Texas school board miseducates Texas children

As I have observed in the past, one thing I as a student of history strongly detest is deliberate distortions of history. The most obvious guilty parties in the modern world are authoritarian states like China, but not all democratic nations are free of such problems either. One good example is Japan, where a lot of the country's more brutal acts during the WW II era are whitewashed in their schools' textbooks. But such things can even occur in the US, with the most recent attempt to rewrite the facts coming from the state I grew up in, Texas.

As the articles linked to above explain, the Texas school board, or rather certain of its most conservative members (though there are no liberals on the board at all), recently has attempted to force a new view of US history into the textbooks used in Texas, and thereby much of the rest of the country, as many publishers will sell textbooks conforming to Texas standards nationwide. This follows on an attempt by some of the same board members (with Don McLeroy, a self-professed believer in the appallingly ignorant "Young Earth Creationism", in the lead) to include the pseudoscience of intelligent design alongside evolution in biology textbooks or at least to include language designed to sow doubts about evolution itself, an attempt which fortunately failed. This year, in their efforts to indoctrinate Texas children with their beliefs, they shifted their focus to US history.

Now I will acknowledge that we are not talking here about the kind of blatant fabrications you might find in, say, a Chinese history textbook talking about Tibetan relations with China. I will also acknowledge that, as pointed out in the NY Times magazine article, the group commonly referred to as the "founders" were in fact Christian (at least in a broad sense), and Christianity did play an important role in the early history of the US. But as several experts also point out in the article, the founders did also clearly make an effort to avoid using explicitly Christian language (as opposed to language which would at least accommodate other monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Islam), and they did intend a separation of church and state, deliberately leaving God out of the Constitution.

Also, a number of the founders has views that today's Christian fundamentalists would strongly opposed to. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and one of the most important founders was a Deist who produced his own version of the gospels which deleted all references to miracles, the divinity of Jesus, and even the resurrection. Given this, one can only imagine what kind of reception Jefferson would get if he were to run for office in the modern US. Barack Obama gets accused of being a communist for doing things that even Republican presidents have advocated from time to time (such as health care reform); what would Jefferson be called? "Godless anti-Christian blasphemer" would probably be the least of it. But, as explained in the NY Times article, they are quite willing to use Jefferson's Declaration, with its reference to God, to compensate for the lack of reference to God in the Constitution itself.

The views of Benjamin Franklin, another of the more important founders, on religion varied over the course of his life; he became a Deist, stopped attending church, and attacked organized religion in his youth, but later concluded that organized religion was a positive force. However, even when he held this view, he was, according to historian David Morgan, a "champion of generic religion"; i.e., he did not exclusively advocate one type of Christianity or even Christianity over other religions, and he explicitly stated that he though a good religion should be able to survive on its own, without any help from civil authorities. And a month before he died, he wrote the following in a letter:
"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble...." This (particularly the part about doubting Jesus' divinity) no doubt would not meet with approval from Don McLeroy and company.

Even the "father of the Constitution", James Madison, late in his life wrote an essay opposing the appointment of official chaplains for Congress and the armed forces, as it would amount to an establishment of a national religion and would exclude smaller religions and sects. In this essay he also refers to "the danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Government". George Washington apparently didn't take communion (though his reason for not doing so is unknown; he may have simply felt he was not sufficiently "in the will of God") and he is thought by many to have been a Deist. He certainly was an advocate of religious toleration, not only of Christians but of non-Christians as well; regarding the hiring of workers for Mt. Vernon, he wrote: "If they be good workmen, they may be from Asia, Africa, or Europe; they may be Mohammedans, Jews, or Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists."

Then there are the Puritans commonly known as the Pilgrims, the group that first settled Massachusetts. Claims by people such as Texas school board member Cynthia Dunbar that the highly Christian language of the Mayflower Compact "clearly delineates us as a nation intended to be emphatically Christian" are obviously nonsensical, as the Pilgrims were simply a religious group who settled in America to practice their religion in peace; they were not, in their own minds, setting out to found a nation, so what they said about the reasons for their own journey can hardly be claimed as evidence that the United States (not established until over a century later) was created for the same reasons. The same might be said of the phrase of Puritan leader John Winthrop most beloved of those who want to claim the US as a Christian nation, namely his statement that "We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." Again, he was referring to the Pilgrims themselves as a religious colony, not a nation. In any case, the same conservatives who so love that quote from Winthrop seem to be unaware some other things he said, such as "The care of the public must oversway all private respects" and "We [should] be willing to abridge ourselves of superfluities for the supply of others' necessities." Oh no! The leader of the Pilgrims was as much a socialist as Barack Obama! (Regarding the latter, see: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0701/Is-Obama-really-a-socialist-Some-say-so-but-where-s-the-evidence)

Of course someone who is looking for "evidence" that the founders were Christian will find plenty of quotes, as references to the Bible and Christianity were pervasive in those days. But it is equally clear that any claim that they explicitly intend the US to be a Christian nation ignores a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

What's more, all this talk about what the founders intended also ignores the fact that the founders were far from perfect themselves, and they lived in a world that was very different from today's. There is no reason that their thoughts and ideas should be treated like some sort of religious scriptures that we cannot deviate from in any way. As Thomas Jefferson said in his forward to America (The Book) - A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, "I was...looking forward to this opportunity to dispel some of the mythology surrounding myself and my fellow Founders.... We weren't gods. We were men. We had flaws.... We created a blueprint for a system that would endure, which means your lazy asses shouldn't be coasting on our accomplishments. We were imperfect. It was imperfect. And we expect our descendants to work as hard as we did on keeping what we think is a profoundly excellent form of government supple, evolving and relevant." Okay, Thomas Jefferson didn't really write that, but the point is valid nevertheless. People like these members of the Texas school board should stop trying to twist history to fit their agenda, and Americans in general should worry less about what the founders "intended" (as if they could even have imagined the world of today, much less anticipated it) and more about what sort of society we want for the future.