quick perspective: Some groups on the Christian right, such as The National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools, want to "reform" public education by bringing the Bible "back" in schools. Other Christian right forces want to simply destroy public education altogether... Amway fortune heir Dick DeVos has been a leader in the war against public education. Notably, too, DeVos' brother in law Erik Prince is another pioneer of bold privatization efforts : Prince is the founder of Blackwater USA, perhaps the most powerful private army in the world and the subject of a new book by Jeremy Scahill. For an overview of the Christian Right's war on public education, see: DeVos Wages War On Public Education, But Meet His Brother In Law...

Meanwhile, here's Chuck himself: Is the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools "furtive" as my title suggested ? You might not think so if you go to the NCBCPS website, where giant animated words float in and proclaim, to a triumphant blaring of horns,  "IT'S COMING BACK". Below that supersized proclamation is the claim "Our Bible Curriculum Has Been Voted Into 382 schools districts, to date, in 37 states." But, the NCBCPS won't divulge the names of those school districts, not will the organization provide a copy of their current curriculum to journalists or other interested parties.  

Evidence suggests that the NCBCPS has insinuated a politicized course curriculum featuring fraudulent history to American public schools from Texas to New Jersey. According to the NCBCPS website "The program is concerned with education rather than indoctrination of students." but analysis of the organization's curriculum suggests otherwise. The NCBCPS Bible course curriculum is a heavily guarded secret but appears to push Christian historical revisionist lies. The Texas Freedom Network (TFN) has been at the forefront of exposing the Christian sectarian bias of the controversial curriculum and, as Southern Methodist University Professor Mark Chancey, who managed to obtain a copy, wrote in a TFN special report, "[ It ] reflects a political agenda... it seems to Christianize America and Americanize the Bible.". The curriculum Chancey writes, recommends Wallbuilders, "an organization devoted to the opposition of church-state separation" and a Wallbuilders video that "argues that the Founding Fathers never intended for church and state to be separated and that America has descended into social chaos since devotional Bible reading and prayer were removed from public schools." That allegation of "social chaos" is not well supported by facts : American national rates of murder, violent crime, teen pregnancy, and divorce have dropped dramatically since the early 1990's

Over the past two decades the creation of revisionist historical works claiming America's founders intended the US as a "Christian Nation" has turned into a booming cottage industry. Meanwhile, esteemed and tenured American historians at the nation's finest Universities have almost completely neglected to address the spread of a fabricated, mythologized Christian right historical narrative on America's alleged origins. That's a shame, because over the past several years a well funded, politically connected, organized effort  has succeeded at inserting its course curriculum featuring that fake history into possibly hundreds of American public schools from Texas to New Jersey.

Should courses on the Bible be taught in public schools ? Yes, some would say, because Christianity and the West, America included, are intertwined and even inseparable. Without Biblical literacy, goes the argument, understanding of Western civilization, and America's cultural and historical roots, is impossible. The centrality of Christianity as a driving force in American history can hardly be disputed, but there's another story to be told because America was founded as a secular, not a Christian, nation. Secular government was a radical, uniquely American innovation that some believe enabled the United States to prosper free from the sort of gruesome internecine religious warfare, in which some combatants literally "pulled guts out for God", that wracked post-Reformation Europe.

But within the American Christian right movement, it is taken as received truth that America was founded as a Christian nation and that the Bible, taught in public school, has served as the foundation of national morality without which America as a nation would surely collapse in a paroxysm of depraved, brutal anarchy.

Liars For Jesus author Chris Rodda is one of the very few who confront Christian historical revisionism head on. Rodda has spent years combing through original archival documents, some never before cited by historians, in researching her book and has been building, as a public Internet resource, an electronic archive of documents she cites in her painstaking debunking of the widespread "Christian nation" myth. Along with other such as James Veverka, another Christian historical revisionism debunker, Chris Rodda is part of a select cadre of fiercely committed but largely unpaid scholars who are picking up the slack left by years of shameful neglect on the part of America's provisioned, institutional historians who have failed to confront, and in some cases even enabled, the rise of a parallel, fraudulent take on US history and America's origins that is widely believed now by, probably, tens of millions of Americans.  

See Chris Rodda's three part series:

Barton Revises History to Promote the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/3/24/12519/6564/More Historical Revisionism from the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools - 3/18/ 2007

Historical Revisionism from the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools - 3/10/2007

A Mini Review Of Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History

Would self professed spokespersons, in the name of Christianity and whose words are routinely broadcast to millions around the United States and the globe, attend public events in honor of, and present awards to, politicians who have derived financial profit from a regime of forced abortion and sexual slavery ? Well, yes. Might the leader of a major world religion have conspired to cover up the sexual molestation of thousands of children ? The answer, again, is yes.

So, it is no great stretch to suppose that Christian historical revisionists might - in the words of author Chris Rodda - "Lie For Jesus" and, in her new book "Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History" (the first of two in the series) Rodda undertakes what an entire generation of professional historians, ensonsced and tenured in America's finest universities, has largely failed to do : acknowledge, confront, and refute the emergent school of Christian historical revisionism that amounts to the construction of an entire fictitious parallel history of the United States - with numerous interwoven and self-referential accounts claiming that the intention of the founders of the United States was to create an expressly Christian nation. One might suppose such a enterprise to have sprung from pages by Jorge Louis Borges or Philip K. Dick, but it is quite real and deadly, for that mythology has become firmly lodged in the minds of millions of Americans and so propells the political advance of Christian nationalism.

there's more

Digg
del.icio.us
Newsvine
Reddit
stumbleupon
Facebook