Liars for Jesus

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Introduction
One day about three years ago, I happened to be reading a news
story on AOL about the Ten Commandments monument in the Alaba-
ma courthouse. Having a little time to kill, I decided to click on the link
to a message board about the story. Little did I know when I clicked on
that link that I was about to discover a whole new version of American
history, or that six months later I’d be writing a book about it.

Once I got to the message board, I couldn’t resist the urge to
respond to a few of the posts, many of which were defending the Ten
Commandments monument by copying and pasting lies from what I
soon found out were literally thousands of Christian American histo-
ry websites. At first, my responses were short – nothing more than
correcting a misquote or briefly explaining why something couldn’t be
true. It soon became apparent, however, that these brief rebuttals
were not working. I was usually accused of being a liar, and occasion-
ally accused of being the antichrist. So, I began taking a little time to
look things up, and started posting longer, more detailed rebuttals,
complete with footnotes. Before long, other people who were battling
the lies began emailing me posts from the both the Ten Command-
ments board and other boards, asking me whether or not they were
true. Apparently, they had gotten the impression from my posts that
I was some sort of expert on the subject. I wasn’t, but I did know
enough about history to be able to answer many of these emails, or at
least to tell the people where they could find the information to dis-
prove whatever lie they were trying to disprove. Between posting my
own messages on the boards and answering emails, what had begun
as a click on a link to kill a few minutes soon became something I was
spending several hours a day on.

From time to time over the next few months, someone would
respond to one of my posts by saying that I should write a book. While
I appreciated the compliment, I didn’t take the idea very seriously – at
least not at first. For one thing, I was was sure that there must already
be plenty of books on the subject, written by people far more qualified
than I was to write about it. When I tried to find such a book, however,
I couldn’t. I found a few books that refuted the lies to a certain degree,
but none providing the amount of information I was including in my
message board posts. At this point, the idea of writing a book was start-
ing to seem a little less crazy. When I mentioned the idea to a few of my
real life friends, I was surprised to find that they didn’t think it was
crazy at all. So, never having written anything before, and having no
particular qualifications to write a history book, I started writing a his-
tory book.

My first step was to read a few of the most popular religious right
history books and compile a list of all the lies. So far, all I had seen
were the various versions of the lies from the internet. People on the
message boards, however, much more familiar than I was with the
sources of these lies, told me which books to buy. These books led me
to other books and other lies, which led me to even more books and
even more lies. I found so many lies, in fact, that I soon realized that
they weren’t all going to fit one book without omitting some of the
information that I felt was necessary to thoroughly explain and dis-
prove them. So, I decided to write not just one book, but two – the
first focusing mainly on the founding era, up until around the 1830s,
and the second covering the rest of the nineteenth and the early
twentieth century. Because most of the lies in the religious right his-
tory books are about the founding era, however, the first volume
began to get too long, and I was once again faced with the decision of
leaving stuff out, or including everything and splitting it up. Since my
goal from the beginning was to write a book that left no stone unturned,
and provided as much information as possible, I decided to split the
first volume into two volumes. This book, therefore, is the first of
what will eventually be three volumes.

For those already familiar with the religious right version of Amer-
ican history, my choice of topics for the first volume might seem a lit-
tle odd. If I had planned from the start to divide this into two volumes,
I would have put a few more of the most often lied about subjects in
the first volume. By the time I decided to split the volume up, how-
ever, it was too late to change the chapter order. A number of things
in the later chapters rely on information provided in earlier chapters,
so this would have required rewriting large sections of certain chap-
ters. So, this volume contains the first thirteen chapters, and the sec-
ond volume will contain the second thirteen. Since most of the
second volume is already written, its chapter titles, which are unlike-
ly to change, can be listed here.

1. George Washington and Gouverneur Morris
2. Were Half of the Founders Really Ministers?
3. Days of Prayer, Fasting, and Thanksgiving
4. Did James Madison Really Oppose the Bill of Rights?
5. Putting the Founders on Pedestals
6. Thomas Jefferson and the Laws of Virginia
7. Mr. Jefferson’s Bible
8. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
9. Sabbath and Blasphemy Laws
10. Toleration vs. Religious Freedom
11. James Madison and the General Assessment
12. Religious Tests and Oaths
13. Thomas Jefferson and the Danbury Baptists

It is my sincere hope that this book, and the two to follow, will be
useful to those already aware of and fighting the religious right’s revi-
sionism of American history, and, even more importantly, that it will
inform those who are unaware, as I was three years ago, of the dan-
gerous extent to which this revisionism has spread.
Chris Rodda