With a tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence, the Senate confirmed longtime religious-right figurehead and outgoing (and unpopular) Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback to be the US’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom on Wednesday.
The outgoing governor’s association with Barton is longstanding. Brownback has frequently referred to Barton as “one of my big heroes” for his preservation of America’s “beautiful heritage” and has appeared on Barton’s WallBuilders radio show.
Meanwhile, Barton is best-known for a series of books, including Original Intent: The Courts, The Constitution, and Religion and The Jefferson Lies, that argue America was founded by evangelical Christians as a Christian nation, and that the Founding Fathers intended for America to be run on Christian principles. He’s also known for his lobbying group, WallBuilders, which attempts to bring Christianity into American public life by highlighting what he says is “forgotten history.”
Like Washington, DC’s new Museum of the Bible, Barton uses the appearance of academic inquiry without any of its rigor — to shill for a Christian dominionist approach to government that ideologues from Newt Gingrich to Michele Bachmann to Brownback to Trump’s latest favorite candidate, Saccone, are all too happy to accept without question.
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