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This story is a couple of days old, but it is a perennial really. Conservative champion David Barton - a best-selling evangelical author and frequent guest of Glenn Beck - published a book called "The Jefferson Lies" in which he contended that Jefferson was a sort of closet orthodox Christian. Now, his publisher, a conservative Christian publisher obviously, has nonetheless pulled the book because it is - surprise, surprise - filled with inaccuracies. The effort to baptize the American Founding is a deeply misguided project (so, too, the effort to deny the religiosity of many if not most Americans at the time of the founding) and while Barton's book may be the most egregious example, there are others.
The story made me realize that I had negelected to call readers' attention to a book review I recently did at America magazine of Richard Lee's book "The Coming Revolution," which also misunderstands the American Revolution and was published by the same house as Barton's now pulled work.
