Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
David Barton built a movement and a fortune on a single fiction — that God founded the United States as a Christian nation. His son Tim repackaged the family act for a generation raised on podcasts and homeschool curricula. Under a second Trump term, the two of them hold a red pen over the nation’s history.
Key takeaways
- David Barton owns one of the largest private collections of founding-era documents in the country, and for 40 years he has used it to sell a story the documents do not support, that the country was Christian from the founding. He has no formal training as a historian. His son Tim, an ordained minister, now runs WallBuilders and carries the message to a younger audience.
- The hardest blows landed from the right. Conservative Christian scholars fact-checked Barton’s book on Thomas Jefferson and turned up errors and quotations the founders never wrote, and his own evangelical publisher pulled it after readers of a historians’ network voted it the least credible history book in print.
- David Barton has been a Republican operative for decades. In 2015, he ran a Ted Cruz super PAC, and House Speaker Mike Johnson credits him with shaping his worldview.
- WallBuilders carries that history into ordinary churches and homeschooling curricula through the Patriot Academy “Biblical Citizenship” course and the TPUSA Faith circuit. Its Project Blitz takes the fight into statehouses, drafting the model bills behind the Ten Commandments school laws now on the books in four states. Under a second Trump term, the family helped steer the White House review of the Smithsonian.
On a January 2026 episode of their family radio show, Tim Barton could barely sit still. The White House had threatened to cut off the Smithsonian’s federal money unless the institution surrendered documents for a government review of its exhibits, and Tim wanted listeners to know whose hands had been on the machinery. “This is one that is dear to our heart,” he said. His father filled in the part Tim had left out. Earlier in 2025, David Barton recounted, the White House had asked the two of them to walk the museums; Tim had been “leading a tour of legislators in Washington, D.C.,” gathered their objections to what hung on the walls, and “turned that over to the White House.”
Neither Barton holds a degree in history. The father coached high-school basketball; the son came up as a youth pastor. They run a ministry out of a Texas town of 5,000 people. And by the close of 2025 they were helping decide which parts of the American past the federal government would let its citizens see.
The Family Business
Barton’s authority rests on a warehouse. He owns more than 100,000 letters, sermons, and government papers from before 1812. He wields the hoard as proof that the credentialed historians are the ones who got the founders wrong. WallBuilders tells researchers on its own website to treat a scholar’s account as “hearsay” and consult the original document instead.
The genuine documents underwrite a counterfeit conclusion. Barton tells audiences that the Constitution overflows with the Bible, that its treason clause and its native-born requirement for the presidency were lifted from Scripture. They were not.
He founded WallBuilders in 1988, named it for Nehemiah’s rebuilt walls of Jerusalem, and grew it into the engine room of the Christian-nation thesis. He argues that the First Amendment was written solely to prevent one Christian denomination from ruling the others and had nothing to do with separating church and state. He has carried the argument into court. When a Pagan chaplain sued for the right to minister in California’s prisons, WallBuilders told a federal appeals court that the Constitution’s protection never reached atheists or pagans, only Christians and perhaps fellow monotheists.
David Barton earned a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University in 1976, ran a Christian school, and somewhere along the way began calling himself “America’s premier historian.” His undoing came from his own side. In 2012, conservative Christian scholars at Grove City College took apart The Jefferson Lies, his book recasting the third president as an orthodox Christian, and cataloged its errors and unsourced quotations. An online vote had already judged it the most discredited book in its field, and soon after, his evangelical publisher, Thomas Nelson, pulled the book from stores, conceding it had “lost confidence in the book’s details.”
It barely dented him. Barton turned every correction into proof of persecution, and the criticism only widened his following. Paul Harvey, a historian, has explained why the debunkings bounced off. Barton’s fans weren’t in it for the footnotes. They wanted a flattering story about how the country began, and no correction was going to take that from them. “Political operatives take a licking and keep on ticking,” Warren Throckmorton, the Grove City professor who led the fact-check, said in 2023. He and his co-author returned to the subject that year with an expanded edition of their book, now aimed at the Christian nationalism that Barton had helped mainstream.
He had already handed the operation to his son. Tim Barton, an ordained former youth pastor and worship leader, became president of WallBuilders in 2016, the face of its daily broadcast, and host of his own podcast, “The American Story.” He has pulled in a younger crowd than David ever had, and watchdogs who track him say he updates the act to whatever is in the news. When Trump’s tariffs shook the markets in the spring of 2025, Tim went on the air to argue that Scripture backed them. The two appeared together at Turning Point USA Faith’s Believers’ Summit and worked through their agenda, including the well-worn falsehood that the Bible was the source the founders quoted most. Tim has also become a fixture on the Christian men’s-conference circuit. Over Father’s Day weekend, 2026, he’ll speak at Freedom Con, a gathering of Christian men at Washington’s Gorge Amphitheatre staged around the nation’s 250th anniversary, on a bill with fellow Christian nationalists Mark Driscoll and Eric Metaxas.
The Long Game in Politics
David Barton got into party politics early and never left. He spent close to a decade as vice chairman of the Texas GOP, drew a paycheck from the Republican National Committee in 2004, when he worked some 300 pastor luncheons for George W. Bush and pressed clergy to endorse candidates from the pulpit. Time named him one of the country’s 25 most influential evangelicals in 2005, and he found a close ally in Mike Huckabee.
He has also sat on the Republican platform committee at one convention after another, where he writes Christian nationalist language straight into the party’s governing document. After the 2012 convention, he claimed that 70 of his 71 amendments had been adopted, a record he later said he set by inserting “stuff about the Constitution, the Declaration, and God and the Bible.”
He came closest to real political money in 2015, when Ted Cruz’s biggest donors installed him atop Keep the Promise, the umbrella super PAC that raised some $38 million for the Cruz campaign and put a self-taught preacher in the same meetings as former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway and Trump financial backer Rebekah Mercer. WallBuilders runs on the same kind of money. The fracking billionaire Farris Wilks has funneled more than $3 million into the organization, buying theological scaffolding for the far larger Texas project he and Tim Dunn run.
His most powerful believer today is the Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson credits David Barton with a formative role in his life and his work, and the day after Johnson took the gavel, Barton appeared on his podcast to work through staffing. “We have some tools at our disposal now we haven’t had in a long time,” he said, and Tim called the new speaker “the kind of guy that we’ve been praying for.” The man second in line to the presidency wants the same country.
The Mainstreaming Machine
Getting all of this out of the conference halls and into ordinary churches is mostly Tim’s work. He and his father host a daily radio show, “WallBuilders Live,” with the former Texas legislator Rick Green, and it airs on about 300 stations. Green runs the next piece, an outfit called Patriot Academy that turns the Bartons’ history into video courses like “Constitution Alive!” and “Biblical Citizenship,” designed to be delivered on DVD and paired with a workbook in a church basement or a living room.
Bankrolled by David Barton, Patriot Academy says it reaches around 100,000 people a year in live audiences and millions more on radio and television. A reporter who embedded at one of its camps watched the courses spread into homeschools, evangelical congregations, even tea party chapters. The lessons come wrapped in flags and Scripture, and they always arrive with the same warning. The republic stands one godless step from ruin, and only Barton’s version of the founding can pull it back.
Charlie Kirk gave the Bartons a younger crowd. When Turning Point launched its Faith arm in 2021 to pull pastors into electoral politics, it built its citizenship classes with David Barton, and the two have been fixtures on the circuit since. Barton was working on schoolchildren long before that. Texas seated him on the panel reviewing its social studies standards in 2009, where he pushed to thin out references to the separation of church and state and to play down civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and César Chávez. Glenn Beck spent years giving him a national stage on “Founders’ Fridays” and within Beck’s now-defunct online university.
David Barton also wrote the laws themselves. The Project Blitz operation he works through runs like a bill mill, churning out Christian nationalist model legislation that friendly state lawmakers carry home and file as their own. The researcher Frederick Clarkson uncovered its playbook in 2018, a manual shared across a coalition of Christian-right groups that sorted model bills into escalating tiers, beginning with symbolic “In God We Trust” displays. Lately that has meant the drive to put the Ten Commandments on the wall of every public school classroom. An investigation by the education outlet The 74 traced 28 nearly identical bills across 18 states back to a single source, down to the dimensions of the required poster, and Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas wrote the template into law, with Alabama following in 2026. A federal appeals court has since upheld the Louisiana and Texas laws, defying a 1980 Supreme Court ruling against an almost identical statute, and the question looks bound for the justices. What starts as a WallBuilders talking point ends up as state law.
Rewriting the Record
In 2025, the president announced that the White House would comb Smithsonian exhibits he judged too dark on the American story. The Bartons were already inside the buildings, doing the combing. On the air, they called the museums a “modern Marxist approach” built to paint the country as evil, and complained about their “obsession with slavery.” David told listeners he had walked into the White House and pronounced the National Museum of African American History and Culture “the most racist and most historically inaccurate museum in Washington, DC.”
Tim makes the erasure sound reasonable. He has argued that the museums should quit treating slavery as “the most significant thing for American history” because, by his accounting, “we had slaves for less than 100 years in our nation’s history.” They read the present the same way. When immigration raids and a troop deployment in Los Angeles drew crowds into the streets, father and son went on camera to defend the operation and insist the agents wanted only dangerous criminals. David has long called homosexuality an “aberration.”
What the family wants out of all this is 2026, the 250th anniversary of independence and the right to tell its story. Tim says he is “so excited for what this could mean for the 250th celebration.” Forty years ago, a basketball coach in Aledo, TX, population 5,825, began buying the founders’ papers by the tens of thousands and decided they proved something they do not. He has spent his life manufacturing that history, and his son has built the audience for it. The federal government has now made the two of them its fact-checkers.
In Their Own Words
“It [the Constitution] drives the secularists nuts because the Bible’s all over it.” — David Barton, NPR, August 8, 2012
“You will find phrases that are almost verbatim from the Bible in the Constitution.” — Tim Barton, Truth & Liberty Coalition, 2021, via Right Wing Watch.
“A profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do.” — Mike Johnson, on David Barton, WallBuilders Live, December 9, 2021
“Atheism, heathenism, and paganism were not part of the definition of ‘religion.’” — David Barton’s WallBuilders, amicus brief, Religion Dispatches, 2011
“We had slaves for less than 100 years in our nation’s history.” — Tim Barton, The WallBuilders Show, August 28, 2025
“It’s not the government’s responsibility to take care of the poor and needy.” — David Barton, Trinity Broadcasting Network, 2014, via Political Research Associates.
