“Christian Europeans Built Everything”: No, Wrong Answer

Benny Johnson just told a room full of Baylor students exactly who he thinks America belongs to. History disagrees.

My wife Mendi and I started our organization, See It Name It Fight It, because we watched Christian nationalism take over our hometown of Granbury, Texas. We saw the playbook in real time: Rafael Cruz, Ted Cruz’s father and an adherent of Seven Mountains Dominionism, came to local churches for “political engagement events.” David Barton of WallBuilders, the same man now advising the Texas State Board of Education on curriculum standards, appeared at local events alongside Cruz. David Welch of the U.S. Pastor Council showed up to advocate for anti-LGBTQ discrimination during the Bathroom Bill controversy. These weren’t isolated appearances. They were coordinated. Strategic. Intentional.

Here is a sampling of what we witnessed in Granbury.

The ideas they planted changed our community. Not overnight, but steadily, like roots cracking a foundation. By the time we started speaking up in 2017, hosting a Celebration of Public Education event, the machinery was already in motion. Empower Texans showed up with cameras, presumably to intimidate us. It didn’t work. But we could see what was happening. The goal was never just Granbury. It was one of many test cases, happening in small towns across Texas. A proof of concept of sorts. Get it working in conservative Texas counties, then scale it.

Now, nearly a decade later, we are watching that same playbook go national. On April 22, 2026, Turning Point USA rolled its “This Is the Turning Point” tour into Waco Hall at Baylor University. The event featured Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, “Border Czar” Tom Homan, and far-right influencer Benny Johnson (a dude best known for getting fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism and then failing upward into conservative media stardom). That career arc really does tell you everything you need to know about the current state of right-wing intellectual life.

During a Q&A session, a student asked Johnson a simple question: “What is an American exactly?”

Johnson's answer was the same script we heard in Granbury. The same talking points Rafael Cruz delivered from church pulpits. The same historical revisionism David Barton has been packaging for decades.

Johnson’s answer was also a masterclass in confident wrongness.

“America, up until the last 200 years, was founded, created, built, all of the infrastructure, all of the culture, Christian European.”

So according to Johnson, everything up until 1826, roughly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, was purely Christian European. After that? Well, he generously acknowledges that maybe some other people showed up. Never mind that enslaved Africans had been building American infrastructure since 1619. Never mind that Indigenous nations had been here for thousands of years. Never mind that the actual founding happened in a country where roughly 20% of the population was enslaved and zero percent of the land was originally European.

But sure, “up until the last 200 years,” it was all Christian Europeans. He said this at a Baptist university in Texas, the state that was literally Mexican territory until 1836, ten years after his imaginary cutoff date. He said it an hour from Granbury, where Mendi and I watched this rhetoric burrow into our community year after year. And he said it to a room full of students who, if Texas gets its way, will have learned a version of history shaped by the same David Barton who helped turn our hometown into a laboratory for Christian nationalist organizing.

Clearly self-awareness was not on the evening's program. But historical accuracy never is when this script gets deployed.

Let’s take that seriously for a moment, which is more than it deserves, but here we are.

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This Is Not a New Lie. It Has a Local Architect.

Before we get to the history, it is worth pausing to note that Johnson did not come up with this on his own. The idea that America was founded as an exclusively Christian nation, built entirely by Christian Europeans, is a specific and well-funded piece of historical revisionism championed by one of my favorites (that’s sarcasm): David Barton of WallBuilders, based in Aledo, Texas.

Barton, a former math and science teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, has spent decades presenting himself as a serious historian. He is not one. His book “The Jefferson Lies” was pulled from shelves in 2012 by Thomas Nelson, the largest Christian publisher in the United States, after the publisher cited a loss of confidence in the historical accuracy of the work. Conservative evangelical scholars Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins described Barton’s methods as “source-mining,” lifting quotations out of context to support conclusions he had already decided on. A federal judge ruled that his curriculum materials amounted to religious indoctrination rather than history instruction.

None of this stopped Texas from appointing Barton as an expert content adviser to the State Board of Education in 2025, where his interpretations now have direct influence over social studies standards that will shape Texas textbooks through 2030. Barton served in a similar role in 2009-2010, advocating for emphasizing the role of the Bible and Christianity in U.S. founding, promoting conservative political figures, and reducing emphasis on certain civil rights figures and movements. Because Texas is one of the largest textbook markets in the country, what Texas demands tends to shape what national publishers print. Barton himself has described his long game plainly: get the curriculum right, wait for the kids who learned from it to grow up, and eventually watch them pass laws based on it. He estimated it would take about 30 years. That was in the early 2000s.

Benny Johnson, standing in Waco Hall, is part of that pipeline. The talking points he delivered to those Baylor students did not originate with him. They were assembled over decades, influenced by a man who believed that if you want to change a country, you start with what children are taught about where it came from.

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The Slavery-Shaped Hole in This Argument

Now, to the history Johnson mangled, even with his careful qualifier.

Johnson’s claim is that “up until the last 200 years,” meaning roughly up until 1826, everything was Christian European. So let’s stay within his timeline. Let’s talk about 1619 to 1826, the period he is ostensibly claiming for his thesis.

Between 1619 and 1826, hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly transported to what would become the United States. By 1826, their descendants born into bondage numbered well over a million. They were not Christian Europeans. They were not volunteers. And they built things.

Specifically, during Johnson’s “Christian European” period, they built:

The White House. Construction began in 1792 and was completed in 1800. Enslaved laborers quarried the stone, hauled it, and laid it. The building that houses the presidency of the United States was constructed in significant part by people who were legally considered property. Built during Johnson’s timeline. By people he erased.

The U.S. Capitol. Construction began in 1793. Same story. The dome that appears on every civics textbook was erected with enslaved hands. Built during Johnson’s timeline. By people he erased.

The entire plantation economy that defined the South and funded early American development. By 1826, the value and labor of enslaved people formed the backbone of American agriculture and exports. Rice, tobacco, indigo, and cotton plantations made American agricultural exports competitive on the global market.

To look at the period from 1619 to 1826 and say “Christian Europeans built this” is not a simplification. It is a lie with a specific political purpose: to make the suffering and labor of millions of people disappear from the national story so that one group can claim sole authorship of it. David Barton understands this. A federal judge noted in writing that his curriculum tried to disguise a course allegedly teaching Middle Eastern history while really rolling out religious instruction, quietly arguing that America’s problems began when Christianity was removed from public life. Erasing Black labor from the founding story is not incidental to that project. It is load-bearing.

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Indigenous Peoples Would Like a Word

Here is another problem with Johnson's timeline. Before 1826, before 1776, before the first European ship appeared on the horizon, North America was home to hundreds of distinct nations with their own infrastructure, agriculture, trade networks, governance systems, and cultures.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy had been operating as a sophisticated political union for centuries before the Founders put quill to parchment, and some historians argue it directly influenced the structure of American democratic governance. The agricultural system known as the Three Sisters, developed by Indigenous peoples, fed colonizers who would have otherwise starved during Johnson's "Christian European" period. The trail networks that became colonial roads were Indigenous paths, walked for generations before 1826, before 1776, before any European knew this land existed.

None of this fits into “Christian European,” so of course Johnson left it out. Along with the people. And the civilizations. And the fact that the land was taken by force, fraud, and biological weaponization on a scale that doesn’t have many parallels in recorded history. All of that happened during the period Johnson claims was purely Christian European.

Barton's curriculum reveals the same erasure pattern. When he last advised the Texas State Board of Education on social studies standards in 2010, he argued that white men deserve the most credit for the abolition of slavery because they constituted the majority that voted for the Thirteenth Amendment. He called Colin Powell, the first Black American to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, a "weak choice" for inclusion in curriculum about civil rights contributions. The erasure is consistent. It is the whole point.

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The “90% Christian European Immigration” Sleight of Hand

Lots of heavy lifting happening here and very little reward.

Yes, in the earliest periods of American colonial history, European immigration dominated the voluntary arrivals. But this framing performs a neat trick: it counts only voluntary immigration. The forced migration of enslaved Africans, one of the largest involuntary population movements in recorded history, is simply excluded from the math, because acknowledging it collapses the entire premise.

It is like calculating the voluntary workforce at a plantation and saying most workers showed up of their own free will.

Even beyond that:

• Chinese laborers built the western half of the transcontinental railroad under brutal conditions.

• Irish immigrants, who were not always considered fully white or fully Christian by the Protestant establishment of the time, died by the thousands constructing canals and railways.

• Mexican workers farmed land that, until the 1840s, was legally Mexican territory.

A “90% Christian European” story requires you to squint past all of them.

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The Founders Were Not a Church Group

Here is where white Christian nationalism always runs into the inconvenient truth of the testimony of the Founders themselves.

Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, literally took a razor to the New Testament and cut out every miracle, every supernatural claim, and every reference to the divinity of Jesus. What remained, a collection of moral teachings stripped of theology, is known as the Jefferson Bible. Do you think that’s the behavior of a man building a Christian nation? Me either.

Benjamin Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention, proposed opening sessions with prayer. The motion failed. The delegates voted it down.

James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution, wrote a lot about the danger of mixing religion and government. He opposed even congressional chaplains as a violation of the separation of church and state.

Thomas Paine, whose “Common Sense” arguably did more to inspire the Revolution and the founders than any other single document, was openly hostile to organized Christianity. He wrote in “The Age of Reason” that all national institutions of churches appeared to him as “human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind.”

The Constitution itself contains exactly zero references to Jesus Christ, Christianity, or the Bible. It mentions religion twice: once to prohibit religious tests for public office, and once in the First Amendment to prevent the government from establishing a religion. Both mentions are restrictions on religion’s role in government, not endorsements of it.

Barton has spent his career arguing that this reading or interpretation is a fabrication, that the First Amendment was only ever meant to apply to Christianity, and that the separation of church and state is a myth invented by activist judges. His book attempting to rehabilitate Jefferson as an orthodox Christian was so riddled with factual errors that his own publisher walked away from it. But the argument lives on, because it is useful, and because it is now being piped into Texas classrooms through curriculum standards Barton is actively helping to shape.

If the Founders intended a Christian nation, they were remarkably careless about putting it in the document. Barton and those like him are playing out a decades long plan to make sure future students never notice that.

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What This Is Actually For

It would be easy to dismiss Benny Johnson as a clout-chasing influencer who got caught plagiarizing and found a more welcoming audience in MAGA. And sure, that is part of it. But what he said at Baylor is not random. It is a script, and David Barton wrote a significant portion of it.

Mendi and I know this script. We heard it in Granbury before most of the country was paying attention. We watched it work. We watched voter engagement events turn into planned school board takeovers. We watched a community that had always been conservative, but never theocratic, begin to blur the lines between church and state in ways that felt wrong, abnormal, and dangerous.

Christian nationalist rhetoric serves a very specific function: it constructs a story in which America has a rightful owner. If America was founded, built, and defined by Christian Europeans, then everyone else is, at best, a guest. Immigration becomes invasion. Pluralism becomes replacement. Civil rights become a concession rather than a correction.

Johnson delivered this speech at a Baptist university in Waco, Texas, a city built on Waco Tribe land, in a state that was part of Mexico until 1836, filled with people whose ancestors came from lots of places that aren’t Christian Europe. The irony is almost applause worthy. Almost.

The facts, the enslaved builders, the Indigenous civilizations, the non-Christian founders, the explicitly secular Constitution, are not mistakes either Johnson or Barton made. They are things both men need you not to know. Johnson needs you not to know it so the crowd cheers. Barton needs you not to know it so the textbooks reflect something else. The goals are different in scale. The lie is the same.

The good news is the historical record is stubbornly, gloriously uncooperative with this narrative. The people erased from this version of America did not disappear. They left receipts: in the architecture of Washington D.C., in the agricultural systems that fed a continent, in the letters of founders who explicitly rejected the theocratic project being retrofitted onto their legacy two centuries later.

America was not built by one people. It was built, often violently, often unjustly, by many. Acknowledging that is not a threat to American identity.

It is our American identity.

This is why Mendi and I started See It Name It Fight It. Because we saw this coming. We saw it in Granbury first, then spreading county by county, church by church, school board by school board. Now it is on a national tour with stadium lighting and a merch table. The disinformation has not changed. It has just gotten louder.

But it is still disinformation. And the more people who know the actual history, the harder it becomes to sell the lie.

See It. Name It. Fight It.

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Sources: The Baylor Lariat (April 22, 2026); Texas Monthly, “A Far-Right Christian Activist Is Advising on Texas Public School Curricula” (October 2025); Southern Poverty Law Center, David Barton profile; Texas Freedom Network, David Barton Watch; Edward Baptist, “The Half Has Never Been Told” (2014); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” (2014).

and a h/t to Bud Kennedy for the initial tweet that clued me into this one!