Historians accuse Barton of cherry-picking founding-era evidence
David Barton keeps tens of thousands of founding-era American documents and artifacts in a climate-controlled vault on his property near Aledo, Texas, where a security guard recently pried open the bulletproof door so the 72-year-old activist could show a reporter a Revolutionary War-era shot flask, a 1795 handwritten prayer proclamation from Samuel Adams, and what he says is a lock of George Washington’s hair. The collection, now totaling about 100,000 artifacts owned by Barton and his son Tim, has helped him position himself as the intellectual architect of a state-by-state campaign to integrate religion into public education.
“I own the stuff,” Barton told the Journal. “So I know more about this history than most of the professors.”
A former math and science teacher with no academic training as a historian, Barton studied religious education at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma and became a principal at a K-12 school run by his parents’ church. The 1962 Supreme Court ruling against state-sponsored prayer in public schools, he told the Journal, helped spark his political awakening, and he resolved to study what he described as the founders’ intent himself. “If you have a friend that stabs you in the back, that’s the way it was with what I had been taught about history,” he said.
In 1988, he founded WallBuilders — named for a biblical passage in which the Jewish people rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem — to teach the public that America was, in the organization’s words, “overwhelmingly rooted in Christian ideology.” He quit his job and spent more than a decade crisscrossing the country with his family in a 15-passenger van, visiting churches, civic clubs and military bases to propagate the theory while homeschooling their three children. “We called it van school,” his wife, Cheryl, told the Journal.
Barton has built a network of allies across conservative politics. A former vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas, he counts Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) among his supporters. “I was introduced to David and his ministry a quarter-century ago, and it has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do,” Johnson told a gathering of state legislators in 2021. Former U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes, of Virginia, said: “David is one of the most impactful individuals in the faith arena that I have ever met. When David speaks, people really are going to listen because they know most of the time he’s going to be right.”
The political opening for the classroom-display laws arrived in 2022, when the Supreme Court swept aside a decades-old legal test that had kept religious displays and practices out of public schools. Texas state Sen. Phil King, a longtime Barton ally, then worked with WallBuilders and a religious-liberty law firm to draft a bill requiring a Ten Commandments display in every Texas classroom. The Texas Senate passed it in 2023, but it died in the House. That November, King urged attendees at the WallBuilders annual closed-door legislative conference to pick up where Texas had stalled: “I hope some of y’all are able to pass it this year and beat us,” he said, according to the Journal.
In 2024, Louisiana state Rep. Dodie Horton drafted a similar bill after seeing a WallBuilders email about the Supreme Court’s ruling, she told the Journal. When the bill reached committee, Tim Barton testified and brought 18th- and 19th-century schoolbooks to argue that the Ten Commandments were once standard classroom material. Louisiana became the first state to enact the requirement in June 2024 since the Supreme Court struck down similar legislation more than four decades ago.
By 2025, WallBuilders tallied that more than 20 states had introduced similar bills, the Journal reported. Four — Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Alabama — have become law. A Journal analysis found that of 16 states that introduced Ten Commandments display legislation since 2024, the large majority used the same phrasing as the model legislation, employing words such as “conspicuous,” “durable” and “donated.” Roughly another 10 states have introduced similar or local-level measures.
Barton has also expanded his reach into curriculum. Last fall, the Texas Board of Education appointed him to help plan what more than five million public-school students in the state would learn. A memo Barton wrote this year, reviewed by the Journal, shows him pushing teachers to preserve third-grade lessons on “Moses, Hebrew slavery, the Exodus, and the Promised Land.” Much of his input made it into the final social-studies standards.
Outside his legislative network, Barton has advised the White House on exhibits for America’s 250th anniversary, and last year, before federal cuts to USAID, he met with State Department officials in Washington to discuss the history of U.S. foreign aid. A State Department spokesperson said the agency regularly consults with outside voices and that officials’ engagement with a person or group does not constitute an endorsement of views.
Many historians and academics accuse Barton of twisting history and cherry-picking quotes to advance his agenda. Mark A. Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, told the Journal that “he is a very accomplished collector, but that does not make one an expert, a scholar, or historian, no more than collecting stamps would make me a postal worker.” John Fea, chair of the history department at Messiah University, a Christian school, said: “For Barton, the past is instrumentalized for the present. He needs a certain kind of past because he needs the Founding Fathers on his side to advance his political agenda.”
In 2012, a publisher pulled Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies,” which claimed Thomas Jefferson was a conventional Christian, after a number of errors were alleged, the Journal reported. Barton’s 2021 public tax filing — the most recent available — shows WallBuilders paid Barton’s for-profit entities $267,071 in royalty fees for sales of his books. Profits from his book sales, which he estimated as likely to be in the millions of dollars, helped fund his acquisitions, the Journal reported.
The legal fight over the new laws is now reaching the Supreme Court. On Aug. 17, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups representing more than two dozen Texas families asked the justices to review a lower-court decision that upheld the Texas Ten Commandments legislation. “There are folks who would like to enlist the machinery of the state to promote their religion and no other,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s program on freedom of religion and belief. Barton told the Journal he believes the U.S. government should be welcoming to a variety of religions.
At the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, in July, where Johnson and other conservative dignitaries also appeared, attendees lined up to buy $79.99 copies of WallBuilders’ “Founders’ Bible” before filing into a conference room to hear Barton speak. “We’ve been told for years that Christians should stay out of politics,” Barton told the crowd. “But aren’t we glad the Founding Fathers didn’t believe that? If we end up believing that, we won’t have an America two generations from now.”