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David Barton continues to spew absurdities, and Right Wing Watch caught his latest, this being a reference to burning Christians at the stake, though there is no actual record of anyone other than Christians burning Christians at the stake. The persecuted Christian meme is never crazier than when wielded by the King of Fake History. According to Barton, speaking on WallBuilders Live about how “religious liberty is under attack in a way that is reminiscent of England in the 16th and 17th centuries, ”

This is a really important thing, to be able to have the presence of religion there but now we’re seeing a hostility that we’ve not [seen before.] This is like England back in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, quite frankly. Now, we’re not burning people at the stake yet, but we are imprisoning people for their faith and to say that in America, that’s unbelievable.

Barton fails to explain in what way America is similar to England in the 1500s to 1600s but that is the least of his problems: the only people in England persecuting Christians since the tenth century have been other Christians.

The weight of atrocity in the Western world in the 1500 to 1600s belongs to Christendom, from slavery of blacks and Native Americans to wholesale destruction of Native American cultures and civilizations, to the burnings of women – women – at the stake for no other reason than they were women (though most accused witches were actually hanged).

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Let’s look at the Christian history of burning people to death (from Wikipedia unless otherwise noted) – the list is necessarily abbreviated because history shows Christians LOVED to burn people, David Barton:

The Inquisition was so crazed that burning living people wasn’t enough; they would dig up the bodies of dead heretics and burn them. Inquisitor Bernard Guy, mentioned above, had sixty-nine bodies dug up and burned between 1306 and 1323.

David Barton cannot show us one Christian burned at the stake by secular powers because secular powers did not exist until the United States Constitution established one. In fact, what Barton is proving (unwittingly of course) is the danger of state-sponsored religion, the very same dangers that motivated the Founding Fathers to established our government as a secular government wherein one religion does not have the sanction of the state to suppress and torture and kill those of other religions.

For David Barton to pretend it was government that burned all those people is disingenuous at best; it was CHRISTIAN GOVERNMENTS and a Christian Inquisition that burned all those people and the vast majority of those people will guilty of nothing more than refusing to believe what the Christian authorities insisted they believe.

State-sponsored Christianity is, of course, the goal of Barton and other religious fundamentalists. If burnings are in our future, rest assured Inquisitor David Barton will be among the cheerleaders as part of a privileged caste of fundamentalist Christians.