The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson [Hardcover]

David Barton (Author), Glenn Beck (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2012

America, in so many ways, has forgotten. Its roots, its purpose, its identity all have become shrouded behind a veil of political correctness bent on twisting the nation's founding, and its founders, to fit within a misshapen modern world.

The time has come to remember again.

In The Jefferson Lies, prominent historian David Barton sets out to correct the distorted image of a once-beloved founding father, Thomas Jefferson. To do so, Barton tackles seven myths head-on, including:

• Did Thomas Jefferson really have a child by his young slave girl, Sally Hemings?
• Did he write his own Bible, excluding the parts of Christianity with which he disagreed?
• Was he a racist who opposed civil rights and equality for black Americans?
• Did he, in his pursuit of separation of church and state, advocate the secularizing public life?

Through Jefferson's own words and the eyewitness testimony of contemporaries, Barton repaints a portrait of the man from Monticello as a visionary, an innovator, a man who revered Jesus, a classical Renaissance man and a man whose pioneering stand for liberty and God-given inalienable rights fostered a better world for this nation and its posterity. For America, the time to remember these truths again is now.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Barton is the founder and president of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization that presents America s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage. He is the author of many best-selling books, including Original Intent, The Bulletproof George Washington, American History in Black and White, and The Question of Freemasonry and the Founding Fathers. He addresses more than 400 groups each year. Barton was named by Time magazine as one of America s 25 most influential evangelicals, and he has received numerous national and international awards, including Who s Who in Education and Daughters of the American Revolution s highest award, the Medal of Honor. David and his wife, Cheryl, have three grown children.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson (April 10, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595554599
• ISBN-13: 978-1595554598
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (404 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #8 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( J ) > Jefferson, Thomas

More About the Author

David Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, an organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage. David is author of numerous best-selling works and a national award-winning historian who brings a fresh perspective to history.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

788 of 1,236 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Barton's Jefferson April 3, 2012

By James Ferguson VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

To look at David Barton, you would think he is a reasonable fellow, but then he opens his mouth and you wonder where on earth his ideas come from. His notion that the Jefferson Bible was some attempt to simplify the Bible for the Indians is a joke. One can draw on Jefferson's own letters to see he had a hard time coming to terms with the Bible, preferring to cull from it what he considered relevant to a discussion on ethics.

"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

Jefferson was a classicist, with a huge library at Monticello devoted to his studies. He had little interest in converting the "natives." He was more concerned with elevating the intellectual life of America, which is why he established the University of Virginia. Mr. Barton would like us to believe in "Lie #2" that Jefferson did not intend this to be a secular school, but rather faith-based, which better suits Barton's own religious temperament. He discards all the classical references which abound in any conventional telling of the founding of the university, choosing instead to focus exclusively on religious aspects. You would think you were reading about Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

We all know that Barton has an agenda, which includes reshaping the founding fathers in his evangelical religious view of the world. There are so many anthologies available of Jefferson's writings that one doesn't need Barton to interpret them for you. Thomas Jefferson : Writings : Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (Library of America) is a good place to start, or you can check any number of online sources, such as the Jefferson collection at the University of Virginia.

As for the Sally Hemings story, there is no clear consensus on whether Jefferson fathered children by her, and besides this is the least of the disconcerting "myths" that surround Jefferson. His biggest problem was that he was persistently in debt and had to use his slaves as collateral to keep Monticello going. This is well documented in his own farm records. In the end, his estate along with the vast majority of his slaves had to be sold at auction to cover his debts. Only a handful of slaves saw freedom, despite having offered manumission in his will. Better to read Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder

Of course, this isn't new for Barton. After all, this is the author of The Bulletproof George Washington. His "unconfirmed quotations," in which he literally put words in the founding fathers' mouths, have gone viral. He defends himself by saying that these unconfirmed quotes are "consistent" with the "views" of the founding fathers. David Barton is no historian. You can check him out at Wallbuilders, an apt title. He is a Texas evangelist, whose sum total of education is a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University. He isn't concerned with facts, but rather with reshaping history to suit his religious conservative agenda. He comes from a long line of such "scholars," dating back to Samuel Wordsworth Bailey, author of Homage of Eminent Persons to the Book, from which Barton draws for a few of his "quotes" on Jefferson. Bailey was a mid-19th century evangelist, an early "wallbuilder," who had a habit of putting words in the mouths of eminent persons.

279 of 438 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes Book Titles are Unintentionally Ironic May 17, 2012

By Labarum VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The idea of a book countering claims about Thomas Jefferson promoted by some recent secularists is not itself an absurd idea. There has often been far too quick an equivalence made by some secularists today between their own views and those held by Enlightenment era thinkers. When examining the views of the Founding Fathers, we must realize there was quite a range one might occupy that falls between the tenor of the French Englightenment and its Anglo-American counterpart. On the one hand, we have someone like Thomas Paine who was openly hostile to Christianity but others, while also deists like Paine, thought the Church had an important role in promoting a shared moral code of the "golden rule" variety. They believed in God, respected Jesus as a moral example, and might even attend church services while not believing a word of the Gospel message apart from the shared morality. While opposing any imposition of doctrinal positions upon the state, they were not averse to religion having its place in the public square.

Any hopes such a clarification would be forthcoming in David Barton's "The Jefferson Lies" was quickly dispelled by a quick glance at the table of contents (and confirmed by reading the relevant chapter). For example, there is a chapter titled "Lie #7: Thomas Jefferson was an Atheist and Not a Christian." This is the logical fallacy known as the false dichotomy: you produce a pair of alternatives and procede as though they were the only two choices available. There were lots of other things Thomas Jefferson might have been besides Christian and atheist - he could have been a Muslim, a Hindu, a Jew, or a deist. Granted, the first two possibilities are fairly remote for eighteenth century America and the third only slightly less so; but there were lots of deists running around at th time and Thomas Jefferson happened to be one of them.

In other cases, the author might have a point if he were aiming at specific radical voices but instead he treats the extremes as though they represented the current scholarly consensus and uses that to attack scholars in general. There are some who claim that Jefferson detested the clergy and attempt to picture him as an equivalent to contemporary "New Atheists" but such views are found on the internet - not academia. Jefferson did detest the behavior of some clergy, as I suspect Barton does himself, but he did not detest them because they were clergy and historians do not claim he did.

It seems Barton has scoured everything Jefferson wrote looking for mention of Christianity, no matter how tangential, that is not negative, no matter how incidental, and uses it as evidence Jefferson was a Christian. Is it really significant that Jefferson attended church services in school? So did Charles Darwin and Christopher Hitchens so we see how much that was worth. Is it really significant that he used the phrase "the year of our Lord" in a date on a treaty? It turns out it was required by the other party. None of such minutiae comes close to demonstrating Jefferson held Christian beliefs.

Even stranger was his discussion of Unitarianism. Besides deists, there some founding fathers who were Unitarians. Barton makes a points of claiming the Unitarians then were more mainstream Christian than today and at that time did not follow the "ultra heretical" doctrines they hold today. While one guesses he means the quasi-New Age beleifs they currently embrace, the fact remains Unitarians in Jefferson's day denied the divinity of Jesus and that still qualifies as heretical by Christian standards.

But perhaps the low point was the section denying the famous "Jefferson Bible." Here Barton shows his hand. Other parts of the book might be explained away by sheer incompetence but to deny something that exists and is well documented gives clear evidence of crossing the line into dishonesty. It is a blatant lie that cannot withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny and reveals Barton's work as not merely poor but as a polemically motivated fraud.

The end result is a mess of a book that is little more that a collection of lies, half-truths, distortions, logical fallacies, and non sequiturs. It has almost no redeemable qualities and is so poor that one might be led to think it was written by someone pretending to be Christian to make Christians look bad. Speaking as a Christian, it is unfortunately the case, judging by this author and the embracing of this book in some Christian circles, they can look bad all by themselves.

Note to Christians who have read this book: Please also read Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President where two Christian professors of history at Messiah College demolish Barton's fraud. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download the Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac software and read it on your dekstop or laptop.

146 of 230 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wish I could buy the book August 16, 2012

By Jim

Format:Hardcover

Just a word to the wise, the editor removed 20,000 words from the final book. Many of them the supporting facts. As for having to dig through the footnotes, good. Look up what he is claiming for yourself. The attacks are basing their information on second hand information. One in particular about the Jefferson Bible sites a author who wrote a book on it in the 1960's who claimed in his own footnotes that he didn't include all of the passages Jefferson cut out because he did not think Jefferson actually thought that way.

Go look at the original source, and you will see that your history teacher lied to you.

Oh and guess I will get to read it, seems Mercury Ink will be publishing the ENTIRE book.