Texas Textbook Shootout

There is a Texas textbook shootout!  The Lone Star State is one of the top textbook buyers and it influences sales worldwide.   Barry Lynn, a church-state separation advocate said:  “Of the biggest, most important fronts now are curriculum battles in Texas and indeed around the country because the next generation of young people need to understand good science, good history, and comprehensive sex education”.  But what is good science, good history, and comprehensive sex education?

Shannon Bream of FOX News wrote: “A major battle brewing in Texas could have a nationwide impact on what kids learn in school.  It’s all over the material in textbooks.”  Should “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority or the National Rifle Association” be included?  The Texas Board has already had showdowns over whether to mention Christmas, the Liberty Bell and Neil Armstrong reading the Bible on the moon.

In respect to American history the big question revolves around whether our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.  These principles once were very much accepted until various more liberal groups latched on to the “separation of church and state” issue and have increasingly attacked this heritage by it.  The separation of the two is not mentioned in the Constitution and originally meant no national church.

Dr. Don McLeroy and other majority conservatives that make up the Texas textbook board have made it clear that they want to affirm what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents. One member of the board said, “To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids.” Jay Sekulow from the American Center for Law and Justice said, “Our founders acknowledge the reliance upon divine providence, that we’re endowed by our Creator with these inalienable rights.” He felt that to overlook this, to “expunge any reference to America’s religious heritage” is not good history.

In respect to comprehensive sex education, the facts can be taught, but to affirm homosexuality as many curriculums do, while failing to address many of the negative factors—suicide rates, AIDS, the molesting of children, etc. is not good; nor to affirm heterosexual promiscuity with all its dangers—psychological, medical, and social.  So what makes comprehensive?  In being comprehensive, the Christian teachings as well as those of most major religions provide positive directions regarding sex.  Why ignore these insights?

When I taught science in the public schools thirty years ago I taught the theories of Darwinian evolution, re-creationism, creationism, and what I called evolutionary creationism, and let the students believe what they wished.  This was before intelligent design. Teachers had more freedom then. Science classes in public schools should not be an area to attack faith in God, nor to indoctrinate religious beliefs.  Private or church schools, however, should be allowed to teach what they see as the truth without interference from the state!

John Hedley Brooke, an expert on Darwin, wrote about Darwin in The International Society for Religion and Science that:  “Two presuppositions characterize much of his thinking on questions of science and religion. One was that it would be sacrilegious to suggest that the deity was incapable of achieving its creative purposes through natural causes. The other, associated with Darwin’s agnosticism, was an attitude of tolerance to those whose intimate beliefs he did not share. In so far as he had a creed at the end of his life, it was that each man should hope and believe what he can.” Why do many followers of Darwin wish to indoctrinate their position and forbid tolerance toward others?

Brooke also wrote:  “There were features of an emerging scientific naturalism that did contribute to new forms of skepticism on religious matters, and Darwin’s writings reveal them. The main reasons for his rejection of Christianity, however, lay elsewhere. While his science did play a role in disposing him against an intervening deity, the loss of his earlier Christian beliefs (as his study for the Episcopal ministry) more had to do with issues common to all humanity than with conclusions entailed by his theory of natural selection. The claim that it was his renunciation of Christianity that made his science possible suffers the inconvenience that his theory began taking shape in 1837 and 1838 before he abandoned belief in divine providence.”

Darwin moved from Christian orthodoxy in his Cambridge years to a non-biblical deism at the time the Origin of the Species to a more thoroughly agnostic position in later life.  He had trouble reconciling “determinism and freewill,” according to Brooke. Darwin confided to the Harvard botanist Asa Gray in a letter of May 1860:  “I had no intention to write atheistically….I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become.”  What is good science?  Maybe studying John Calvin’s work about predestination and free will might have helped.

The Texas textbook battle rages between two cultural viewpoints on the fifteen-member State Board of Education.  Gilbert T. Sewall, Director of the American Textbook Council, lamented, “I think there’s no doubt that identity politics have contributed to the decline of textbook quality over the last 20 years….Groups from nutritionists to gender activists have demanded their way into textbooks.” And then he said, “The most visible groups are the Christian right that wants to use American history textbooks to recapture the soul of the nation.”  Halt — Let me ask, did not Sewall declare, “…use American history textbooks to RECAPTURE the soul of the nation?”  Is this a Freudian slip, for how do you RECAPTURE something that did not exist?  Don’t we need to RECAPTURE the soul of our nation in the textbook shootout?

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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, Box 751, Lavonia, Georgia 30553, 706-356-4173, joerenfro@windstream.net