The Righteous Right
Americans are well aware that Christian evangelicals are an important and loyal Republican voting bloc. They may well be less aware of one way this coalescence of interests has been forged through religious schools and the textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials. The three most important curricula for the Christian schools, published in the 1970s by Abeka Books, Bob Jones University, and Accelerated Christian Education use their history textbooks to assert that Republican positions are Christian and explicitly endorsed by God.
In treating the world since 1980, the curricula produced for Christian schools revisit the development of the Christian right and advance ideas the Republican Party has used since the 1960s to attach evangelicals to their cause. In treating topics certainly within the memory of teachers and parents of students, these curricula take positions now part of the “Christian agenda.” Their economic arguments resonate in the views of contemporary political right. As the market is “free,” these curricula do not recognize that economic policies favor some at the expense of others, increasingly corporations over citizens and investors over wage earners. The political right generally fails to acknowledge the massive redirection of tax revenue from public interest to corporate welfare or from the economic powerhouses of the Northeast and California to the purportedly, self-reliant South and West. The thorough-going connection these textbooks draw between any policy intended to advance the public good and inevitable economic, social, and moral decline makes clear why the Christian right anathematizes the former.
These curricula consistently inform students that contemporary Republican economic policies, whenever they have been enacted, invariably led to prosperity. It seems unlikely that the failures of capitalism evident in the Great Recession of 2008 will elicit any reappraisal of the connections between capitalism and virtue. In fact, the Abeka textbook treats the recession as the result of personal failures. People bought “homes they could not afford” and “banks were forced to foreclose,” but government policies, like the Stimulus Bill of 2009, “meant that economic recovery was slow and many Americans were left unemployed and receiving government assistance.”[i]
Limited government, these textbooks consistently argue, is God’s intention for human beings. Since the 1980s, that opinion has been mobilized to undermine government and shred the social safety net. Reagan wins praise for strong government, essentially in the interest of completely undermining government itself. Republican administrations crippled the federal government. These histories endorse such efforts. For them, government programs are socialist and thus evil and unchristian. Reliance on any form of government aid is a clear sign of sin, inevitably leading to personal and social immorality and economic collapse.
Once government is denounced as antithetical to Christian capitalism, Christians cannot easily see any benefit they receive from government programs they have so condemned as un-Christian and un-American.
So profound is this aversion to government that the ways US citizens, including members of the Christian and political right, depend on it can never be recognized. Only the military is defensible. The other services only a central government can provide from disaster relief, to roads, bridges, monetary policy, diplomacy, etc. go unrecognized. Once government is denounced as antithetical to Christian capitalism, Christians cannot easily see any benefit they receive from government programs they have so condemned as un-Christian and un-American.[ii] This cognitive dissonance contextualizes some peculiarities of contemporary political discourse: Tea Party members crying “hands off my Medicare” or farmers’ failing to acknowledge farm subsidies as government support, for example. No student educated with these curricula would likely imagine a government program could be legitimate or beneficial.
As the United States is the key to extending Christianity throughout the world, these educational materials narrow their focus to the US and to their political causes and goals: the perspective of the American Christian right essentially defines their understanding of the post-1980 world. They essentially issue the rest of world an American scorecard. With the US the only remaining superpower at that time, this focus might seem reasonable, but reducing US foreign policy to a religious crusade impedes a more nuanced understanding of it and the political interests of other parts of the world. Because the Christian right and these curricula present post-9/11 wars in the Middle East as a contest between good and evil, they fail to recognize that resistance to the West is often driven by Islamic fundamentalist opposition to secularization and the decline of religion — both seen as the result of western involvement in their affairs. Ironically, Islamic fundamentalists urge greater influence for religion over government and culture — just what some on the religious right promote for America.
These textbooks deem other nations as good when they accepted US interventions in their affairs or misguided or even evil when they did not. Students educated with them will understand precious little about the interests, concerns, or motivations of citizens of other countries. Foreign countries are mere game pieces in an American quest to spread Christianity and capitalism.
Standard histories offer a more balanced view of both US foreign and domestic policy. They assess Democratic and Republican administrations more even-handedly. They do not present Republicans as strong, competent, and committed to Christian causes and critique all Democrats as irresponsible and weak at best and as ungodly at worst. They are not completely uncritical of American foreign policy, acknowledging that some policies were controversial and provoked opposition at home and abroad. They do not assess other parts of the world in such starkly ideological terms where US actions are to be emulated and set the standards for other countries. Nor do they look with either delight or foreboding to the coming apocalypse.
These curricula give students a partisan and polemical history of domestic politics and deprive them of a nuanced understanding of American actions in the world.
What implications does this severely narrowed perspective have beyond its limitations as a history of the world since 1980? These curricula give students a partisan and polemical history of domestic politics and deprive them of a nuanced understanding of American actions in the world. They give students a position from which to judge — a judgment based on Divine favor for American Christians, an unquestioned assumption to the point of arrogant superiority. They define US interventions in the affairs of other countries as commendable and as a biblically sanctioned mission to spread Christianity.
The alliance of the Christian right and the Republican Party has become an article of evangelical faith in ways these curricula thoroughly document. Their history makes our partisan divide more comprehensible. The unquestioned virtue of American politics allows foreign policy decisions to go largely unexamined by the public. Even our military interventions or wars rarely produce intense public scrutiny: early opposition disappears only to occasionally reemerge briefly during election cycles. The historical narrative of these textbooks, despite the interest of evangelicals in proselytizing across the globe, isolates the United States, walling it off from problems we will face as the twenty-first century unfolds that will require both knowledge of the rest of the world and its history and an ability to work globally to solve them.
[i] Abeka+, 421.
[ii] Eduardo Porter, “Where Government is a Dirty Word, but Its Checks Pay the Bills,” New York Times, December 21, 2018.
Kathleen Wellman is Dedman Family Distinguished Professor of History and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor at Southern Methodist University. She is the author of Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters published by Oxford University Press.
