Barton's work has been well received by many fundamentalist Christians and political conservatives, but he has received harsh criticism from secular groups and professional historians:
Senator Sam Brownback praised Barton’s work for providing "the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today...bringing God back into the public square."
Richard V. Pierard, Stephen Phillips Professor of History at Gordon College describes Barton's work as follows:
Writing in the
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, (then Republican) Senator Arlen Specter stated:
First Muslim Congressman Claims
In 2007 Barton published an article purporting that founding-era Senator John Randolph of Roanoke of Virginia was actually the first Muslim member of Congress. The claim was made in reaction to the recent election of Keith Ellison (D-MN), a practicing Muslim. Barton's claim garnered widespread coverage in the evangelical Christian media at the time, but appears to have been based on a misinterpretation of a passage in which Randolph reported a youthful flirtation with agnosticism and professed sympathy for the Muslim Arabs during the crusades. Randolph was a practicing Episcopalian for most of his life, and his biographers reject Barton's claim about an Islamic conversion outright.
Unconfirmed Quotations
In an article titled "Unconfirmed Quotations," Barton conceded that he has not located primary sources for eleven of the alleged quotes from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions (hence, the title of the article), but maintained that the quotes were "completely consistent" with the views of the Founders. This drew heavy criticism from Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who accused Barton of "shoddy workmanship", and said that despite these and other corrections, Barton's work "remains rife with distortions of history and court rulings". WallBuilders responded to its critics by saying that Barton followed "common practice in the academic community" in citing secondary sources, and that in publishing "Unconfirmed Quotations," Barton's intent was to raise the academic bar in historical debates pertinent to public policy.
Barton has denied that the modern notion of separation of church and state exists, saying that, in Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, "Jefferson referred to the wall of separation between church and state as 'one-directional'...that is, it was meant to restrain government from infringing on the church's domain but not the other way around. There is no such language in the letter." However, this denial is contradicted by a 1990 version of Barton's video
America's Godly Heritage in which Barton states:
Barton was also criticized for speaking at two functions that were organized by Christian Identity adherent and Holocaust denier Pete Peters' ministry, although he later stated that he "didn't know they (the groups he spoke at) were part of the Nazi movement".
Barton's legitimacy was reported to be growing in 2006, due largely to his first work which was not self-published, a 2003 article in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, (Volume XVII Issue No. 2, 2003, p. 399), a "rather tame survey" on Jefferson’s writings about the First Amendment.
Criticism
Rob Boston of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been critical, stating
The Religious Right's leading practitioner of this type of historical revisionism is David Barton ... Barton makes a lucrative living traveling the right wing's lecture circuit where he offers up a cut-and-paste version of U.S. history liberally sprinkled with gross distortions and, in some cases, outright factual errors. Crowds of fundamentalist Christians from coast to coast can't get enough of it.
Rev. Randolph Bracy, president of the Orange County, Florida chapter of the NAACP has referred to Barton as a "Holocaust-denier, an anti-Semite and someone who has called for the death penalty for gay and lesbian people", stating that Barton has "a long history of being related to the worst fringes of our society."