A few weeks ago, I reviewed Eric Metaxas’s bestselling book Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. Since then, it has remained on the New York Times bestselling list and is currently ranked number two in nonfiction behind Maggie Haberman’s TDS offering, Regime Change.
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One would have thought a book published during the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence would be stocked and displayed prominently at Barnes & Noble. Instead, during his frequent appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room program, the author testifies that the nation’s leading storefront bookseller doesn’t typically have copies on hand but will instead order them for interested customers. Meanwhile, Jill Biden’s execrable View from the East Wing, which quickly fell off the Times bestseller list into remainder obscurity, is prominently displayed alongside the other Times bestsellers — except for Revolution.
What gives here? Anyone with a memory stretching back to the Biden administration and pre-Musk Twitter or even observing listing priorities for current Google searches doesn’t have to speculate much about the answer to that question: corporate censorship. The question then arises: What is it about Metaxas’s book that Barnes & Noble finds sufficiently objectionable to forgo profits and customer satisfaction? The likely answer for secular management is the book’s unacceptable emphasis on the Revolution’s Christian roots.
For Democrats, it would be bad enough that the book exposes the long planted lie that America’s Founders were deists for whom God’s intervention in human affairs ended with the world’s creation, but to substitute the role of biblical Christianity for Enlightenment “Reason” was a bridge too far. Imagine, giving credit to a “Black Robe Regiment” of “No King but Jesus” preachers for stirring up images of freedom like that of the Israelites fleeing from Egyptian bondage — the symbol Benjamin Franklin suggested for the new nation’s official seal. Everyone should know (even if it isn’t true) that secular philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau who inspired the French Revolution (and its Reign of Terror) deserve top billing for the Founders’ passion for “liberty, equality, and fraternity” — a phrase missing from America’s revolutionary discourse.
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And if those violations of historical etiquette weren’t sufficient grounds for book banishment, Metaxas has the temerity to note that colonial leaders like George Washington actually believed that God’s providential aide was contingent on his troops’ moral uprightness and deportment consistent with their “sacred” cause. Adding insult to injury, Metaxas contrasts the biblically grounded morality of most colonials with that of hedonistic British elites and their brutal Hessian mercenaries — as if, again in true Old Testament fashion, God’s blessing were somehow connected to morality. Finally, Metaxas describes incidents (like the fortuitous fog-shrouded exodus of Washington’s troops across New York’s East River) that make the general’s religious fantasy seem plausible.
Barnes and Noble will have none of it. They weren’t established to promote revisionist history, even if accurate, unless it happens to be revisionism of the 1619 or Howard Zinn variety and comports with their political druthers.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer and retired teacher living in Southern California. His book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is available on Kindle, as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.
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