By Madelyn Braho · Staff Writer
Former Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton debunks common myths about America’s founding in his new book “The Christian Past That Wasn’t.”
Throckmorton, previously of the Grove City College Department of Psychology, has been a historical fact checker for over a decade now.
“Getting Jefferson Right,” now in its third edition, written with current college professor Michael Coulter, focuses on the claims David Barton, a political activist and figure in Christian homeschooling circles, made about Thomas Jefferson and the Christian founding of America. Throckmorton and Coulter’s book was so influential that the publisher of Barton’s book, “Telling Jefferson Lies,” pulled it for inaccuracies.
“The Christian Past that Wasn’t” expands on the fact-checking and myth-debunking of that previous work, taking on a wider range of Christian nationalist stories. The book has a series of seven myths following America chronologically, from the Puritans onward.
“I start with the idea that America was a covenant nation, that the Puritans were a kind of new Israel,” Throckmorton said.
Other stories investigated include Benjamin Franklin proposing prayer at the constitutional convention and Roger Williams’s founding of Rhode Island.
Researching Rhode Island was particularly interesting for Throckmorton because his family made a feature in the colony’s history. John Throckmorton converted to Quakerism, causing a disagreement with Roger Williams. Despite that, John Throckmorton was still elected to a government office.
“In civil things, there was complete freedom to follow your conscience,” Throckmorton said. “That was exciting to me.”
But historical research is about more than just family genealogy; it’s about the facts. Considering the landscape of falsified history that Barton is included in, getting to the truth was important, but also not difficult.
“It was so easy a psychologist could do it … It wasn’t that much of a stretch from how I taught psychology,” Throckmorton said. “Ultimately, I think as Christian scholars, we’re not looking to produce an outcome in the sense of making sure someone was on ‘team Christian,’ but we should seek the truth about things.”
This dedication to the facts is key to “The Christian Past that Wasn’t.”
Authors like Barton may have “grabbed facts out of context or made up facts and used them for a present political purpose,” Coulter said.
Contrarily, for Throckmorton, getting the facts right is crucial. When asked how readers should approach the book, he said to “read it with an open mind … check the primary sources.”
And the facts aren’t always kind. A key thread of the book follows the treatment of Native Americans and Africans and questions why that is ignored in the making of a Christian America.
“There is a Christian past that wasn’t; those are the myths, but there’s the Christian past that was, that’s where Christianity was used in vain,” Throckmorton said. “God’s name was taken in vain to do some very bad things.”
But the book doesn’t dismiss America’s Christian past as entirely myth either.
“I’m very open in the book that of course the founders believed in God, of course they had Christian leanings,” Throckmorton said. Throckmorton doesn’t want readers to forget the limits of that.
“America’s sins aren’t justified by America’s virtues, and the virtues are real too,” Throckmorton said. “The Christian Past that Wasn’t” will be available for purchase on May 19th, and Throckmorton can also be found at the Throckmorton Initiative on Substack.
