I [Ed Brayton] was thrilled to see ... Rob Boston did an interview with ... Chris Rodda ... available online.
[...]
[Boston:] Do you believe we’re making any headway ... ? If people are going to believe whatever they want regardless of the facts, why should we even continue?[Brayton:] I agree with this completely. It can be frustrating, just as it’s frustrating to continually see atheists sharing fake quotes and bad history. But I keep at it because it at least serves as a resource for others.
Rodda: It does get very frustrating, and there have been many times when I’ve asked myself why I even bother ... What stops me from giving up are things like the occasional emails I get from Christian homeschooling parents who happen to stumble upon one of my articles or videos and write to me ... asking me to recommend a reputable history curriculum. So, there are those glimmers of hope. Plus, once you know that something like this is going on, you can’t just ignore it and do nothing, no matter how impossible it might seem to fight it.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Brayton, Rodda, and Boston
See here. A taste:
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14 comments:
"This tactic of making himself out to be the victim of a liberal conspiracy to silence him worked like a charm and made him more popular than ever."
But there is a leftist conspiracy to get Barton. Chris Rodda makes her living with the militantly secularist Military Religious Freedom Foundation. She is no dispassionate scholar.
The nastiness and near-psychotic obsession with Barton has him laughing all the way to the bank. His critics are clearly uninterested in correcting him, they want to destroy him, and that just feeds his supporters' enthusiasm.
I guess that it just comes down to whether one believes that truthfulness is, or should be, a Christian principle and virtue.
Barton's critics, like Rodda, Boston, and Brayton or the decidedly Christian critics such as Michael Coulter, Warren Throckmorton, John Fea, and Gregg Fraser are not out to destroy Barton but are out to correct the lies and misinformation that are Barton's stock in trade. It's Barton's hubris and penchant for make believe history in service to his religious-political agenda that is the root of any destruction that occurs.
The obsessed critics--Fea is not one--attack Barton on a personal level. Their left-wing agenda is as bald as his right-wing one.
bloody psycho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JtVosVMxVE
I realize that it may be hard to tell from the inside looking out, but have you considered that it's you that are a bit off kilter* by obsessively defending a well-documented and unrepentant public liar?
*psycho is probably too strong a word.
We all noticed how our resident liberals stood up right away against their fellow left-winger when he made noises about atheism among the Founders [which didn't exist].
obsessively defending a well-documented and unrepentant public liar?
Is there a constitutional limit on how many pejoratives a leftist can pack into a sentence to beg the question?
*psycho is probably too strong a word.
Yah you're probably right but we should leave it up to our readers. It's...something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JtVosVMxVE
The main difference is that David Barton is writing outside of his field of technical expertise (not a necessary disqualifier in itself) in a prolonged, well-funded, and well-orchestrated public religious-political campaign to elect candidates to his party, and his historical “facts” range from distortions to fabrications, and Matthew Stewart wrote a book within his field of expertise by presenting his theses in a well-researched work documenting the evidence that he believes supports his thesis – and to the best of my knowledge he is neither waging a prolonged campaign or using his work to support any political parties or candidates. As to whether there were atheists at the founding let’s see what the contemporary commenters were saying (1):
In Boston, Thomas Young found both a political and a philosophical ally in William Molineux – the suspected chief of the “Mohawks” responsible for throwing tea into the harbor. Indeed, the Committee of Correspondence on which Young and Molineux sat was regularly pilloried in the press at the time as “a set of Atheists or Deists, men of profligate manors and profane tongues.” Ezra Ripley – the same minister who later oversaw the spiritual development of Ralph Waldo Emerson – concluded that roughly the same could be said of the bulk of the educated population in Boston, excepting (most of) the clergy.77 Vermont was no better, according to the Reverend Nathan Perkins, who reported with dismay in 1789 that “about one quarter of the inhabitants and almost all of the men of learning [are] deists.”78 A Gospel ministry would receive support from no more than half the population, he estimated: “the rest would choose to have no Sabbath – no ministers – no religion – no heaven – no hell – no morality.”
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In New York, there were few professional men who were not infidels, recorded James Kent, eventual chancellor of the state, and literary societies such as “the Friendly Club” were widely suspected of freethinking tendencies.79 In Philadelphia, the clergy routinely complained that “reasoning unbelievers” were everywhere and that the “conversations at the taverns and coffee houses” overflowed with “ridicule for the gospels and the idea of an afterlife.”80 In Virginia, the Baptists circulated a petition in 1785 lamenting, “Deism with its baneful influence is spreading itself over the state.”81 According to John Randolph, an alcoholic aristocrat who atoned for his own youthful lapses with a late-life conversion experience, Virginia during the revolutionary period was “the most ungodly country on the face of the earth…The last was a generation of free thinkers, disciples of Hume & Voltaire & Bolingbroke & there are very few persons…of our years who have not received their first impressions from the same die.”82
Now there’s a good chunk of material to fact check and comment on rather than making and attacking straw men and making unsupported assertions.
Continued Below
1) Matthew Stewart, 2015. Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. I could not find my copy to get page numbers – must have loaned it out at the last leftist meeting – but the passage and references can be found at the link below.
https://books.google.com/books?id=L69bAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT456&dq=matthew+stewart+founders+atheists&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjW7ZDI6LjLAhXJ5yYKHZ09BX0Q6AEIOzAF#v=snippet&q=atheists&f=false
As to whether there were atheists at the founding let’s see what the contemporary commenters were saying
Name one.
As for your banging your Matthew Stewart drum, you're boring us again. His expertise is in philosophy, not history or theology.
http://christopherblosser.blogspot.com/2015/01/robert-tracy-mckenzie-on-matthew.html
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In America's Founding May Not Have Been Christian, but It Sure Wasn't Anti-Christian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, chair of the Department of History at Wheaton College, reviews Matthew Stewart's Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. (Christianity Today 07/03/14):
... I'll leave it to the philosophers to evaluate whether Stewart has exaggerated the underlying atheism of this cast of characters. (His portrayal of Locke, at least, is sure to arouse controversy.) As a historian, I am more concerned by his utter failure to establish the influence of atheistic belief on America's founding. Historians believe that our most important task is to explain what we see, basing our statements of cause and effect on evidence. Stewart takes a different approach. He concludes that radical philosophy was widespread among common Americans after discovering it in the writings of two individuals, Vermont's backwoods leader Ethan Allen and a Boston physician named Thomas Young. In like manner, he finds that atheistic presuppositions determined the political philosophy of the most prominent Founders by ruthlessly disregarding all competing influences. This is pronouncement, not demonstration.
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Mark David Hall has published a rather devastating review of Nature's God for the Spring 2015 issue (pp. 285-291) Christian Scholars Review entitled "A Failed Attempt at Partisan Scholarship", which is reposted to the blog American Creation. He concludes:
... Stewart regularly makes sweeping statements that leave the impression America’s founders were radical deists who wanted to create a godless republic, but he occasionally offers the qualification that many Americans were traditional Christians and that intellectual traditions not antithetically opposed to Christianity may have had some influence as well (e.g. 32, 352). But these qualifications are too few, faint, and far between. By focusing on a handful of founders with radical religious views, some important—Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine—and others relatively unimportant—Allen and Young—he grossly distorts the founders’ religious views and political commitments. Even brief consideration of a wider range of founders reveals a very different picture.*
[...]
Nature’s God suffers from a number of serious flaws. Stewart virtually ignores the vast literature on the role of religion in the American founding and he utterly fails to engage scholars whose works challenge his thesis. He misuses and misconstrues primary sources and largely ignores founders (key and otherwise) who do not fit his thesis. Alan Ryan, in a friendly blurb, describes the book as “partisan scholarship.” It seems to me that Ryan is half right. Readers interested in a polemical account of religion in the American founding almost completely ungrounded in history may enjoy this book, but anyone interested in a serious treatment of religion in the era should look elsewhere.
See, for instance, the approximately thirty-three founders and traditions profiled in Dreisbach, Morrison, and Hall, eds., The Founders on God and Government (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), Dreisbach, Morrison, and Hall, The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, and Dreisbach and Hall, eds, Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (Oxford, 2014).
As for your banging your Matthew Stewart drum, ...
You brought Stewart into the discussion not me. Of course you still remain completely ignorant of his book having not read it.
As to whether there were atheists at the founding, I reproduced a passage of Stewart's book that presents some contemporaneous views at odds with your own unsupported assertion. You could always comment on that or chase down his citations to see if they're correct but you choose to change the subject and sling mud. Whatevs my little buddy.
As to Mark David Hall's review in Christian Scholars Review, it's possible that there's just a wee bit of turf protecting going on. It's evident that Hall virtually ignores the vast literature that supports Stewart's work (discernible via the citations).
As to whether or not Hall's review is devastating, I suspect it is if you haven't read Stewart's Natures God or any of the literature that it builds on. Still, without quibbling over the details, it's inarguable that America's founding owes a debt to heretical ideas and those who embraced them and that the Constitution is a radical departure from the old forms of European government and church-state alliances.
It's also inarguable that many Christians and Christian leaders at the time felt that they had been betrayed by heretics and deists and atheists and that the Constitution, with no reliance on God but with complete reliance upon the people as the basis for governance, was an abomination. It's somewhat ironic that many Christians, contemporary with the framing and ratification of the Constitution and thereafter, would not have had and did not have any problem pointing out the heretical nature of the Constitution and the anti-Christians behind it - might even have seen Stewart's book as devastating social review and given it a big thumbs up.
And finally, I quote you: "People should read him for themselves rather than listen to vague slime from his critics."
Different author, same principle.
Completely unresponsive to the above. Name one. Thomas Young? That's it? Who's he again?
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