What’s The Matter With The Texas Board of Education?

CORRECTION: This post incorrectly states that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Bill of Rights. That is incorrect. James Madison did. The editors regret this error.

For some reason education is on my mind a lot recently (as you can see here).  This time around I read an interesting The New York Times magazine article about the Texas Board of Education, which is increasingly dominated by conservative elements pushing for a specifically Christian agenda in Texas public education.  It’s a long article, but well worth reading.  Here’s the gist of what’s going on:

“Since the election of two Christian conservatives in 2006, there are now seven on the Texas state board who are quite open about the fact that they vote in concert to advance a Christian agenda…[I]t isn’t merely the case that their Christian orientation shapes their opinions on gay marriage, abortion and government spending. More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders.”

Now I’m not out to level a critique of conservatism, Christianity, or anything like that, but there is any number of things seriously wrong with this process.  What these board members are pushing for is essentially an ideological re-writing of history.  The article mentions several of the most important problems here: the intended separation between church and state (a view expressed by Jefferson, a strong proponent of the Bill of Rights and friend of its author, James Madison) is ignored; the Declaration of Independence is treated as legally equal to the Constitution (it takes a lot of legal contortionism to argue that); many of the founding fathers are wrongly inferred to have been strongly Christian and strongly desirous of a Christian direction for the US government.  This is all not to mention that “a dentist and an insurance salesman,” among other under-qualified individuals, are rewriting Texas educational policy on science and history. But probably the most significant problem with this phenomenon is highlighted by this passage:

“Merely weaving important religious trends and events into the narrative of American history is not what the Christian bloc on the Texas board has pushed for in revising its guidelines. Many of the points that have been incorporated into the guidelines or that have been advanced by board members and their expert advisers slant toward portraying America as having a divinely preordained mission.”

Whatever you may think of the belief that America has a divine mission, it is not a historical claim.  History is not teleological; it is a human science that seeks to account for the events of the past by reference to influential individuals, powerful social forces, and the like.  To bring religious purpose into the discussion is to stop playing by the rules of history.  That’s really the most dangerous thing about the agenda of the Texas Board of Education: it threatens the very integrity of history and other academic pursuits.

–Aaron Bekemeyer