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Thursday, January 14, 2016


LIARS FOR JESUS, VOLUME II:
NOW AVAILABLE IN BOTH
E-BOOK & PAPERBACK

MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda's latest book, an authoritative refutation of Christian nationalist myths & revisionist history

Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, Vol. 2

By Chris Rodda

With a foreword by Ed Brayton

Liars for Jesus debunks many of the historical lies invented and used by the Christian nationalist history revisionists in their efforts to further their far right political agenda and destroy the wall of separation between church and state in America. Liars for Jesus is not a book about religion. It is a history book, setting the record straight by presenting and fully documenting the true stories and historical facts that are distorted in the "Christian nation" pseudo-history of our country.

Click here to purchase your copy from Amazon (Kindle and print edition)

Click here to purchase the NOOK Book edition from Barnes & Noble

Introduction by Chris Rodda

When I published the first volume of Liars For Jesus back in 2006, I never imagined that it would be over nine years before I would get this second volume finished, but here we are in 2016. Why did it take so long for me to get around to finishing this second volume? Well, my writing of the first volume led to my getting a job that drew me into another area of the battle against the Christian nationalists – fighting the takeover of our military by those whose goal is to transform our military into a force of "government-paid missionaries for Christ," as one of the largest and most powerful of the fundamentalist military ministry organizations puts it.

Shortly after publishing the first volume of Liars For Jesus, I was invited to write on the website talk2action.org, where, in early 2007, I was writing a series of articles exposing the revisionist history being taught in our public schools through the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS) curriculum. In these articles I was writing about the NCBCPS, the name David Barton came up very often, not only because Barton is the source of so many of the lies found in the NCBCPS curriculum, but because he is also a member of the NCBCPS's advisory board. My articles about the NCBCPS curriculum led one of the co-founders of talk2action.org, Bruce Wilson, to look further into this issue of David Barton's version of history making its way into our public schools, and what Bruce found was that there was another way that this revisionist history had found its way into our public schools – the JROTC curriculum. What Bruce had uncovered was an essay by David Barton in the JROTC's core curriculum's unit on "Citizenship and American History." Needless to say, this Barton essay, on the subject of what separation of church and state means, was full of the same blatant lies that appear in Barton's books and videos. This discovery that Barton's revisionist history was being taught to public school students not only through the NCBCPS curriculum but also in the JROTC curriculum led me to write an article in May 2007 titled "The Department of Defense – Bringing Historical Revisionism to a High School Near You." This article was seen by someone who was a volunteer for an organization called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), who passed it on to MRFF's founder and president, Mikey Weinstein. To make a long story short, by the end of that month I was working for MRFF as a researcher, and am still working for MRFF today, now as the foundation's senior research director.

While my work for MRFF caused me to put off finishing this second volume of Liars For Jesus until now, it also further opened my eyes to just how dangerously pervasive the lies of David Barton and his fellow history revisionists are. Not only had this revisionist history made the leap from Christian homeschools and churches into our public schools; it was also being promoted in, and by, our military. I saw article after article in military base newspapers repeating the lies found in the revisionist history books and pushing the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation. I saw that Barton's books and videos are in the libraries at many of our military installations – including the libraries at our military's service academies. I saw that the members of Congress who for years had been repeating Barton's lies and appearing on Barton's radio show were the very same members of Congress who are on a constant mission to change military regulations to allow religious discrimination, harassment, and all manner of Christian proselytizing and other unconstitutional promotions of religion to go unchecked, and even be encouraged, in our military. I also saw it in the hate mail that so-called Christians send to MRFF, with much of this hate mail "informing" us that America was founded as a Christian nation and that the founders based our government on the Bible. So, although I at first thought my work for MRFF would be completely separate from my work fighting history revisionism, I quickly realized that the two could not be separated, but were inextricably entwined with each other.

Those who have read the first volume of Liars For Jesus are likely to notice a few differences between this volume and that first volume. One of these differences is in the examples I cite of where the lies are coming from and where they are being used. At the time that I wrote the first volume of this series, the distorted version of history promoted by David Barton and the other revisionists was for the most part confined to Christian schools, homeschools, and churches. That has changed. As already mentioned, the Christian nationalist version of history has now made its way into our public schools. Therefore, one of the sources frequently used as an example in this book is the NCBCPS curriculum. And, while in the first volume I included many more examples of the versions of the lies found in other revisionist books besides those by David Barton, the majority of the examples in this volume come from Barton's books, videos, TV show appearances, etc. This does not mean that the lies debunked in this volume don't also appear in the books of the other revisionists. I have just chosen to use Barton as the primary example because the reality is that almost every lie found in the books of other revisionists has either been copied from Barton or popularized by Barton. There is obviously no question that Barton is the most influential by far of all the revisionists, and that his versions of the lies are the versions most often repeated, not only in the books of the other history revisionists, but by the NCBCPS in our public schools, and also by members of Congress and other politicians, many of whom have specifically stated that it is Barton upon whom they rely for their information about American history.

The other difference in this volume is in the terminology I use to describe the history revisionists. While the title of this volume is, like the first volume, Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, you will see that in the book itself, the term "Christian nationalists" has replaced "religious right," a term that has become somewhat outdated. The term "Christian nationalist history revisionists," while a bit of a mouthful, is a much more accurate term to describe the likes of David Barton and the others who are using history revisionism as a means of achieving their ultimate goal of turning our secular country into a Christian nation.

Click here to read foreword by Ed Brayton at Patheos

LEARN MORE at LiarsForJesus.com


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