Kindle for iPad) and love it. This book is full of well researched facts and is needed to push back on the lies of the religious right. Reading through all these reviews, is almost as interesting as reading the book. I think the results of accepting faith as fact, over time, the reason center of the mind becomes damaged. The "faithful" start to consider themselves infallible; tin gods. They know for a fact they are right, so if you show them facts that contradicts what they believe, their mind just loops back to the dilution or "faith" that what they know is a fact so you fact can't be right.

What we can do with this book, is to use its to divert open minded people away from the indoctrination of the religious right, before the damage is done.

This book isn't really a political left vs. right argument, it is simply real history vs. fake history. Rodda does an outstanding job researching the lies and distortions used by the christian right and countering them with the real historical facts.
Rodda's work is meticulous and on target.
This book is a must-read for anyone concerned about religious freedom or the 1st Amendment in a time where certain people on the fringe Christian right are using fake history to pursue a sinister agenda to redefine the Constitution and impose a Christian theocracy upon America.
This book is also a must-read for anyone who intends to home-school their children, as christian history revisionism has become a booming business in selling home-schooling books.