[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 75 Spring 2022]
Hijacking History
How the Christian Right Teaches
History and Why It Matters
Kathleen Wellman
Oxford University Press
2021
ISBN 9780197579251
This might well seem a
peripheral subject of little
real interest or concern,
but anyone thinking that
would be seriously wrong.
The US Christian Right were
crucial in the election of
Donald Trump to the
Presidency in 2016, were
still right behind him in
2020 and are essential to
the continuation of his hold
over Republican politics in
the USA. And as far as they
are concerned, control of
education is an absolutely vital concern. An important
part of their concern is ensuring that the teaching of
history is always Biblically informed.
What prompted Kathleen Wellman, Professor of History at
the Southern Methodist University, to investigate the
history textbooks and curricula used in evangelical schools
and to write Hijacking History was the decision of the
State Board of Education in Texas to impose ‘ahistorical
stipulations on teaching history’.
She put herself forward as a reviewer of the textbooks
and curricula that were being considered, but was turned
down, whereas Mark Keogh, a former car salesman and
now an ordained minister and Tea Party supporter was
accepted! As she points out: ‘I was just one of many
academics rejected’.
She goes on to explain the likely
reason for this rejection: the Christian Right saw ‘the
historical profession as promoting positions antithetical to
theirs, it identified historians as the enemy – left‐wing,
Marxist, feminist, or anti‐American’. For the Christian
Right, it was the Bible that explained the unfolding of
history.
She responded to this by examining the textbooks and
curricula produced by three Christian Right publishers:
Abeka Books, the Bob Jones University Press and
Accelerated Christian Learning. These were, she tells us,
‘all long‐standing, conservative Christian publishers whose
wares served the private schools that proliferated after
desegregation but are now used by homeschoolers and in
charter schools and private schools’. They all began
publishing school materials in the 1970s and have thrived
ever since. Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), for
example, by 2013 claimed to serve some 6,000 schools in
145 countries.
A particular concern was to proselytise in Africa, but the
organisation also had more than thirty schools, all private,
using its materials in Britain and Ireland. Even more
successful, Abeka, which is attached to Pensacola
Christian College, produces material ‘used in more than
10,000 schools’ along with many thousands of
homeschoolers. The College trains teachers and its
publishing arm, Abeka, ‘has a massive presence online’.
More than 50,000 homeschooled students in the US are
enrolled in its Video Streaming academy. There are over a
million children, both in school and at home, using Abeka
textbooks and materials. Which brings us to the Bob Jones
University Press (BJUP)!
The BJUP was founded in 1973 as the publishing arm of a
notoriously sectarian and racist so‐called educational
institution, the Bob Jones University. Its vicious anti‐
Catholicism vied with its vicious racism with its founder,
Bob Jones no less, on one occasion notoriously remarking
that he would rather have a ‘nigger’ as President than a
Catholic. This university notoriously banned black students
right up until 1971, then required that they be married up
until 1975, continued to ban mixed‐race married couples up
to 1998 and inter‐racial dating up until 2000.
This was all ‘on biblical grounds’. Indeed, as far as the first
three of the university’s chancellors were concerned, Bob
Jones I, Bob Jones II and Bob Jones III, segregation was
biblically proscribed, ‘God intended racial segregation’.
Successive right‐wing politicians, among them Ronald
Reagan, have sought the endorsement of the Bob Jones
University.
It is also worth noticing that our very own Ian Paisley, no
less, was a member of the BJU board of trustees. And
according to Wellman, the BJUP at present ‘has over a
million pre‐college students using its textbooks’ and like
both the other publishers she looks at also has offers
online classes and materials.
Wellman goes on to examine the textbooks and curricula
materials these publishers have produced. As she puts it,
what she lays bare ‘may astound historians unfamiliar
with the religious right’s use of history’, indeed, ‘history as
practiced by historians bears little resemblance to the
polemical stances of these textbooks’.
She goes on to emphasise how dangerous this is, warning
how the Christian Right’s success ‘in undermining biology
should heighten concern about deliberate distortions in
history’. Her examination is absolutely first class, but there is only space here to briefly dip into her account, to
highlight some of the low points so to speak.
Abeka materials, for example, are very critical of the way
the Roman populace were kept under control by a
strategy of ‘bread and circuses’, but not for the reasons
one might normally assume. Indeed not: it was the
provision of ‘bread, an early form of ‘welfarism’ that
undermined the moral fibre of the Roman people and
helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire! And this
anti‐welfarism is brought more up to date when Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society initiatives are blamed for the US
defeat in Vietnam.
She looks at Abeka materials dealing with slavery and the
Civil War where it is argued that ‘slavery bestowed the
benefits of evangelization’ with the slaves learning that
‘the truest freedom is freedom from the bondage of sin’.
The horrors of slavery are effectively diminished with the
Lost Cause myth remaining ‘salient’. As for the BJUP
treatment of slavery, its textbooks actually ‘use biblical
slavery as injunctions to present‐day employers and
employees. The biblical master‐slave relationship…is
invoked as a model for twentieth‐century American labour
relations’ Which brings us to the Ku Klux Klan: while the
BJUP textbook acknowledges its racism, it also ‘defends it
as a force for moral improvement’.
The textbooks and curricula materials from all three
publishers emphasise the benefits that the colonised
peoples derived from Western Imperialism and
colonialism, not least, of course, the activities of the
missionaries. The exploitation, repression, suffering and
hardship imposed on the colonised are relentlessly
minimised. This is, of course, only to be expected, and the
Christian Right is hardly alone in taking this stance.
More surprising perhaps was the vehement hostility
towards the United Nations (UN) in Abeka materials. The
UN is ‘a threat to freedom around the world’ and
‘contrary to the basic Judeo‐Christian concept of law
which limits government’. Indeed, it is ‘a collectivist
juggernaut that would crush individual freedom and force
the will of an elite few on all of humanity’.
This is, in fact, a commonplace of US Right. It is also
interesting to see ACE materials supporting the military
overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1973, with
the ‘Chilean people begging the military to overthrow the
government’. She writes of how ‘ACE notes with approval’
that the coup ‘was carried out with the support of the CIA’.
One last point that is of particular importance at the
present time is that these Christian publishers are anti‐
environmentalist. As far as Abeka is concerned, for
example, ‘Environmentalism poses a direct threat to
Christianity’ and ‘climate science violates the Creation
Mandate’. Never have such attitudes and prejudices
been more dangerous.
There is so much more of interest in this volume. It deals
with an important subject thoroughly and with
considerable insight. Whether we like it or not the
Christian Right is not going away and we must know our
enemy.
John Newsinger
