Kathleen Wellman is to be commended for attempting to bring to wider awareness the extensively used history curricula produced by the leading US Christian Right textbook publishers Abeka Books, Accelerated Christian Education and Bob Jones University. Since the 1970s, these texts have been used by millions in private Christian schools and in home-schooling, and through the Christian Right's takeovers of school boards their core message has been incorporated into public education standards in much of the United States. As Wellman points out, given the increasing scarcity of post-secondary history courses at US colleges, millions of Americans now get their historical facts from these textbooks alone. Moreover, their narration of US and world history has saturated conservative media and many a Republican politician's public discussion. Given all this, the content of such Christian curricula certainly merits a book-length examination such as is here attempted.
The end result of this particular attempt, however, is not a little disappointing. Some allowances should surely be made for the author not being an expert on the US Christian Right but rather on early modern French history (especially of the history of science), although such a background might conceivably also open up fruitful new perspectives and lines of inquiry. But not here. This book does not offer an impassioned objective examination of the subject matter at hand but instead devolves into yet another, utterly predictable artefact of the culture wars. It constitutes but one long diatribe against the Christian Right, past and present. Wellman claims not to be biased against religious or other conservatives (and ascribes such a lack of bias to all other historians too, while citing studies showing the opposite), yet it seems that there is not a single thing that anyone on the Christian Right has ever said, written or done that does not merit strident criticism in this book.
Wellman does not actually find many demonstrable factual errors in the textbooks under review, but instead keeps assailing them for not mentioning what they should mention, for their misplaced emphases and lack of balance, for their illegimate biblicist starting points and ‘extreme religious ideas’ (p. 43), for being ‘retrograde’ (p. 53), and for assorted other ‘flagrant’ and ‘deliberate distortions’ (pp. 2, 4). Throughout, these curricula are juxtaposed with a notably nebulous ‘historical consensus’ (pp. 4, 207, 298) to be found in ‘the standard narratives’ (pp. 28, 298). These narratives are rarely named or cited. Surprisingly, at the same time Wellman also maintains that professional ‘historians make claims to neither single truth or objectivity’ (p. 54).
Wellman does show that the textbooks follow a providentialist and teleological approach rooted in the Christian understanding of God's activity in human history. The secular professional historian objects. Next these textbooks are criticised for not celebrating the genius of classical Greek and Roman civilisation, for not appreciating the Enlightenment and for misrepresenting the agency of people of faith in the scientific revolution. This is all unacceptable. Wellman then finds it appalling that the textbooks do not approve of Islam or other non-Christian religions, and even more appalling is their contention that British colonialism included a civilising and Christianising dimension. The ‘Christian nation’ thesis about the origins of the United States comes in for predictably strident criticism. None of these textbooks emphasise the evils of slavery and racial segregation sufficiently for Wellman's taste, yet they appreciate free market capitalism too much. All in all, the textbooks recount a ‘fairy tale rather than a history’ (p. 157).
In describing the tenets, history and purposes of the Christian Right, Wellman relies on some academic scholarly productions, but just as often the reference is to purely polemical screeds with little or no value. The result is a rather banal caricature of a fringe movement that is profoundly racist, anti-Catholic and anti-LGBTQ, anti-science and anti-pluralist, more wedded to capitalism than to the New Testament, against all purposive social reform and popular challenges to the divinely instituted state (yet fundamentally ‘antigovernment’ at the same time, p. 41), and forever seeking some form of a theocracy. All of this can supposedly be read from the textbooks under review – if not from their actual wording then at least from between the lines.
Characterisations of key individuals and theologies are often slanted or even factually incorrect – as with Francis Schaeffer being called a ‘postmillennialist’ (p. 39), Carl McIntire only a ‘radio host’ (p. 347), Bob Jones Sr a ‘Baptist’ (p. 24) and Whittaker Chambers simply ‘the reactionary’ (p. 250). Presuppositionalist apologetics are dismissed as ‘illogic’ (p. 39) and the textbooks’ praise of the Revd Ian Paisley as ‘frankly astounding’ (p. 263). Yet to describe Salvador Allende as a repressive ‘Marxist dictator’, as the textbooks also do, is apparently a ‘most striking misrepresentation’ (p. 265). Capitalism, Wellman insists, has had a ‘positive connotation’ only after Milton Friedman managed to lure people away from recognising that the word actually means ‘the exploitation of the workers’ (p. 317).
This type of fare continues for over 300 pages. The findings are repeated at the end of each of the sixteen chapters and in the conclusion. They keep the author in a perpetual state of astonishment, agitation and anxiety over conservative Christian educators actually basing their teaching on the Bible literally understood, over Christian publishers actually publishing Christian materials, and over democratically-elected decision-makers in a Christian-majority country actually accepting such teachings and materials into their school textbooks.
Others might regard all this as self-evident, but to Wellman this is ‘historical miseducation’ (p. 303) that seeks to ‘make Americans compliant and passive, living under a capitalistic Christian government legitimated by biblical law’ (p. 305). This threat to ‘pluralistic democracy’ (p. 15) requires that all conservative Christian perspectives ‘should be ruled out of education paid for with public monies’ (p. 302), including in voucher-funded private schools. Herewith are exposed the real purposes of this book, about which Wellman is quite open throughout. This book is written not so much to add to knowledge about the Christian Right as to inspire resistance to it.
