Pseudo-historian David Barton now wants to persuade Americans that things were pretty good in the United States during the Civil War — arguable our nation’s most traumatic, divisive and certainly bloodiest war. From our friends at Right Wing Watch:
When David Barton appeared on Glenn Beck’s program to discuss the important of prayer and fasting, he displayed various prayer proclamations issued by the Founding Fathers before highlighting one issued by Abraham Lincoln that Barton claimed Lincoln released because he felt that America had “become so prosperous, so bountiful” that it had forgotten God and needed to be reminded to humble itself and be thankful for all God had given this nation, declaring that it showed that “Lincoln had great spiritual insight at a time when the nation really was doing well.”
Right Wing Watch includes a video clip from the Beck program. They also include this from President Lincoln’s 1861 proclamation:
And whereas, when our own beloved Country, once, by the blessing of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him, and to pray for His mercy, — to pray that we may be spared further punishment, though most justly deserved; that our arms may be blessed and made effectual for the re-establishment of law, order and peace, throughout the wide extent of our country; and that the inestimable boon of civil and religious liberty, earned under His guidance and blessing, by the labors and sufferings of our fathers, may be restored in all its original excellence.
Barton must hope his audience was clueless. The State Board of Education members who appointed him as an “expert adviser” during the controversial and highly politicized revision of social studies curriculum standards in Texas three years ago clearly were.
