Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Bob Allen on Pastors' Boycott of Barton

Here.

6 comments:

Tom Van Dyke said...

Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at Grove City College and frequent Barton critic, said the controversial author can no longer complain that his critics are all liberals and secularists, because all the Cincinnati ministers are evangelicals.

But they are liberals. Democrats, left-leaning activists. Look 'em up.

jimmiraybob said...

Since Throckmorton and Coulter are both involved largely in fact checking, I assume that you are suggesting that the verifiable facts that they use have a liberal bias.

In Barton's case, I believe the formulation might be expressed as:

Conservative facts = (unlimited imagination) x (liberal/verifiable facts) = predetermined outcome

Tom Van Dyke said...

No, I meant the protesters are left-wing activists. It's about partisan politics, not history. The "protest" is bogus.

As for Dr. Throckmorton, I don't know what makes an evangelical psychology prof with a strong professional and religious interest in gay and "ex-gay" issues write a book about David Barton's butchery of historical factoids.

Warren Throckmorton has been courteous to me even as I've voiced disagreement with some of his own rebuttals of Barton. I do not know how he votes, I do not know if his interest in Barton is intellectual or born of an animus against the Religious Right. When I asked him about it, he did not respond directly, so we still don't know.

http://wthrockmorton.com/2012/07/13/my-response-to-david-barton/comment-page-1/#comment-483917


[Throckmorton and Coulter] begin by candidly admitting that they are critiquing “Barton and religious conservatives in general,” thereby openly confessing their hostility toward me and my personal religious beliefs.

Barton put quotation marks around “Barton and religious conservatives in general,” indicating that it’s a direct quote from your book. Your excerpt here indicates that’s not a direct quote from you atall.

If so, you just should have said that, that he misquoted you. And you should have added your denial that you have any “hostility toward me [Barton] and my personal religious beliefs.” And more to the point, no hostility toward religious conservatives in general, since they seem to be the ones you want to warn off of David Barton.

But perhaps you couldn’t truthfully say that, so you didn’t.


I'd be pleased to learn there's no animus; I'm not saying there is.

Jonathan Rowe said...

This Christian Nation thing is a bug. I caught it about 8 years ago. Maybe Dr. Throckmorton caught it too.

I'm not sure where WT stands politically. On the gay issues, he seems to still hold to traditional Christian notions of the impropriety of homosexual acts; but he no longer supports a lot of the "ex-gay" social science (which the experts don't believe works) that he used to. Interestingly a few "ex-gays" involved in heterosexual marriages (Alan Chambers, John Smid) seemed to have moved along those very same lines.

jimmiraybob said...

Oh, the protesters. I thought you were making an ironic statement about the T & C. My bad.

jimmiraybob said...

This issue is going to be covered on NPR's All Things Considered very shortly per"

http://wthrockmorton.com/2012/08/08/all-things-considered-considers-david-barton-today/

A written article is here:

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/08/157754542/the-most-influential-evangelist-youve-never-heard-of#commentBlock

The article ends with: "Barton's next stop: the Republican National Convention, where as a Texas representative to the GOP Platform Committee, he will lay out his vision of America."

That is the platform that expressly comes out against teaching critical thinking.