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3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
A wonderful and very important book! Aug 27, 2009
Liars For Jesus, The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History - Volume I. By Chris Rodda
Ever try and catch up with a lie? How about more than one? How about hundreds? This is the monumental task the author of Lies For Jesus, Chris Rodda, has embarked upon, and Volume One of her truly landmark work is an excellent beginning! I love American history, I like to search for the little nuggets, sometimes hard to find, that contributed to who we are as a people, and Liars For Jesus proved to be the mother load.
The religious right in the United States has been, for decades, eager to prove that the US was instituted as a Christian country, with laws based upon Christian principals. Faced with a totally secular Constitution, along with that darned inconvenient "wall of separation" in the First Amendment, they have resorted to lying, misstating and twisting historical facts to fit their own version of what our founders were trying to create. Heck of it is, they have been very successful, at least among their primary audience - fundamentalist Christians who very much wanted to believe what the revisionists were selling, and just wanted some justification.
In fact, the revisionists have been every bit as successful within their target audience revising United States history as the creationists have been revising the sciences of Biology, Geology, Astronomy, Paleontology and even Physics. The revisionists use the same tactics as the creationists - misrepresentations, half-truths and outright lies!
You might be thinking that what the revisionists are doing has no effect on you or yours; "Who cares," you might say, "So what, they teach their own kids their own version of history, aren't they already home schooling their own version of science?" That's true, and if they were only just trying to raise another generation of ignorant children it would be hard to object, but that's not the case! In Texas right now, the State Board of Education is fighting a battle that could force revisionist history into every classroom in the country!
The dispute in Texas centers around revisionist ideas about what's important and what should be taught as "truth" to Texas school children, and as Texas is the largest single schoolbook market, publishers usually produce new books to Texas standards. That elevates the problem to what may become, in a very short time, a national issue.
As I mentioned above, the task Ms. Rodda has set for herself is one of monumental proportions. To begin with, there are many revisionist authors to dispute, not just one, and the scope of their work effects most of our history, not just the founding period. Compounding the problem is the fact that many of the religious right authors rely upon each others work, sometimes making slight changes, often forcing Ms. Rodda to debunk two references instead of one. Most difficult is when the revisionists invent a quotation or even an event out of whole cloth, leaving the debunker no option other then evaluating the entire context to determine the likelihood of the quotation or occurrence. Tough work!
With so many revisionist lies to debunk, Ms. Rodda decided early-on to divide her work into two volumes, the first covering the founding era to the 1830s, and the second covering from there to the present. It soon became clear, however, that there was just too much material to debunk in the first volume, there being so much revisionist focus upon the founding era, so she decided to break the first volume into two. Volume one is available now, Volume two is mostly written and will be available in the next few months.
Her approach of dealing with a given incident or subject per chapter makes for an interesting and enlightening read. It's really fun to explore our history to great depth, and even more fun when it reads like a detective story. For instance, Chapter five is devoted to Thomas Jefferson, and his involvement with public education, from colonial days, through his establishment of the University of Virginia. The revisionists would have you believing Jefferson was a strong advocate for religion in public schools during this entire period. Ms. Rodda destroys their arguments, debunks their phony quotes, lies and half-truths, leaving nothing but the bare truth. Unpleasant as it may be to the religious right, Jefferson never advocated religion in public schools, and especially not at his University of Virginia.
I'm not going to go chapter-by-chapter, there is no need and I would require just as much space as she used in Volume one. Suffice to say, she does an outstanding job, not only of debunking the lies, but of presenting a wonderful panorama of an exciting time in our history. I am somewhat of a U.S. history buff, and have written more then a few essays on the colonial period. I learned a great deal while reading Lies For Jesus, and gained a new appreciation for the type of work Ms. Rodda is doing. She is a wonderful writer, and at times you will forget that you're reading a history book.
Everyone who's concerned about the influence of the religious right in politics and the rest of the affairs of this country should read this book. Our Senators and Representatives are using the lies of David Barton and the rest of the revisionists to influence legislation, and thereby the governance of our country. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
8 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Another respected historian agrees with Rodda Jul 22, 2009
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.
11 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 Fisking liars is hard, but essential. A heroic, interesting, prodigious effort. Jun 14, 2009
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.
9 of 13 found the following review helpful:
For keeping U.S. history accurate and church and state separate Feb 08, 2009
The book provides (starts) a very careful refutation of some of the many distortions by a number of religious historical revisionists trying to portray some early American leaders as much more supportive of a closer relationship between church and state than was the case. As such, it's not the most exciting or "entertaining" book out there; but it's important to realize how extensive and persistent the distortion effort is and how those lies find their way into the writings "for example" of Supreme Court Justices as well as "history" books used in some religious schools and those who are "home schooled." This is an important part of maintaining one of the great features of our Constitutional heritage--the separation of church and state. For anyone dealing with that battle, this is a must.
17 of 22 found the following review helpful:
Meticulously Researched Sep 27, 2008
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.
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