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Some textbooks still parrot Donald Trump's skewed version of U.S. history
Some textbooks still parrot Donald Trump’s skewed version of U.S. historyWashington Post, by Amy Fallas, 9/24/2020
President Trump has vociferously objected to historical projects that are in any way critical of the United States or that seek to spread new scholarship that challenges past hagiography to broader audiences. Last week, he even held a conference on U.S. history assailing “decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools” and intending to launch a commission to promote “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.”
While Trump’s rhetoric on U.S. history is often impenetrable to his critics, the appeal to his base may be its familiarity to Americans who were educated either at home or in evangelical Christian schools where his myopic, racist and fundamentalist nationalist view of U.S. history is part of the standard curriculum. He parrots a vision of the past that was once mainstream but more recently has been found mainly in textbooks marketed to home-schoolers and Christian schools. The history of their development reveals how such messages, once considered unobjectionable, have more recently become associated with this particular market, helping explain today’s political chasm in the U.S.
In 1954, Southern Baptists Arlin and Rebekah Horton founded a small Christian school in Pensacola, Fla., that would become the hub for one the most popular suppliers of K-12 curriculum in Christian education.
The couple had met at Bob Jones University (BJU), an institution founded in 1927 by evangelist Bob Jones Sr. as a haven for fundamentalist Christian students in the aftermath of the sensational Scopes Trial over teaching evolution in schools in Tennessee. The founding of BJU was part of a growing schism among American Protestants over the authority of the Bible, interpretation of history and the relationship between scientific and theological knowledge. Known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, this intellectual, cultural and religious divide motivated conservative evangelicals to establish institutions like BJU to offer alternatives to both public schools and liberal Protestant education, which they viewed as increasingly worldly and godless.
While Trump’s rhetoric on U.S. history is often impenetrable to his critics, the appeal to his base may be its familiarity to Americans who were educated either at home or in evangelical Christian schools where his myopic, racist and fundamentalist nationalist view of U.S. history is part of the standard curriculum. He parrots a vision of the past that was once mainstream but more recently has been found mainly in textbooks marketed to home-schoolers and Christian schools. The history of their development reveals how such messages, once considered unobjectionable, have more recently become associated with this particular market, helping explain today’s political chasm in the U.S.
In 1954, Southern Baptists Arlin and Rebekah Horton founded a small Christian school in Pensacola, Fla., that would become the hub for one the most popular suppliers of K-12 curriculum in Christian education.
The couple had met at Bob Jones University (BJU), an institution founded in 1927 by evangelist Bob Jones Sr. as a haven for fundamentalist Christian students in the aftermath of the sensational Scopes Trial over teaching evolution in schools in Tennessee. The founding of BJU was part of a growing schism among American Protestants over the authority of the Bible, interpretation of history and the relationship between scientific and theological knowledge. Known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, this intellectual, cultural and religious divide motivated conservative evangelicals to establish institutions like BJU to offer alternatives to both public schools and liberal Protestant education, which they viewed as increasingly worldly and godless.
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