Recently, David Barton and Matt Krause testified in front of the Texas House of Representatives Public Education committee. Barton and Krause both said some historically questionable things to support the placement of the Ten Commandments in every Texas classroom. A premise of this podcast is that it takes faulty history to pursue Christian nationalist goals, one of which is to erode separation of church and state.

Texas Representatives John Bryant and James Tallerico scrutinized Barton's and Kruse's arguments and determined that placing a Christian version of the Ten Commandments in every Texas classroom was unfair and un-American.

The episode begins with a passionate appeal by Bryant and Talerico for fairness and ends with an analysis of faulty history which is being used to oppose fairness.

Music provided by Earl's Taco Shack (Gulf of Mexico Blues, Nebula); Jeremiah Lawson (Sonata for Guitar in A minor), and Jonus Fair (The Rest is History).

Written and produced by Warren Throckmorton

The podcast will be on break until June. Watch for new episodes with material from Andrew Whitehead, Katherine Stewart, Roger Finke, Jemar Tisby, Jeremie Beller, and much more in the second half of season two.

In this segment, I examine the notion that there was something remarkably Christian about America's founding era. Last week, I fact-checked Charlie Kirk's viral video defense of the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation in the legal sense. Most of what Kirk had to say was irrelevant or incorrect.

Today, I consider an overview of moral and religious failings during the founding era. Along with guests Jemar Tisby, Mark Noll, George Marsden, Caleb Campbell, and Aaron Cowan, I contradict Charlie Kirk's call to return to America's Christian roots. In fact, those roots don't seem very Christian when one considers the injustice and atrocities throughout the historical record.

From the segment: "With slavery, treachery, mass murder, betrayal and theft embedded in the legacy of the nation, what does it matter how many times a Supreme Being is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or if the Liberty Bell has Leviticus on it?"

Written and produced by Warren Throckmorton

Music provided by Earl's Taco Shack, Jonathan Swaim, and Jonus Fair

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In 2024, Charlie Kirk distributed a five-minute video defense of the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. It has been played at least 20 million times on various social media platforms and is full of faulty history. This segment serves to correct the false claims and defend the proposition that America's founders set out to found a secular government with provision for religious pluralism. Unfortunately, this only applied to white males at first.

Kirk and his fellow Christian nationalists use a variety of false stories to prop up a vision of a Christian American founding. They want to go back to that mythical time. In this segment, historians Aaron Cowan, Randall Balmer, and George Marsden, English professor Matthew Boedy, and co-host Michael Coulter join me to debunk Kirk's false claims and advocate for good history and religious pluralism.

For primary sources referred to in this segment, see this link: https://warrenthrockmorton.substack.com/p/charlie-kirks-christian-america

Written and produced by Warren Throckmorton. Music provided by Earl's Taco Shack and Jonus Fair.