Reply #5: also check this link

[bobbieinok]

http://www.livingston.net/wilkyjr/link28.htm

The constitutional principle of separation of church and state has given Americans more religious freedom than any people in world history. Around the globe, those suffering under the heavy heel of government-sponsored religious oppression look to America's church-state model with longing. The "wall of separation between church and state" is America's bulwark of true religious liberty.

Despite its proven track record of success, separation of church and state is increasingly becoming just another target for the Religious Right's smear campaign strategists. In the past few years, an entire cottage industry has sprung up in Religious Right circles that seeks to "prove" that mainstream history is all wrong. The United States was really founded to be a fundamentalist Christian nation. Separation of church and state was never intended; it was, these far-right activists allege, foisted on the country by the Supreme Court in recent times.

The Religious Right's leading practitioner of this type of historical revisionism is David Barton, who runs an outfit called WallBuilders out of Aledo, Texas.1 Barton makes a lucrative living traveling the right wing's lecture circuit where he offers up a cut-and-paste version of U.S. history liberally sprinkled with gross distortions and, in some cases, outright factual errors. Crowds of fundamentalist Christians from coast to coast can't get enough of it.

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Barton has no legitimate credentials as an historian, and it shows. Shoddy research, astounding lapses of logic and outright errors are hallmarks of his work. For his first book, America: To Pray Or Not To Pray? (1988), Barton reports that God ordered him to go to the library and look into the connection between the removal of state-mandated prayer in public schools by the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963 and the drop in SAT scores. "I didn't know why," Barton writes in the book's introduction, "but I somehow knew that these two pieces of information would be very important."6

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