Religion in American History, but in Public School Textbooks?

The Texas Board of Education, the nation's second largest purchaser of
public school textbooks, is revising its K-12 social studies curriculum
and deciding how to characterize religion's influence on American
history. Three consultants have recommended emphasizing the roles of the
Bible, Christianity and civic virtue of religion. / As America's children go back to school, how would you advise the Texas board? How should religion be taught in public schools?

Religion was central to America's first public-school textbook, The New England Primer. Gradually, it became peripheral. Now, it's nearly nonexistent. Gradual: in communist countries, this eradication of religion was sudden. Irony: religion is back into Russia's public schools, but not into America's.

1.....In a public school 80 years ago, I experienced the earliest stage of this abolition of religion from American education. Our schools were of course Protestant: Euro-America began as a Protestant country with a few minorities. But as the Roman Catholic population increased, Catholic authorities became increasingly determined to drive Protestantism out of our public schools. (In 1933, I looked forward to studying the English classic John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which my older sister was reading in school that year; but by year's end, Catholic pressure had succeeded in adding it to the banned-books list.) Other non-Protestant minorities joined in, and in 1962 the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated "school prayer" - specifically, acts of reverence (including Bible-reading) at the beginning of the school-day.

2.....This Supreme Court wipe-out of religion from our public schools began in 1948 with the prohibition of religious instruction. The series of religion-negations included, in 1985, the forbidding of a moment of silence to begin the school-day: silence, it was argued, might suggest prayer, which would violate the no-establishment-of-religion clause of the First Amendment. The progression was completed in a 1994 decision: the original intent was no preference of one church over another; then, no preference of one religion over another; then (1994), "no preference of religion to irreligion." But was not that anti-silence decision of 1985 a preference of irreligion in the sense that the court feared religion might occur in a school-mandated moment of silence?

3.....Results?
3.1
A growing alienation of American society from the Federal government. The people feel helpless in face of the Federal government's throttling of religion in public education, but they can yell down as "big government" any significant Federal healthcare program.
3.2
The alienation of religion and science from each other. The author of "Unscientific America" is an atheist who wants to overcome the public's resistance to science. But his "science" is the atheistic philosophy properly termed "scientism," which in American public education has taken the central place which religion had. Indeed, it is a philosophy functioning as a religion.
3.3
The alienation of many of our brighter children from God. Our public schools teach our children to sin by making sense of life and the universe without "God" as a word & as the ultimate reality: the Bible teaches that the worst sin is God-amnesia, forgetting God while making sense. Most of the commenters on my On Faith entries are bright atheists. School taught them to sin by making sense without God, who therefore is extraneous to their values. The Bible? To them it's a collection of superstitious stories most of them have never heard: their biblical ignorance should not shock me, but it does. (The Greek word "atheist" means literally "no God"; most atheists are passive, not "anti-God" aggressive.)
3.4
The alienation of the two Americas - theistic and atheistic - from each other. The Rev. Peter Marshall, one of the reviewers for the Texas Board of Education, put it well: "We're in an all-out moral and spiritual war for the soul of America," and how American history is written for our school-children to read "is at the heart of it."

4.....American historian Mark Noll rightly teaches that the U.S. had "two foundings," the first emphasizing Enlightenment values and the second, immediately following, the values of evangelical Christianity (centering in the Bible). To be fair as well as to be scholarly, American history should give full weight to both and superior status to neither.

5.....I suggest that Texas public-school children will be well served if their American-history textbooks (1) fairly represent the religion factor (on the model of great historians, such as Mark Noll), (2) avoid ideological distortions (such as egalitarian multiculturalism), and (3) include all of America's founding documents, beginning with the Mayflower Compact. ("How religion should be taught in public schools" is another subject.)

By Willis E. Elliott  |  September 1, 2009; 11:03 PM ET
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