They have been at this for a very long time. What is ‘this’? Revising our public school text books to reflect a skewed view of America’s history beginning with the claim that we were founded as a “Christian Nation”. This is serious and threatening. Hearings were held in Austin, Texas last month, January 2010, to the 15 members of the Texas State Board of Education.
You may be thinking, “I’m not Texan, why does this matter to me?” Let me share an excellent article with you about how and why this is seriously significant to ALL of us. Russell Shorto of the NY Times published an article on February 11, 2010 that you really must take time to read in its entirety and you can click here to do just that.
In the meantime I will paste a few excerpts here so that we can spark a discussion around this insinuation of the Khristian Dominionists into our public education through the revision of history – and ultimately through the minds of our children.
First, we must talk about why Texas has so much influence in determining (and undermining) what ends up in our public education textbooks.
“Public education has always been a battleground between cultural forces; one reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money. The state’s $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country. Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State.”
“Not surprisingly, money”…and organization…
“Texas was one of the first states to adopt statewide curriculum guidelines, back in 1998, and the guidelines it came up with (which are referred to as TEKS — pronounced “teaks” — for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) were clear, broad and inclusive enough that many other states used them as a model in devising their own. And while technology is changing things, textbooks — printed or online —are still the backbone of education.”
AH! And the always well-funded Christian Dominionist sect…the infestation begins…
“The cultural roots of the Texas showdown may be said to date to the late 1980s, when, in the wake of his failed presidential effort, the Rev. Pat Robertsonfounded the Christian Coalition partly on the logic that conservative Christians should focus their energies at the grass-roots level. One strategy was to put candidates forward for state and local school-board elections[...]“
And now enter the ReBiblicanized republicans…
“Since the election of two Christian conservatives in 2006, there are now seven on the Texas state board who are quite open about the fact that they vote in concert to advance a Christian agenda. “They do vote as a bloc,” Pat Hardy, a board member who considers herself a conservative Republican but who stands apart from the Christian faction, told me. “They work consciously to pull one more vote in with them on an issue so they’ll have a majority.”
Steeplejacked! It is truly that obvious…the Texas State Board was intentionally targeted and successfully turned into an arm of the Christian Dominionist agenda to re-write our history. And what is the story they want our children to be sold?
“The one thing that underlies the entire program of the nation’s Christian conservative activists is, naturally, religion. But it isn’t merely the case that their Christian orientation shapes their opinions on gay marriage, abortion and government spending. More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders.”
Straight from the horse’s mouth….
“Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
No subtlety there! This is how brazen they are…they know they can come right out with it and not face any push back. It flies right past our radar! And they carry on…and on…and on.
One of the current board members up for re-election and former Chairman of the state board, Don McLeroy, describes himself this way,
“I consider myself a Christian fundamentalist,” He also identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago. He went on to explain how his Christian perspective [guides] him in the current effort to adjust American-history textbooks to highlight the role of Christianity. “Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,” he said.
Here is where we begin to pull in the language of the Dominionists and stir it up into a muddy Tea (as it were) – a concoction of two kool aids – like mixing red & green together – you end up with a glass that looks something akin to swamp water. And let us not overlook that our favorite Poster Gal for Christian Dominionism, Sarah Palin, holds these very same views…I mean really holds them! As unbelievable as this may be to some of us, they truly believe that humans co-existed with the dinosaurs.
“Merely weaving important religious trends and events into the narrative of American history is not what the Christian bloc on the Texas board has pushed for in revising its guidelines. Many of the points that have been incorporated into the guidelines or that have been advanced by board members and their expert advisers slant toward portraying America as having a divinely preordained mission.”
The article takes you on an in depth journey into the rationalization behind the Dominionist claim that we ARE a Christian nation and how they are in a relentless pursuit to incorporate this into our schools. The absence, to date, of their version of America in our public school textbooks is what leads the zealots to claim that our schools are “Institutions of Satan”. Literally.
It introduces you to players like David Barton, Jay Sekulow and Cynthia Dunbar who is quoted as saying…
[...]“We as a nation were intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.” But the true picture of America’s Christian founding has been whitewashed by “the liberal agenda” — in order for liberals to succeed “they must first rewrite our nation’s history” and obscure the Christian intentions of the founders. Therefore, she wrote, “this battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.”
And there we go…it’s the Dominionists’ perceived mandate from God’s lips to their ears to “Reclaim the 7 Mountains”, and education is a huge target for them. (refer to the 7 Mountains video in my side bar)
Where in recent history have we heard the recitation of “a light/beacon on a hill? Well, Reagan in the 80s and it has rolled right on down that hill to Palin as recently as her speech at the Tea Nation Party gathering this month in Nashville, Tennessee.
I know my post is lengthy and Shorto’s NY Times article is even longer, but it is worth reading even if you need to come back to it. This IS representative of what I (and others) have been writing about in our efforts to warn about Christian Dominionism in America and their very real goal to change our democratic republic into a theocracy.
**A fellow colleague and friend, Chris Rodda, is one of the foremost experts in this discussion and specifically David Barton. I have her book linked on my sidebar, “Liars for Jesus” and highly recommend it to be added to your MUST READ list. **
Thank you, Leah. This is disgusting. Do "main-line" Christian denominations know this is going on? It's not exactly good for Christianity when a group of advocates of Christianity become shameless liars in public and other Christians don't call them out. It's one thing to believe and teach something you can't prove to be true, and something else entirely to teach something you know to be false.
I am not a Christian, but I respect the faith and know the New Testament fairly well. When Jesus said, "I am the truth," he was hardly authorizing his disciples to lie, and when he called the devil "a liar and the father of lies," he was not holding the devil up as a model. Revising history books was a well-known Soviet tactic. A Christian should be ashamed to use it.
And I have no doubt that Christians truly are. This is one of the reasons why I have such resistance to calling these zealots "Christian"…and why I have tried to use other spellings. It is for the very reason that I do not believe them to represent mainstream Christians.
They are frauds, dishonest and sneaky….not virtues I would hold as a Christian. Thanks, Kevin
I certainly would be ashamed to! Though many people don't exactly consider me Christian…
The "dominionist" movement is strong elsewhere, too. Their goal right now is to recruit and embed dominionists in South Carolina and to embed their candidates in local govt, and eventually "climb the ladder" to state govt (which is already one of the most corrupt state govts in existence). SC is also one of the states at the bottom of the educational ladder, right above MS, if I recall, and one of the poorest in terms of delivering services to all its population. Remember that Mark Sanford did not want to accept stimulus money to assist those receiving unemployment benefits while he cavorted in Argentina with his "soul mate". I live in NC, and the difference between this state govt and SC is the difference between day and night, between progress and living in the stone age mentally.
These horrible people don't care about others–they only care about money, power and telling others how to live their lives. The dictum, "You are your brother's [or sister's] keeper" is something they don't subscribe to in any fashion, and they don't care if you have no boots to "pull yourself up"with, either.
That speaks to one of the most self-indulgent parts of their scripture-twisting…in that they are relieved of helping others because those who are poor, indigent and/or downtrodden are that way because they have turned their backs on God. Therefore their problems are just that….THEIR problems.
And their disdain for public education is decades old. Knowledge IS power, and god forbid we raise a bunch of free thinking critical thinkers! The "dumbing-down" of this nation, particularly in devout bible-belt regions is no accident.
This is not the message I was raised with as a Lutheran, of that I am certain.
Speaking of dumbing-down – this is scary:
http://tinyurl.com/yf5fpbt (very short)
On another forum a Lutheran chimed in on a thread where I had mentioned not believing in OSAS, and backed me up. (OSAS seems to be popular among Baptists and Calvinists, and virulent among the NARasites as you know.)
If Christian children are adequately trained at home and in church, they will not need Caesar's assistance in their indoctrination. The very fact that they have to rely on Caesar tells me that the church is in an extremely anemic state spiritually – just the opposite of its status politically. Not surprising, since the two realms are at odds with, and therefore inverse to, one another, as all history proves – and the more state power the church arrogates to itself, the increasingly more apostate it will become. It is no wonder that the secular world is not interested in buying what they are selling. The original product is still very attractive, however, when viewed in its original text and context, and apart from the manipulation and apostasy of the dominionist pretenders.
It is their unyielding appetite to accrue as many non-believers as possible before the End of Times … as though this earns them bonus points in the afterlife. Very disturbing. The original product is hardly relevant in their zeal.
It's not just the schools. My daughter is crazy about dinosaurs, so we often check out books from the library about dinosaurs. Imagine my shock when reading one of them to her that there was serious evidence that man walked with dinosaurs and that the real reason that dinosaurs are extinct is because of the great flood. I guess they were just too big to take on Noah's ark (although surely he could have managed some of the ones that are only 1 foot tall).
They are insidious in their influence and peppering libraries, both in schools and local community, is a subversive tactic that reaches a wide audience without being open and honest about what they are doing.
But of course, we know that honesty is sacrificial in the name of God when you are "harvesting souls"….
I thought I might be getting the message to one of my inlaws she and her husband are pretty much fundamentalists but compleatly unaware of the dangerous word they spread .We grew in the same churches.They left a group that I left a year ahead of them, I was becoming disalusioned but still not convinced the whole movement was wrong.They were cut off from so called friends they had from the church ,phone calls were not returned and several face to face chance meetings were met with a snub and silence and they blamed themselves.(I don't have to tell you my reaction) Lately I've been getting the pass it along and bless someone else and God will give you rich's beyond belief E-Mails from them(Which I delete)I tell you about this to give your readers and skeptics some idea of the stranglehold the fundamentalists have on members. I've known and to some degree still feel the guilt the movement excerts.By the way that church was recently in foreclosure and the Pastor is being investigated for irregularities in church funds.Christian Values at work??
It is so sad isn't it? Honestly. The practice of distancing their members from non-believers is a tactic that cults use. This is no different than the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh (who I actually met), Jim Jones, David Koresh and so many others.
It is brainwashing pure and simple, and too many are so desperate for eternal answers that they will give their last dime.
When i read that article last week i also thought class action suit. This needs be spoken in every local paper in the country. A letter to your local paper will help awareness. Also link the article from NY Times mag in comments of your favorite blogs. Something must be done or we will all be Texasses.
Texas is a state of divergent ideologies and politics. If I were asked who my most revered politician has been in recent memory – it would be former Democratic Governor Ann Richards who passed away in 2006. And that was in Texas. Recently Houston voted in the first openly lesbian Mayor.
So they never cease to amaze me. But they also have a heritage of deep south bible belt conservatism and unbalanced personal wealth from the oil industry that finance mega churches like Joel Osteen's in Houston and John Haggee's in San Antonio.
I have no doubt that there are many Texans who oppose the Christian Dominionist attempts to re-write history, we need to reach out to them. I know they exist.
I agree with Elizabeth. Because California is not in a position to influence what textbooks get distributed, we need to pressure publishes to make two editions: Texas and non-Texas editions.
I think, if they don't, the could be open to lawsuits. Publishers who produce textbooks can be argued to be in a position to influence the public welfare. it is a matter of public trust. I hope we can all figure to bring a class-action lawsuit, or just a plain old lawsuit to have this exposed.
What's ironic is that Texas has a very poor educational quality record. Too many dropouts (which are encouraged so as to boost their test scores) and the test scores themselves are lower than most.
Here in Kansas, it is not uncommon for kids transferring in from Texas schools to have to take remedial courses. So, tell me, again why is Texas in charge of producing standards and textbooks: money, money, money.
Thanks again for a great post and for the referral suggestions.
It is the money trail…and I have nothing against the almighty dollar! Nor free enterprise capitalism. But Dominionists routinely have deep pocket supporters that are hard to fight against.
Help me keep an eye on this….they do not have to succeed.
Just the fact that this committee wants to make Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts appear more acceptable in opposition to the conclusion drawn by real historians who have deemed him an ideological nutcase says all that can be said about the goals of this top-heavy conservative "education" board.
precisely! I have written in the past that Palin is the new McCarthy….
Christian charity to a lost and dying world. I don't think most of the world wants their brand of "Christian Charity". Seriously Texas is a threat. The only other influential state is California and right now, it doesn't have the money for new textbooks. We have to keep watch in our own states. If enough states balk, the textbook companies may make two editions.
You are spot on. We see this self-anointed sanctimony in the efforts of Dominionist "missionaries" who justify terrible treatments against those who push back against their proselytizing. What they deem as charitable is really an action with ties that bind.
Remember, I am talking about the zealots. I do understand that there well-meaning people of ALL faiths that truly do good deeds for others….but they are not the Dominionists.
And you are right, we need to get current candidates to make this a talking point and an election issue. It will shed ever-increasing light onto this BS!