Project Blitz is NOT a Football Play
Project Blitz is NOT a Football Play
Part Three: Copy, Paste, Legislate
Who Is David Barton?
When I was teaching history to students in Christian Schools in the 1980’s, everyone was excited about the writings and lessons about American history coming from another fellow Christian School teacher in Texas. His name was David Barton, and in 1992, he published his first book called, The Myth of Separation: What is the Correct Relationship Between Church and State? Barton instantly became the hero and darling of the Christian School movement. He helped teachers such as me indoctrinate students into his brand and interpretation of history which includes the destruction of the separation of church and state. Folks in the Christian Schools were jubilant that finally they had their own hero to elevate. He and his his book were everywhere at every Christian School Conference, and Barton’s star began to rise.
The next year in 1993, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., founder of Liberty University and co-founder of the Moral Majority, promoted Barton’s book. According to a Christian Century report, less than a month later on Falwell’s television show, “The Old Time Gospel Hour,” he preached an aggressive sermon in which he said, “Let everyone know that this separation of church and state business is bogus.” The Christian Right has ever since been trying to tear down the wall of separation. It is a foundational idea of the Christian Nationalist movement of today.
I left the Christian School arena by 1997, but Barton went on to write more books, and become a self-proclaimed historian and expert on Constitutional history. Barton, a self-taught historian (he has no history degree) and activist, had founded WallBuilders in 1988, a group dedicated to “presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built.” This became, and still is, his platform to try to influence not only Christian School curriculum but public-school textbooks, curriculum and education legislation at the state level.
Barton has also demonized LGBTQ persons and communities, arguing that HIV and AIDS are God-given consequences for living out one’s LGBTQ life. Historians and scholars across the political and religious spectrum have criticized Barton’s version of U.S. history, which supports his religious nationalism, for what they claim are its many fundamental inaccuracies, so much so that the publisher of Barton’s The Jefferson Lies said in 2012 that it was pulling the book. Senior fellow Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute, a think tank known for its advocacy of “intelligent design,” asked 10 conservative Christian professors to evaluate Barton’s work. They found the book rife with errors. This would end the career of a serious academic historian, but not Barton, because, well, he isn’t a serious historian. He is a political hack, although a very influential one.
Project Blitz…What Is This?
So, here is why I start this part three exposé by highlighting David Barton and his spurious historical rantings. His organization, Wallbuilders, along with two other prominent Christian Nationalist organizations which I highlighted in Part Two of this series, are the creators of a legislative project launched around 2015 called “Project Blitz.” Project Blitz is the Christian Nationalist strategy to flood state legislatures with model laws and bills that institute a Christian theonomy of sorts.
But this strategy began years earlier when WallBuilders, branched out into public policy in 1998 by launching what Barton called the ProFamily Legislative Network to help “conservative, God-fearing legislators.” The group’s annual conference and regular updates keeps state and national legislators apprised of “pro-family” legislation. This includes bills to ban abortion and prevent gay marriage, support religious expression in public schools and public life, and resist gun control. Do you think they’ve been successful? Then you better read on.
The other two organizations that have partnered with Barton’s ProFamily Legislative Network to create Project Blitz are the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation and the National Legal Foundation, on which Barton sits as a board member, surprised? Barton along with Lea Carawan of the CPCF, and Congressman Randy Forbes of Virginia, came together to develop a state-by-state strategy to introduce model legislation crafted by Christian Nationalists. By the way, for my Iowa friends, 65 of Iowa’s Republican legislators are aligned with the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation.
Project Blitz promotes its model legislation through the annual “guidebook” that they have published since 2016. The Project Blitz guide receives yearly updates. The 2017/2018 playbook contained 116 pages and included 20 model bills. In 2018, over 70 Project Blitz-related bills were introduced in state legislatures across the country. In 2019, Project Blitz went underground, making the guides no longer available to the public.
Lea Carawan, the executive direction of the CPCF, laughed in a recorded phone call, as she tried to show how CPCF had buffaloed the opposition “They started talking about Project Blitz. And as soon as we understood that they knew they were onto us, we changed the name; shifted things around a little bit; now they’re talking about something that nobody else is even talking about, we’ve renamed and moved on.” They now call Project Blitz, “Freedom for All” –– although that name does not appear on the CPCF web site. But what an innocuous name, “Freedom for All,” who wouldn’t be in favor of that?
BUT (behold the underlying truth) The secretive 2019-2020 and 2020-21 playbooks were uncovered in 2021. Here is the agenda of the 2020-21 playbook:
New Bills in the 2020-21 Project Blitz Playbook
Ten Commandments Display Act—Encourages the display of the biblical Ten Commandments in public buildings.
Proclamation of Call to Prayer for America Day—Based on a “memorial” adopted by the New Mexico House of Representatives, for “the purpose of calling the nation back to prayer, and… the need for America to turn back to God and prayer, not for a single day or month, but to pray “without ceasing.””
Student Prayer Certification Act—Would require school districts to “certify” that they are in compliance with federal law regarding student prayer.
Public K-12 School Personnel Protection Act—Would indemnify teachers and staff from lawsuits if they violate the law with regard to school prayer.
Preserving Religious Freedom in School Act—A broad assertion of the rights of religious expression by students and school employees based on bills introduced in several states in recent years.
Parental Library Review Board Act—Would empower elected panels over every library in the state. They would have the power to block or remove materials and events that they deem to be age-inappropriate in matters of sexuality and gender identity Potential criminal penalties for failure to comply include a fine or up to a year in jail for librarians and defunding of the library by the state.
Parental Review and Consent for [Sex-Education] Participation Act—Requires parental review of and consent for their minor children’s participation in public school system sex education programs.
While you will recognize many of these initiatives in your state legislature, there is an update to the 2020-21 handbook. At this point, the owners of Project Blitz have broken their model legislation into five categories illustrated here:
Although they are pushing legislation in all five categories, it is probably category three that will be most recognizable. Under the guise of “religious freedom” Christian Nationalists are proposing the most draconian restrictions ever seen on libraries, schools and mental health experts in regard to sexual orientation, banning books, and depriving transgender youth of gender affirming care. This is the crux of the Christian Nationalist agenda: the complete domination over the sexuality of every American. It doesn’t just end with the overturning of Roe, this is a program designed to make and force, with governmental coercion, everyone into a “Christian ethic of sexuality” as they define it.
As more light is shined on the bill-mill of Project Blitz, the more the leaders of this effort make to become stealth. These groups do not like public attention. Why? Because they know most Americans would be opposed to making the United States into a Christian Theonomy. Their efforts have gone dark and their methods have changed in the past year. They have removed most if not all references to religious motivations in their literature, and they have turned their attention to local efforts to take control of decision making.
Libraries In the Cross-Hairs
Frederick Clarkson Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, first exposed the existence of Project Blitz in 2018. He is optimistic that Project Blitz can be countered. Clarkson views the push-back this way:
The ongoing exposure and response to Project Blitz has taught us several things. First, that it's possible to stand up to and prevail against anti-democratic movements and measures, and that our democratic institutions are more resilient than they sometimes seem. Sen. John Marty showed that — when he spoke up for the integrity of his faith and stood down a national smear campaign led by Fox News, as noted earlier. Librarians and their allies showed that, even in the face of demagogic attacks on the competence and integrity of public libraries, state legislators could be made to see reason. Efforts since 2018 by scores of national organizations organized by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Blitz Watch, have also shown that it's possible to defend democracy and its institutions against a secretive and formidable opponent of democratic values, and of democracy itself. What's more, journalism has once again shown that sunlight remains the best disinfectant. (Clarkson in an interview with Salon in 2021)
What Clarkson emphasizes is public exposure is something these folks really want to avoid. Their methods are deceptive and their theft of progressive language is intentional and disengenuous.
But Clarkson highlights a more recent effort that the Christian Nationalists are targeting, and we’ve seen it here in Iowa. The attempt to enact “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries.” This has nothing to do with parents, so don’t be fooled. It has everything to do with Christian Nationalists having veto control over the library collections of every public library in a state through the creation of a “parental review board.” Here is how Clarkson describes this effort:
The"Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act," introduced in 2020 by Missouri State Rep. Ben Baker (R-Neosho), sought to create "parental review boards" with the authority to "convene public hearings" and restrict access to anything they deemed "age-inappropriate sexual materials." Not only would their decisions be "final," but the bill also prescribed fines or jail for librarians who "willingly" violated board decrees regarding what is inappropriate, and included the potential state defunding of libraries accused of violating the statute. Clarkson notes, it "feigns a democratic method to achieve an anti-democratic result."
But Baker’s true motived for this bill were revealed in an interview with the New York Times, where he said what inspired his bill were events held at public libraries…
“like Drag Queen Story Hour, and materials that have a clear agenda of grooming our children for the L.G.B.T.Q. community with adult themes and content that fit the description of a [sic] objectionable sexual nature.”
Once again the Christian Nationalist goal of controling the sexuality of all Americans they feel lies in their hands. Their objective is to force 100% of the population into a strict, dual-gender definition that erases gay and transgender possibilities. Because of the mobilization by the American Library Association and other organizations, the bill was defeated.
Clarkson again is optimistic because of this type of mobilization and push-back actions take by various groups. He says,
"That librarians and allies around the country rallied to the defense of the archives of democratic knowledge, culture and practice is a case example of how we need not be bullied by Christian right demagoguery. Screechy charges may make headlines and bring in ad revenue on right-wing talk radio, but most people, most of the time, do not want their schools and libraries messed with by authoritarian bigots and mobs of the easily led."
History Is At Stake
There are two other progressive forces working to push-back on this attack on our democratic institutions. Rachel Laser is president of Americans United For Separation of Church and State, and Alison Gill is vice president for legal and policy matters at American Atheists have worked along with others to establish a watch dog website called Blitz Watch.
Rachel Laser points out the the same efforts pushing book bans and anti-gender affirming care are also hoping to ban Critical Race Theory in public schools. These currents run parallel. She notes,
"White Christian nationalism is the belief that America is and must remain a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants, and that our laws and policies must reflect this premise, they completely reject church-state separation. White Christian nationalists oppose equality for people of color, women, LGBTQ people, religious minorities and the nonreligious. The same white Christian nationalist ideology that is behind Project Blitz is also driving the backlash against a deliberate caricature of critical race theory.”
Gill observes that if America's founding was really
"as pristine as the religious myth requires it to be it cannot be marked by the racism and genocide that the facts of history reveal. History is thus an existential crisis for Christian nationalist beliefs. That's why history must be revised and the evils that mark so much of our history be erased, rather than acknowledged and addressed. The attack on the straw man of CRT is of a piece with what we might call the purification of American history in the name of God's history."
That brings me back around to David Barton, the pretend historian that has captured the imaginations of the Christian Right to try and re-write American history to fit their version of a “Christian Nation.” For me, fighting back means sharing history that is accurate, evidence-based and reflective of the highest standards of historical analysis. I will continue to do so.
I’ll close with a list of organizations that are mobilized to push-back against this Christian Nationalist onslaught. Now is not the time for apathy or complacency. See which of these organizations you might best fit in, and join the fight. (Just click on the banner for any of the organizations)
