Thomas Nelson is ceasing publication of David Barton's influential albeit controversial book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. NPR reports that the Nashville-based publisher has "lost confidence" in the book.
"When the concerns came in, from multiple people, and that had weight too, we were trying to sort things out," said Thomas Nelson Senior Vice President and Publisher Brian Hampton. "Were these matters of opinion? Were they differences of interpretation? But as we got into it, our conclusion was that the criticisms were correct. There were historical details — matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all."
Maybe it's just me, but I'd think that I, if I were Thomas Nelson, would have asked long before I published the book, maybe back when I was acquiring it, how any Evangelical Christian reconciles the man who said, "Question with boldness even the existence of a God" (and who went on to say that it's totally cool if you end up an atheist, you can still be a good person) with the claim that Thomas Jefferson was a "conventional Christian" that Evangelicals would recognize as one of them. But I am not an important religious publisher that stands to lose thousands of dollars from this debacle.
