By Warren Throckmorton
May 12, 2025
From my home in Pennsylvania, I read The Washington Post article of Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s praise for the Three-Fifths Compromise and his subsequent declaration that an entity called “WallBuilders” informed his analysis as the “gold standard for learning the real history of America.” As an academic who has devoted considerable time to studying Christian nationalism and WallBuilders, I feel compelled to warn Hoosiers that you should be alarmed that WallBuilders’ selective reading of American history might be accorded any legitimacy. Simply stated, WallBuilders has created a mythology about American history that has been tailored to justify basing American law on their narrow understanding of the Bible and Christianity.
I spent most of my career as a psychology professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, a small (2,400 students), private institution founded in 1876 that is proud of its academic excellence and Christian community. I began researching WallBuilders and its founder, David Barton, in 2011.
Nothing illustrates the damage Wallbuilders can do more than Beckwith’s praise for the Three-Fifths Compromise. When Democratic Indiana state senators compared anti-DEI legislation to the Three-Fifths Compromise, Beckwith said the agreement between Northern and Southern delegates during the Constitutional Convention “helped to root out slavery” and “was designed to make sure that justice was equal for all people, and equality really meant equality for all people.” In other words, it was a good thing. This is straight from WallBuilders and David Barton.
Although he calls egotistically himself “America’s Premiere Historian,” David Barton is more political operative than historian. Barton started using history to promote Republican politics by forming WallBuilders in 1988. His first book of history, The Myth of Separation, was littered with quotes falsely attributed to the Founding Fathers. He replaced that book with Original Intent in 1996, arguing the Founders intended the new government to be guided by biblical principles.
In 2012, he published The Jefferson Lies. In it, Barton claimed Jefferson was an orthodox Christian much of his life and wanted the Bible taught in schools. He claimed the separation of church and state meant the government couldn’t influence the church, but that the church was allowed to influence government. The book was voted “Least Credible History Book in Print” by the readers of the History News Network. Shortly after Barton published his book on Jefferson, Michael Coulter and I produced a book length critique titled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact-Checking Claims About Thomas Jefferson (now in its 3rd edition). Aided by our book, in August of 2012, his Christian publisher Thomas Nelson made the unprecedented decision to remove Barton’s book from the shelves and stop publishing it altogether because they “lost confidence in the book’s details.”
In 2016, Barton claimed in a video posted to his social media accounts that he had an earned doctorate. However, during the video, he didn’t name the school and said he never mentioned the degree because he had “chosen not to talk about it.” When it was discovered that the diploma was not earned but given to him by an unaccredited organization considered a church by the IRS called Life Christian University, he removed the video and has chosen never to talk about it again.
The career of any academic historian would be over if that person had falsely claimed to have an earned doctorate and had books removed from publication because of historical errors. And yet, just such a person is advising Indiana’s lieutenant governor on history. How is this a “gold standard?”
Lt. Gov. Beckwith’s foray into American history in defense of the Three-Fifths Compromise wasn’t designed to educate the public, but rather to ward off criticism of his support for anti-DEI legislation. Instead of having to intelligently and meaningfully discuss the issues and history surrounding racial justice, he twists history to make him appear to be the defender of justice and equality. Reframing history helps with rhetorical reframing in the present. WallBuilders is the gold standard of that political task.
In fact, the Three-Fifths Compromise was introduced in the Constitutional Convention on June 11, 1787, by Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson and slave-owning South Carolinian Charles Pinckney. The plan proposed that three-fifths of the enslaved would be counted, along with whites, toward the number of representatives each state would get in the House of Representatives. The real story is a straightforward one of using powerless slaves to generate political power for enslavers. Not only did the enslavers benefit from the forced labor of other human beings, but they also wanted to maximize representation in Congress without giving the enslaved any benefits of that representation.
However, on his website, Barton says: “The three-fifths clause was not a measurement of human worth; rather, it was an anti-slavery provision to limit the political power of slavery’s proponents. By including only three-fifths of the total number of slaves in the congressional calculations, Southern States were actually being denied additional pro-slavery representatives in Congress.” In Barton’s view, the Northern states would have acceded to the South’s demands to count every slave as part of a state’s population, which is a preposterous reading of the Constitutional Convention.
The Three-Fifths Compromise helped the pro-slavery cause and was key to slavery’s perpetuation for the next almost 80 years. According to historian Michael Klarman, “by 1820, the Three-Fifths Clause was in effect translating into eighteen additional southern congressional representatives, and it had become a consistent target of northern criticism.”[i] Politically, says historian Steve Dundas, the Three-Fifths clause benefited white Southerners and did nothing for the anti-slavery movement. The main purpose of the clause was to give the southern states electoral status beyond what their white population would allow without any loss of control over those they enslaved.
But in 2025, do we really need to debate whether the Three-Fifths Compromise was a good thing? The main people defending it are carrying the Christian nationalists’ banner. I call on Lt. Gov. Beckwith to stop the whitewashing of history and get busy making good on the American promise of equality for all Hoosiers.
Warren Throckmorton is a writer and retired professor of psychology in Pennsylvania. He is co-author with Michael Coulter of “Getting Jefferson Right: Fact-Checking Claims About Thomas Jefferson.” His upcoming book from Broadleaf Books is “The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths that Hijack History.” The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
