Peter Greene writes here about the demand by Christian nationalists to rewrite history to their satisfaction. Whatever promotes the religion of their choice is good, whatever contradicts it must be left out. They want fairy-tale history.

Greene writes:

Recently Oklahoma’s education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters went on another tear, this time warning textbook publishers that they’d better not try to sell any wokified textbooks in Oklahoma.

“If you can’t teach math without talking about transgenderism, go to California, go to New York,” he told Fox News Digital. He even sent out a letter, just so they’d know. “Listen, we will be checking for these things now. Do not give us textbooks that have critical race theory in them.”

Walters said lots of things. Maybe he’s auditioning for a media spot. Maybe he wants to be governor. Maybe he’s just a tool. But he says all sorts of things like “In Oklahoma, our kids are going to know the basics. We want them to master it. We want them to do exceptionally well academically. We’re not here for any kind of Joe Biden’s socialist Marxist training ground.”

But somewhere in this conversation, Walters lays out a succinct summary of our nation’s history as he believes it should be taught.

“So as you go through, you talk about the times that America has led the free world, that we have continued to be that light. We’ve done more for individual liberty than any other country in the history of the world. And those belief systems that were there in place, it allowed us to do it. You’ve got to talk about our Judeo-Christian values. The founders were very clear that that was a crucial part of our success. Then you go through and you evaluate. Are these times we lived up to our core principles? You’ve got to be honest with kids about our history. So you talk about all of it, but you evaluate it through the prism of our founding principles. Is this a time we lived up to those principles?”

Most of the elements of the christianist nationalist version of US history are here. American exceptionalism– the light that led the free world, the very most ever done for individual liberty. A nation founded on Judeo-Christian values.

With that as a foundation, it’s safe to note some of the lapses, all of which are framed as an aberration, a lapse from our foundation and certainly not part of it (take that, you 1619 project-reading CRTers). In the CN view, every good thing that ever happened is because of our God-aligned nature, and every bad thing is in spite of it, quite possibly because Wrong People were allowed to get their hands on some power.

There are plenty of implications for this view of history. One of the biggest is that these folks simply don’t believe in democracy, because democracy allows too many of the Wrong People to get their hands on power. As Katherine Stewart puts it in her must-read The Power Worshippers—

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

Or, as she quotes Gary North, a radical free-market libertarian christianist who developed the Ron Paul Curriculum,

Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then we will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

The idea of individualism is also important in the CN view of US history. There’s no systemic anything–just the work of either good or bad, Right or Wrong individuals. And if everything is about the individual, then your problems are strictly your problems; your failures are all on you, not on society or community (the village has no responsibility to raise your child). That emphasis on the individual runs all through the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, both original flavor andthe Jordan Adams stealth version.

The rejection of systemic views of society and history matters. It goes along with the view that we pretty much fixed racism in the 1960s (even we got a little too socialist in the process). From which we can conclude that all attempts to talk racism now are just attempts to grab power with made-up grievances.

To take another angle– the underlying idea of the Classical Education that is so popular with the CN crowd is that there is One Objective Truth. Back in classical times, great thinkers understood this Truth, but the 20th century brought a bunch of relativistic thought and the evil notion that there are different, subjective truths. But our Founding Fathers knew the Truth and encoded it into the Constitution and our founding principles, and as long as we are led by people who follow that Truth, which is somehow both a Christian Truth and an American Truth, we are okay. People who don’t follow that Truth are a threat to the integrity and fiber of our country; consequently, they have to be stopped.

People who claim that history is complicated, that our founders were complicated, that humans are complicated–those people are just trying to confuse the issue, to draw others away from understanding The Truth.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Let me add that I don’t want to go back to 1776. The guys who wrote the founding documents were brilliant, but not on subjects like slavery and women’s rights.