by Mark Bauerlein, First Things
It is a historical fact that Christianity played a central role in the colonization of the New World and the formation of the United States (the missions of California, religious freedom sought by the Puritans, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan, the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements, the poems of Whitman and stories of Hawthorne, and so forth). A well-known study from 1984 reviewed more than nine hundred public political writings published between 1760 and 1805 in order to determine what sources most influenced the discourse of the day. The Bible was the clear winner—with Deuteronomy being the most-cited book—easily beating whole groups of thinkers in the survey (Enlightenment, Whig, Classical). The author of the study was careful to note “the prominence of biblical sources for American political thought, since it was highly influential in our political tradition, and is not always given the attention it deserves.”
Any basic course in American civics and history, then, should give Christianity its essential place. Yet in the Advanced Placement (AP) course in U.S. government and politics, that isn’t the case. The two-hundred-page course guide that lays out skills and content doesn’t mention Christianity or the Bible—not once, even though it professes to cover “the intellectual traditions that animated our founding.” Religion appears in discussions of the First Amendment, but those references treat religion both generically and ahistorically. Nothing specifically Christian or biblical comes up.
The AP U.S. history course is no better. The home page for the course features a chronological layout of topics that include events, themes, and conditions such as the Articles of Confederation, the rise of industrial capitalism, and “Youth culture of the 1960s.” There are fifty-three of those topics, in fact, and only one of them makes any explicit reference to religion: the Second Great Awakening. Reviewing that list, one would have no idea that, as Tocqueville put it, “America is still the place in the world where the Christian religion has most retained true power over souls,” or that the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements were deeply Christian endeavors.