Why Is David Barton's Wallbuilders Asking Questions About Race?

In websurfacing David Barton's Wallbuilders website, I clicked on the link for his organization's pastor's briefing.

At this event, Christian ministry leaders (common believers not being good enough apparently) are given a tour of the Capitol building by Barton and Christian members of Congress detailing the religious symbolism throughout the building.

Are regular Christians somehow not pious enough or simply too stupid to hear this information from the Holy Barton himself and must instead receive it second hand from their pastors?

Apart from the hypocrisy that Barton himself would not qualify to go on his own tour since he is technically not a pastor but a historian, Christians should be more concerned about something else on the Wallbuilders site.

On the site’s registration page for the tour, apart from asking for name, address, and ministerial affiliation of the applying cleric (no doubt to weed out those in the laity unworthy of an audience with such auspicious elites), one of the blanks the applicant is forced to fill out asks for race.

Why in the name of Lincoln’s beard is this any of Barton’s business?

Scripture says that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew. Unless Barton is looking for a spouse for his children among those gathered, what bearing should the ethnicity of those assembled have on his presentation? And for those offended that I dared to insinuate that it’s OK to take someone’s race into consideration when contemplating matrimony, shouldn’t you get even more upset it is being considered here for something less permanent or intimate?

Those conditioned to blithely accept what they are told to do without additional reflection simply because someone from behind a pulpit or on television told them to will likely conjecture, “Well, in this Post-9/11 world security at the Capitol might simply need to know who’s going to show up at the door and ethnicity is simply one of the easiest ways to initially confirm identity.”

But if that’s the only concern and someone was really up to no good, what’s to prevent the ne’er-do-well from assuming the identity of someone of a similar phenotype as themselves?

However, it is safe to assume that security played little reason in compelling those wanting to attend the briefing to reveal this information. For elsewhere on the site listing the dates of these events, web browsers find a date set aside for African American pastors underneath of which it reads, “African American Pastors Only".

As I mentioned in recent commentary, Bob Jones University lost its tax exempt status not for violating any law but for transgressing “public policy” for not allowing interracial dating even though it permitted Blacks to attend the school. Shouldn’t Barton face similar sanctions since he is going even further by denying accommodations to some of his programs solely on the basis of race, the very definition of discrimination?

The weak-minded having fallen for multiculturalism and diversity will respond that due to the unique circumstances of the Black experience that those of this particular background might not feel comfortable addressing these sensitive issues in the presence of White devils (eh, I mean people). If this is the case, will Barton dismiss himself from his own seminar since he is not Black or is this once again an example of where those in leadership are not going to abide by the same rules they wish to impose upon the rest of us?

I did not see a date set aside for “White Pastors Only”. Aren’t Whites just as entitled to discuss these matters since in mixed company nowadays Caucasians, as Shelby Steele points out in White Guilt : How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, are likely to self-censor themselves for fear of being categorized as racist by Black malcontents ready to bounce on a misinflected word or misdirected glance like a shark waiting for the first drop of blood to hit the water to commence a feeding frenzy.

For the past several years various tolerancemongers in Evangelical circles have beat the White brethren over the head for being reluctant to attend Black churches (often because of the raucous and borderline disorderly worship services many in this ethnic group are known for) by lamenting 11 am Sunday’s is the “most segregated” hour in America. Isn’t it about time we chastise these very same leaders when they turn around and praise this behavior in other ethnic groups when the natural tendency to prefer the company of one’s own breed of man when it manifests itself in instances beyond reason or wholesomeness?

On TBN’s Praise the Lord program, David Barton gave an eloquent exposition on how the Ku Klux Klan has traditionally been more of a phenomena of the Democratic Party. Frankly, it is saddening that such an insightful historian would cave to political correctness so easily and endorse what amounts to a retread of the pernicious notion of Separate But Equal.

By Frederick Meekins