ALEDO, Texas-The vault lies inside a grassy hill, next to the rolling Texas prairie.

In the windowless room, climate controls ensure the humidity remains constant, while a suppression system stands ready to snuff out fires. A bulletproof steel door guards the contents.

One recent August afternoon, a burly security guard pried it open, and David Barton, a sprightly 72-year-old conservative political activist, strolled inside to his prized collection: tens of thousands of founding-era American documents and artifacts he values at millions of dollars.

Barton darted among glass cases and rattled off the highlights of his trove: a Revolutionary War-era shot flask, a 1795 handwritten prayer proclamation from Samuel Adams, and what he says is a lock of George Washington's hair.

A former math and science teacher with no academic training as a historian, Barton has used this vast collection to position himself as the intellectual architect of a movement advancing a conservative agenda in policy and education.

"I own the stuff," Barton said. "So I know more about this history than most of the professors."

Writing books and speaking in state legislatures, he champions a controversial narrative: that America's founders established a Christian republic and wanted the church to influence the state. The "separation of church and state," he argues, is a myth.

Now, bolstered by a favorable political climate and Supreme Court rulings, Barton's stature is rising. He and his nonprofit have helped facilitate legislation in more than a dozen states to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms. He also helped craft social-studies curricula for the nation's second-largest statewide public-school system, advises hundreds of state lawmakers, and helped the White House plan exhibits for America's 250th anniversary.

"David is one of the most impactful individuals in the faith arena that I have ever met," said former U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes, of Virginia. "When David speaks, people really are going to listen because they know most of the time he's going to be right."

Many historians and academics accuse him of twisting history to fit his agenda.

"He is a very accomplished collector, but that does not make one an expert, a scholar, or historian, no more than collecting stamps would make me a postal worker," said Mark A. Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University.

'Stabs you in the back'

Raised in Aledo, near Fort Worth, Barton studied religious education at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma and became a principal at a K-12 school run by his parents' church.

A landmark 1962 Supreme Court ruling against state-sponsored prayer in public schools helped spark his political awakening. He resolved to study the founders' intent himself.

As he researched, Barton said he was shocked to find that the majority of the founders were deeply devout, rather than the religion-shunning men he had learned about.

"If you have a friend that stabs you in the back, that's the way it was with what I had been taught about history," he said.

Barton developed a theory later expounded in his books: The founders established America as a Christian nation, but progressive historians and judges hijacked that project.

In 1988, he founded WallBuilders, named for a biblical passage in which the Jewish people rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. The goal: teach the public that America was "overwhelmingly rooted in Christian ideology."

He quit his job and spent more than a decade crisscrossing the country with his family in a 15-passenger van, visiting churches, civic clubs and military bases to propagate his theory, while home schooling their three children. "We called it van school," his wife, Cheryl, said.

Over the years, Barton scoured antique shops, bookshops and auctions to add to his collection, which has grown to about 100,000 artifacts owned by Barton and his son Tim. Profits from his book sales, which he estimates as likely to be in the millions of dollars, helped fund his acquisitions, Barton said.

In 2021, the most recent available public tax filing, the WallBuilders nonprofit paid Barton's for-profit entities $267,071 in royalty fees for sales of his books. The nonprofit and the business entities are now run by his son.

Historians say Barton tends to cherry-pick quotes or exaggerate the Christian influence on America's founding. A publisher pulled his 2012 book, "The Jefferson Lies," which claimed Thomas Jefferson was a conventional Christian, after a number of errors were alleged.

"For Barton, the past is instrumentalized for the present," said John Fea, chair of the history department at Messiah University, a Christian school. "He needs a certain kind of past because he needs the Founding Fathers on his side to advance his political agenda."

'I hope some of ya'll are able to pass it'

On a typical day, Barton spends hours fielding texts and calls from contacts in think tanks, legislatures, Congress and the White House, his son Tim said. He often works until 3 a.m., with a John Wayne movie in the background.

A former vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas, Barton counts Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) among his allies.

"I was introduced to David and his ministry a quarter-century ago, and it has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do," Johnson told a gathering of state legislators in 2021.

Last year, before the federal cuts to USAID, Barton met with State Department officials in Washington, D.C. In a conference room at the agency, he laid out how the U.S. had limited foreign aid before World War II, he said.

Asked about the meeting, a State Department spokesperson said the agency regularly consults with a range of outside voices, and that officials' engagement with a person or group doesn't constitute an endorsement of views.

Barton and his nonprofit also regularly counsel a coalition of hundreds of state lawmakers on issues, from the evils of in vitro fertilization to the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance, he says.

He and this network have been in action since the Supreme Court in 2022 swept aside a decades-old legal test that had kept religious displays and practices out of public schools.

Texas state Sen. Phil King, a longtime ally, worked with WallBuilders and a religious-liberty law firm to draft a bill requiring a Ten Commandments display in every Texas classroom.

Barton and his son Tim supplied evidence from Barton's archive showing the Ten Commandments in early textbooks. The bill passed the Texas Senate in 2023 but died in the House.

That November, King urged attendees at the WallBuilders annual closed-door legislative conference to pick up where Texas stalled. "I hope some of y'all are able to pass it this year and beat us," King said.

Conference organizers shared a draft of King's bill and a supporting brief on the Ten Commandments' history in classrooms. Legislators called King asking who to bring in to testify at hearings; he recommended Barton.

Ten Commandments bills take off

In 2024, Louisiana state Rep. Dodie Horton drafted a similar bill after seeing a WallBuilders email about the Supreme Court's ruling, she said. When it reached committee, Tim Barton testified and brought 18th- and 19th-century schoolbooks to argue the Ten Commandments were once standard classroom material.

In June 2024, Louisiana became the first state to enact the requirement since the Supreme Court struck down similar legislation more than four decades ago. By 2025, WallBuilders tallied that more than 20 states had introduced similar bills. Four-in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Alabama-have become law.

A Wall Street Journal analysis found that of 16 states that introduced legislation to require Ten Commandments displays in classrooms since 2024, the large majority use the same phrasing and words-such as "conspicuous," "durable" and "donated"- as the model legislation. Roughly another 10 states have similar or local level legislation to incorporate the Ten Commandments into public schools.

Legislative records, court filings and lawmakers' public statements show that in almost every case, the sponsor attended the WallBuilders conference, credited the group, or cited Barton's work directly. Barton and his son often testified in support.

While the Ten Commandments are going up in Texas and Louisiana classrooms, these moves remain contested. On Aug. 17, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups representing more than two dozen Texas families, asked the Supreme Court to review a lower court's decision to uphold the Texas Ten Commandments legislation.

"There are folks who would like to enlist the machinery of the state to promote their religion and no other," said Daniel Mach, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on freedom of religion and belief. Barton said he believes the U.S. government should be welcoming to a variety of religions.

Last fall, Texas Board of Education members appointed Barton to help plan what more than five million public-school students in the state would learn.

A memo Barton wrote this year, reviewed by the Journal, shows him pushing teachers to preserve third-grade lessons on "Moses, Hebrew slavery, the Exodus, and the Promised Land." Much of his input made it into the final social studies standards.

Barton continues to tour nationwide, speaking at hundreds of conferences and events a year, including July's Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, along with Johnson and other conservative dignitaries.

Attendees flocked to buy $79.99 copies of the WallBuilders' "Founders' Bible" and then filed into a conference room to hear Barton himself speak.

"We've been told for years that Christians should stay out of politics. But aren't we glad the Founding Fathers didn't believe that?" Barton told the crowd. "If we end up believing that, we won't have an America two generations from now."