David Barton is not a historian

Barton, a rabid partisan, has no academic credentials as a historian, and his “scholarly” work has routinely been discredited by real academicians. In Bush’s America, where Republican activists pretend to be reporters, it’s only fitting that Republican activists also get to pretend to be historians.
Though Barton would prefer that his patrons remain unaware of it, he published a book several years ago called “The Myth of Separation,” which relied on alleged quotes from key figures from early American history to prove that this is a “Christian nation.” Unfortunately for Barton, a closer look at his book’s content showed repeated instances of bogus quotes, never uttered by any Founding Father.
Similarly, Barton produced a documentary called “America’s Godly Heritage.” In 1996, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs reviewed the documentary’s claims carefully and concluded that it is “laced with exaggerations, half-truths and misstatements of fact.”
Barton ultimately had to withdraw some of his materials and issue an alert to his supporters not to use some of the spurious quotes he’d been touting for nearly a decade. This more or less should have ended his fledgling career as an amateur historian and “expert” on the role of religion in America’s founding.
Alas, it didn’t. As has become far too common, conservatives were less concerned with Barton’s shoddy scholarship and more concerned with his conclusions, which merely served to reinforce what they wanted to believe anyway. The right continues to treat Barton as a legitimate scholar.
Indeed, conservatives are so enthralled by Barton’s revisionist historical tales that the Republican National Committee literally put him on the payroll — a $20,000 stipend during the 2004 campaign to travel and preach the historical gospel, as he sees it, so long as it helps produce GOP votes.

Barton traveled the country for about a year prior to the election, showing pastors a slideshow designed to prove that the United States was meant to be Christian. He told Beliefnet that his efforts were meant to be “below the radar…. We work our tails off to stay out of the news.”