Texas School Board Article

I want to highlight a fascinating article in today's New York Times Magazine, "How Christian Were the Founders?" by Russell Shorto.

There Shorto provides a sketch of the divisive politics of Texas's state school board, whose members have the power to re-write carefully devised curricula recommended by the state's teachers. Many of these members Shorto identifies as "Christian" in a fundamentalist sense. These Christian school board members are dedicated to correcting what they see as a recent and unjust drifting away from K-12 texbooks and curricula's emphasis of Christianity as a uniquely prominent aspect of American history and culture. Faced with curricular suggestions and text book choices that fail to so emphasize Christianity in US history and culture, these school board members simply amend the standards to reflect their own views.

Texas's standards prove unduly influential to educational standards nation-wide. Since Texas represents, after California, the largest school system, the largest texbook publishers generally follow its lead. Conservative Texas school boards, then, have the potential to produce conservative curricula more broadly.

In his article, Shorto links those board members' views to a wider sub-movement of evangelicals (though he consistently uses "Christian" as a general descriptor) who combine a particular view of US history with a specific cultural-political agenda.

Their historical view? The US is a Christian nation, meaning that it is founded within a specifically Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) ethos, by people professing a specifically Christian faith, and with the goal of advancing specifically Christian aims. Whereas many other historians emphasize the founders' Deist and (for its time) pluralist leanings, the new Christian historiography places the majority of US founders squarely within a Biblical Christian worldview.

This historical view leads its proponents to several conclusions about present-day culture and politics. They dispute, for example, the idea that the US relies on a "separation of church and state." Indeed, they tie key ideals of US liberal democracy quite specifically to Christian faith. Human rights, for instance, are God-given, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Rights' utility as a legal concept is inseparable from their religious underpinnings. (And, as a side-argument, the Declaration enjoys a "symbiotic" relationship with the Constitution proper; one cannot be considered apart from the other). The US is tolerant of other religions, yes, but it remains by design (and by Divine fiat) a Christian nation. It is thus only proper that its laws reflect specifically Christian precepts.

Bolstering this view are authors like David Barton, of Wallbuilders, who has written several books about how Christian (not Deist) most of the founders were and how shocked they would be at the secular bias of today's politics and culture. I've heard Barton speak and have read several of his articles. He strikes me as an autodidact, extremely well-read on facts and trivia of various Revolutionary era figures and events. But he is by no means an academic historian. He lacks a scholarly sense of history as a discipline, i.e., an ongoing conversation among experts in which participants submit themselves to mutual accountability and peer review to check and refine arguments or evidence. Indeed, his Wikipedia entry links to several of his more infamous gaffes, including using alleged quotes by the founders for which he cannot find primary documentation.

Of course, Barton's lack of formal academic credentials in no way hinders his influence and popularity among his fans, including several members of the Texas school board. Shorto interviews several of these members, noting that they make no secret of the fact that they have no professional expertise in the areas about which they dictate policy--or even education in general (one member, for example, home-schooled her children, specifically avoiding the system she seeks now to influence). The sense here is that, for these board members and those who support them, educators by and large suffer from a liberal, secularist bias. They have twisted true history--the history that reveals the hand of God at work in Instrument America--and require correction from honest believers.

To his credit, Shorto notes that many historians who otherwise do not agree with Barton et al. nevertheless concur that a history of influences on US history that ignores the religious views of major actors also errs. Religion did and does play a role in people's lives, and the founders were often quite open about that role as they saw it. To the extent that history books have shied away from exploring this reality, such squeamishness should be remedied. This is not to say, however, that historians concur that the founders saw themselves as building a specifically or exclusively Christian nation in Barton's sense. Shorto quotes a conservative author, Richard Brookhiser, who puts it nicely: "The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be."

But such nuances don't cut the mustard in the more conservative school board members' minds. Christian is Christian. To suggest that past understandings and expressions of Christian faith differed significantly from present-day ones seems incredulous to many present-day, Bible-believing evangelicals. They therefore back-read their own present-day configuration of faith into the historical narratives and legal documents US. American history becomes the story of the endurance of (their configuration of) faith.

Shorto's take on all of this (it's mainly reportage rather than editorial) is fascinating and, I think, fair. I wish, however, that he were more careful in identifying the Christians who follow Barton's lead and seek to twist educational standards to fit their faith-pictures versus Christianity more generally. At times Shorto seems to suggest that all Christians (all Christians in Texas, anyway) see US history just as Barton et al. do. The people Shorto talks to on the board--and they do say some alarming things--strike me more as (indeed, identify explicitly as) working on the fundamentalist end of evangelicalism.

A more complicated picture of what evangelicals more generally (to say nothing of non-evangelical Christians) mean by describing the US as a Christian nation emerges in such books as Christian Smith's Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: U of CA P, 2000). Smith, a sociologist, draws on a great deal of qualitative and quantitative evidence to trouble many of the preconceptions about evangelicals that Shorto's article might otherwise foster. Although a majority of evangelicals in Smith's study did affirm the notion that the US was Christian nation, they do not take that to mean that Christianity should enjoy some privileged status in US schools or laws. "Christian nation" can mean many things, from Barton's quasi-theocratic view to the simple observation that, for a long time, most US citizens identified as broadly Christian (as the UK might be called a "secular nation" even though it formally has a state church).

So the school board members that alarm Shorto represent an especially activist fringe with particularly strong views rather than the "average evangelical" (whatever that might mean). Nevertheless, as an especially activist, vocal fringe, the board members' attitudes and actions are quite troubling. The article is worth reading.

More later,

JF