In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
From the Treaty of Tripoli:
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The U.S. ConstitutionThe United States Constitution serves as the law of the land for America and indicates the intent of our Founding Fathers. The Constitution forms a secular document, and nowhere does it appeal to God, Christianity, Jesus, or any supreme being. (For those who think the date of the Constitution contradicts the last sentence, see note 1 at the end.) The U.S. government derives from people (not God), as it clearly states in the preamble: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union...." The omission of God in the Constitution did not come out of forgetfulness, but rather out of the Founding Fathers purposeful intentions to keep government separate from religion.
The Declaration of IndependenceMany Christians who think of America as founded upon Christianity usually present the Declaration of Independence as "proof" of a Christian America. The reason appears obvious: the Declaration mentions God. (You may notice that some Christians avoid the Constitution, with its absence of God.)
However, the Declaration of Independence does not represent any law of the United States. It came before the establishment of our lawful government (the Constitution).....Moreover, the mentioning of God in the Declaration does not describe the personal God of Christianity. Thomas Jefferson who held deist beliefs, wrote the majority of the Declaration. The Declaration describes "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." This nature's view of God agrees with deist philosophy and might even appeal to those of pantheistical beliefs, but any attempt to use the Declaration as a support for Christianity will fail for this reason alone.
Talk2Action is an activist group dedicated to, among other goals, exposing religionist historical revisionism in educational curricula. Although there are some examples of this subversive practice infesting the public education system, the two primary miseducational tools used by the Christian Right in its efforts to rewrite American history and instill their distorted view in the minds of children are:
1)private Christian "academies" (madrassas)
2)homeschooling.
We'll look at their deceitful propaganda and how they are inflicting it on America's children - aided by irresponsible, misguided parents who place their extremist, antiAmerican religionist agenda above the mental health and intellectual strength of their children - below the fold.
From the report linked above the fold:
More and more people are accepting home schooling as a way of life. Many major groups support home schooling, including Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and the Rutherford Institute (Miner, as cited in Lubienski, 2000, home and public.) The week of September 19 has even been declared National Home Education Week (Reich, 2002, introduction.) However, this may not be the best thing for society as a whole. Home schooling provides parent with an alternative method for teaching their child, allows them to customize their child?s education. Nonetheless, 57% of the American population disagree with home schooling (Rose, Gallup, & Elam, as cited in Lubienski, 2000, privatization.) This is because there are many reasons to remain in public schools and condemn the home schooling movement. A few of these reasons are: a lack of sufficient social experience, lack of proper learning materials, and insufficient instructors, as well as a destruction of the public school systems. Therefore home schooling is destructive to the students who are home schooled, and to those who are left in the public school systems....Also, when a child is home schooled, they are not able to experience a variety of teachers and teaching methods. They are confined to their parents or one or two tutors. This does not properly prepare them for what they will encounter when they enter the collegiate level. They will have a difficult time adjusting to their new teachers and the myriad of ways in which those teachers will educate them. Most children who are home schooled have not experienced people of religions, races, and backgrounds different from their own.
Here it is tempting to digress into a discussion of whether, though parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit, that right includes programming their children with a falsified and distorted view of history, while simultaneously weakening the educational resouces available to children in public schools. This, however, is not the purpose of this composition.
Instead, we will look at the revisionist history promulgated by the Christian Right to create delusional children who will grow up to be operatives dedicated to furthering a religionist and fundamentally antiAmerican agenda, after a brief look at the Bush Administration's complicity to this end.
From Washington Monthly and a piece by Kevin Drum:
Question: Why would NCLB mandate an obviously unmeetable standard? And now that it's up for renewal, why would Republicans continue to insist on that obviously unmeetable standard?Answer: Because the 100% goal isn't just rhetorical. It comes with penalties. If you don't meet the standard, you lose money, you're officially deemed a "failing school," and your students are eligible to transfer to other schools. And needless to say, by 2014 there won't be any satisfactory public schools to send them to because 99% of them won't have met the standard.
Followup bonus question: What incentive does anyone have to label 99% of America's public schools as failures? That's crazy, isn't it?
Answer: Anyone who wants the public to believe that public schools are failures. This would primarily consist of conservatives who want to break teachers unions and evangelicals who want to build political momentum for private school vouchers. The whole point of NCLB for these people is to make sure that as many public schools as possible are officially deemed failures.
This, it could be argued, is part of a larger, and more sinister, agenda.
Returning to Talk2Action:
The rewriting, and fabrication, of history can be most deadly expression of totalitarian impulses: those who control the past, the record of what has been, control the future. Falsified American history has seeped into not only homeschooling curriculum, America's public schools, and Congressional debates, but it also has distorted public understanding that the religious neutrality of American government was, and still is, key to the success of American democracy itself.
David Barton
The Lesson Planner: Even before he got directly involved in politics, David Barton was a major voice in the debate over church-state separation. His books and videotapes can be found in churches all over the U.S., educating an evangelical generation in what might be called Christian counter-history. The 51-year-old Texan's thesis: that the U.S. was a self-consciously religious nation from the time of the Founders until the 1963 Supreme Court school-prayer ban (which Barton has called "a rejection of divine law").
"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."So said James Madison, architect of the Constitution, defender of religious freedom and fourth president of the United States, according to the Religious Right.
But to church-state separationists and historians of the post-colonial period, something about this Madison quote has never felt quite right. It seemed unlikely that the same Madison who advocated "total separation of the church from the state" and battled to disestablish the Anglican Church in Virginia would say it. The sentiment appeared to clash with his well-known advocacy of a healthy distance between religion and government.
A few years ago, with the quote popping up increasingly in the mass media (including Rush Limbaugh's daily radio show), Robert S. Alley, professor emeritus at the University of Richmond and author of James Madison on Religious Liberty, undertook a dogged effort to track it down. Enlisting the help of the editors of The Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia, Alley scoured reams of documents, books and writings. After coming up empty-handed, the Madison scholar concluded that the quote was probably fictional.
Now the major purveyor of the quote, Texas-based Religious Right propagandist David Barton, has admitted it's bogus. Last year Barton's group, WallBuilders' issued a one-page document titled "Questionable Quotes," a list of 12 statements allegedly uttered by Founding Fathers and other prominent historical figures, that are now considered to be suspect or outright false. Madison's alleged comment about the Ten Commandments is number four on the list and is flatly declared by Barton to be "false." (See here for a full list of the bogus quotes.)
David Barton has published many revisionist books that distort American history and are used as textbooks in private Christian schools and homeschools.
A simple Google search turns up other disturbing information about Barton. Not only does he disseminate biased and misleading materials, he has a profound, and profoundly alarming political agenda. Last year, Beliefnet reported that Barton is on the board of The Providence Foundation, a Christian Reconstructionist oriented organanizaton. Reconstructionism is an influential political theology whose proponents argue that the U.S. should be a Christian theocracy, under "Biblical law." (I wrote about this movement and its role in the Christian Right in detail in my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.)
And David Barton's lies are brought to our community by Dean Welty of Valley Family Forum, who offers a seminar based on Barton's "America's Godly Heritage" on Fridays from October 5th through December 7th.
"Many people have bought into the LIE that the church should be separate from the state."
Dean Welty, radio show October 2006
Of course, Barton's textbooks would not be used in any responsible educational setting. Thus the two-pronged assault on public schools: No Child Left Behind, which is designed to designate as many public schools as possible as inadequate, combined with the recurring push for school vouchers.
Conservatives often argue against their tax dollars being used to pay for the health care or other sustenance of their fellow Americans who are less privileged than they are, while ignoring the fact that those same tax dollars are being used to fund the health and educational needs of citizens of a foreign country, when they are not being used to drop bombs and incendiaries on those same civilians. Yet these same conservatives are silent when I object to my tax dollars being used to instill their children with distorted, revisionist history.
In the Commonwealth of Virginia, homeschooling laws contain the following religious exemption:
The statute, 22.1-254 (B)(1) reads:
A school board shall excuse from attendance at school: any pupil who, together with his parents, by reason of bona fide religious training or belief is conscientiously opposed to attendance at school. For purposes of this subdivision, "bona fide religious training or belief" does not include essentially political, sociological or philosophical views or a merely personal moral code.
On July 1, 2006, statute was modified to lessen the educational qualifications of homeschooling parents from a bachelor's degree to a high school diploma, and, apparently from my reading of the statute as modified, removes the standard of testing from the control of local Boards of Education and places it under the rubric of NCLB:
C. The parent who elects to provide home instruction shall provide the division superintendent by August 1 following the school year in which the child has received home instruction with either (i) evidence that the child has attained a composite score in or above the fourth stanine ona battery of achievement tests which have been approved by the Board of Education for use in the public schoolsany nationally normed standardized achievement test or (ii) an evaluation or assessment which, in the judgment of the division superintendent,indicatesdetermines to indicate that the child is achieving an adequate level of educational growth and progress.
Kantrowitz et al tell us that parents remove their children from public schools for safety, academic, and personal reasons (as cited in Lubienski, 2000, Home and public.) Unfortunately the negative effects home schooling has on the students, public schools, and the community void their reasons. According to Lubienski, ??the idea of democracy becomes hollow and collapses if individuals define democracy only in terms of their individual rights but neglect the public good?? (2000, maintaining education.) And home schooling does just that. Therefore, home schooling does more damage than it does good, and should not be allowed to be a continued practice.
I find myself in agreement with Floro's conclusions.
However, I fear it will continue to exist, as long as the Christian Right continues its efforts to subvert American democracy, aided by activist judges, religionist legislators, and irresponsible, misguided parents.