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The idea of a book countering claims about Thomas Jefferson promoted by some recent secularists is not itself an absurd idea. There has often been far too quick an equivalence made by some secularists today between their own views and those held by Enlightenment era thinkers. When examining the views of the Founding Fathers, we must realize there was quite a range one might occupy that falls between the tenor of the French Englightenment and its Anglo-American counterpart. On the one hand, we have someone like Thomas Paine who was openly hostile to Christianity but others, while also deists like Paine, thought the Church had an important role in promoting a shared moral code of the "golden rule" variety. They believed in God, respected Jesus as a moral example, and might even attend church services while not believing a word of the Gospel message apart from the shared morality. While opposing any imposition of doctrinal positions upon the state, they were not averse to religion having its place in the public square. Any hopes such a clarification would be forthcoming in David Barton's "The Jefferson Lies" was quickly dispelled by a quick glance at the table of contents (and confirmed by reading the relevant chapter). For example, there is a chapter titled "Lie #7: Thomas Jefferson was an Atheist and Not a Christian." This is the logical fallacy known as the false dichotomy: you produce a pair of alternatives and procede as though they were the only two choices available. There were lots of other things Thomas Jefferson might have been besides Christian and atheist - he could have been a Muslim, a Hindu, a Jew, or a deist. Granted, the first two possibilities are fairly remote for eighteenth century America and the third only slightly less so; but there were lots of deists running around at th time and Thomas Jefferson happened to be one of them. In other cases, the author might have a point if he were aiming at specific radical voices but instead he treats the extremes as though they represented the current scholarly consensus and uses that to attack scholars in general. There are some who claim that Jefferson detested the clergy and attempt to picture him as an equivalent to contemporary "New Atheists" but such views are found on the internet - not academia. Jefferson did detest the behavior of some clergy, as I suspect Barton does himself, but he did not detest them because they were clergy and historians do not claim he did. It seems Barton has scoured everything Jefferson wrote looking for mention of Christianity, no matter how tangential, that is not negative, no matter how incidental, and uses it as evidence Jefferson was a Christian. Is it really significant that Jefferson attended church services in school? So did Charles Darwin and Christopher Hitchens so we see how much that was worth. Is it really significant that he used the phrase "the year of our Lord" in a date on a treaty? It turns out it was required by the other party. None of such minutiae comes close to demonstrating Jefferson held Christian beliefs. Even stranger was his discussion of Unitarianism. Besides deists, there some founding fathers who were Unitarians. Barton makes a points of claiming the Unitarians then were more mainstream Christian than today and at that time did not follow the "ultra heretical" doctrines they hold today. While one guesses he means the quasi-New Age beleifs they currently embrace, the fact remains Unitarians in Jefferson's day denied the divinity of Jesus and that still qualifies as heretical by Christian standards. But perhaps the low point was the section denying the famous "Jefferson Bible." Here Barton shows his hand. Other parts of the book might be explained away by sheer incompetence but to deny something that exists and is well documented gives clear evidence of crossing the line into dishonesty. It is a blatant lie that cannot withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny and reveals Barton's work as not merely poor but as a polemically motivated fraud. The end result is a mess of a book that is little more that a collection of lies, half-truths, distortions, logical fallacies, and non sequiturs. It has almost no redeemable qualities and is so poor that one might be led to think it was written by someone pretending to be Christian to make Christians look bad. Speaking as a Christian, it is unfortunately the case, judging by this author and the embracing of this book in some Christian circles, they can look bad all by themselves. Note to Christians who have read this book: Please also read Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President where two Christian professors of history at Messiah College demolish Barton's fraud. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download the Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac software and read it on your dekstop or laptop.