[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
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