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The Texas State Board of Education is revising the state’s social studies curriculum and, with the help of a panel of six reviewers, weighing the role of religion in the country’s historical narrative.
"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," said Rev. Peter Marshall, Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.
You would think that a nominal background in academics and the appearance of objectivity would be useful when reviewing a state’s K-12 curriculum. You would be mistaken.
According to Stephanie Simon of the Wall Street Journal, “The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America's Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God's judgments on the nation's sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.”
In his own way, Marshall speaks a truth known to generations of textbook authors: those who control the writing of history control the past (a refinement of the “history is written by the winners” argument, and, more cynically, Napoleon’s “History is a lie agreed upon.”). It is echoed on the WallBuilders website: “we believe that as citizens learn the truth about our nation's past, they will be better equipped to help frame its future and to help shape the policies under which they will live…This is accomplished in part by providing direct assistance to our elected and appointed officials. This assistance takes several forms, including consulting with both legislators and judges, at their request, on legal and historical issues, testifying in state and federal hearings, providing research services, identifying and supporting sound legislation, and providing historical perspectives to current problems.”
Barton’s record as autodidact is troubling—by turns uninformed and deliberately misleading (see first link). Especially disturbing, to me, is the frequent use of the diminutive “revisionist historian” on the WallBuilders site.
As someone trained in historical research, I’ve always quarreled with the term “revisionist historian.” All of history is a revision: new primary source materials turn-up every day, often illuminating previously misunderstood periods; fresh interpretations are offered, and a general consensus is reached. Part of this push-pull may be cultural: the way secularists and the religious understand academic truths. Focus on the expository, as Richard Hofstadter once stated, is what separates scientific truth from religious truth: scientific truth is provisional—theories gain credence only through experimentation, and refinement is constant. Religious truth is made known through revelation—it is manifest in scripture, and unchanging. To call modern historical schools of thought “cults” or “religions” is antithetical—it’s simply not the way most historians go about their work.
Textbook tribalism is certainly nothing new—it’s not confined to the Texas State Board of Education or the work of certain Christian nationalists.Liberal/progressive assaults have generally focused on gender/ethnic identity politics, enlarging the role of marginal players to that of standard bearers (the National History Standards controversy of the mid-1990’s comes to mind—the rehabilitation of Ebenezer MacIntosh and “discovery” of Mercy Otis Warren are both interesting journeys)[see third link].
We all wish to spin our personal histories as part of the larger historical tapestry—everyone has their own story to tell. But it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish collaboration from subversion of the process. That doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.