Geoffrey Stone’s Founders: An Exercise in Historical Revisionism
Gary Demar has written this response (pdf) to a recent post on the ACS Blog by U. of Chicago Law Prof. Geoffrey Stone. Demar’s response opens [citations omitted]:
It’s been said (by me) that two half-truths don’t make the whole truth. Geoffrey Stone’s response to Mitt Romney’s “religious assurance” speech begins by stating that it “called to mind a disturbingly distorted version of history that has become part of the conventional wisdom of American politics in recent years.” If there was ever a distorted version of American history, it’s Professor Stone’s recollection of our nation’s religious history that he recounts in his blog entry “Romney’s Founders.” Part of the distortion comes because there is no neatly packaged history of the past. Like a watermelon grown in a square bottle that takes the shape of its container, historical summaries take the shape of those doing the summarizing. To change the analogy, Professor Stone, I believe, is engaged in a bit of historical trimming, “massaging” the historical data to fit a desired outcome.