How Christian were the Founding Fathers?

This article from The New York Times is a long but fascinating read regarding the battle over just what should be included in school curriculums, especially the history curriculum. It's the belief of Christian (mostly conservative) school board activists that the current curriculum is too liberal, and doesn't give enough voice to the religion of the founders, nor is it skeptical enough of the intent of the "separations" clause.

Here's a smidgen:

This is how history is made — or rather, how the hue and cry of the present and near past gets lodged into the long-term cultural memory or else is allowed to quietly fade into an inaudible whisper. Public education has always been a battleground between cultural forces; one reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money. The state’s $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country. Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State. California is the largest textbook market, but besides being bankrupt, it tends to be so specific about what kinds of information its students should learn that few other states follow its lead. Texas, on the other hand, was one of the first states to adopt statewide curriculum guidelines, back in 1998, and the guidelines it came up with (which are referred to as TEKS — pronounced “teaks” — for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) were clear, broad and inclusive enough that many other states used them as a model in devising their own. And while technology is changing things, textbooks — printed or online —are still the backbone of education.

The cultural roots of the Texas showdown may be said to date to the late 1980s, when, in the wake of his failed presidential effort, the Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition partly on the logic that conservative Christians should focus their energies at the grass-roots level. One strategy was to put candidates forward for state and local school-board elections — Robertson’s protégé, Ralph Reed, once said, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members than one president and no school-board members” — and Texas was a beachhead. 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. “They do vote as a bloc,” Pat Hardy, a board member who considers herself a conservative Republican but who stands apart from the Christian faction, told me. “They work consciously to pull one more vote in with them on an issue so they’ll have a majority.”

I'm all for democracy; I'm just a little tense where the determination of what is correct or factual is left up to a committee. It leaves open the potential for quite enthusiastic and well-intentioned people to do a massive disservice to the consumers of the results of that process--the developing minds of impressionable children.

Here's what I'm talking about:

McLeroy is a robust, cheerful and inexorable man, whose personality is perhaps typified by the framed letter T on the wall of his office, which he earned as a “yell leader” (Texas A&M nomenclature for cheerleader) in his undergraduate days in the late 1960s. “I consider myself a Christian fundamentalist,” he announced almost as soon as we sat down. He also identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago. He went on to explain how his Christian perspective both governs his work on the state board and guides him in the current effort to adjust American-history textbooks to highlight the role of Christianity. “Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,” he said. “But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. “There are two basic facts about man,” he said. “He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

There is so much wrong with this I don't know exactly where to start. It can probably be established that textbooks always have been vetted by school boards, and that Texas, which is pretty conservative, has always had a big influence on what textbooks are acceptable, which should take a big whack at the idea of textbooks having a liberal bias (except in the Colbertian sense of "facts having a well-known liberal bias"). Naturally, having just a fairly basic science education, myself, but having actually bothered to understand what I was learning, I just weep for our children that young-earth creationists are even allowed near the curriculum. "Young Earth" creationists are just wrong--they have no science to back them up. Any one who cites a Bronze Age book for support but rejects actual quantifiable and testable data, is not....qualified.....to discuss....the subject. End of argument. They are self-disqualifying. It's like saying, "I don't believe in spelling things so-called 'properly'. You all can guess wud eye mene. And grammar ain't even in my dickshunarry. Here's your English curriculum." Arggh!

As to the "two basic facts about man" they aren't basic, they aren't facts, and they are derived from a notable but not really necessarily historically accurate nor scientifically correct Bronze Age era collection of "just so" stories--to wit:

"Man is created in God's image"--or is God a product of man's imagination and we created him in our image--yowza, this is obviously debatable!

And-- "he is fallen." Long story short, we can easier demonstrate the descent of man through the fossil record and DNA, than his descent from God's good graces. But this conceit of the fallen nature of man is only sensible to the Abrahamic faiths--it is a "separation clause" issue--a religious "truth", not a fact, per se. And a case should probably show whether or not that "separation of church and state" is "real". Because we've been treating it as real in courts for a long time. Stare decisis, my man.

See, the point is whether our "kids is learning" as George W. Bush might have put it. Should they learn actual facts and critical thinking so that they can discern what is real from what is bogus in their lives? Or should they learn from an agenda that doesn't aim to stretch their little thinking apparati? I don't even have kids, but it concerns me that anyone's kids might be taught bullshit instead of learning about reality.