Why Johnny Doesn’t Know about Mennonites

A vital task of our public schools is to educate young people about their religious heritage.

The Founding Fathers dreamed of an America that would offer diverse ideas in a “marketplace” of free thought and free publication. Their concern for separation of church and state did not mean, contrary to some people’s notions, that general discussion of religion was to be excluded. But our high-school history textbooks rarely offer students opportunity to learn about the varied religious movements that have become a part of our heritage.

Confusion on this issue has been compounded by the failure of some educators to note just what the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. The Court has indeed disallowed any religious observance, including school prayers and activities involving proselytizing. But it has placed no constitutional limitation whatsoever on the right to teach the facts about religion. Nothing, for example, prevents English teachers from assigning and teaching religiously oriented texts that have become integral to our multi-ethnic heritage. Quite the contrary: Insofar as teaching about different faiths helps citizens live in an ethically and religiously plural democracy, public schools are required by various state constitutions to provide it. A sympathetic understanding of other faiths is plainly necessary to enable adults to promote equality and exercise sound political judgment.

Textbook “Devolution”

Against this backdrop, high-school and junior-high history textbooks in the United States (in contrast, perhaps, to many teachers) appear singularly inadequate in how they handle religion. They have “devolved” to this state in the last 50 years, during which time, ironically, anthropologists have made historians increasingly aware that religion is a central feature of primitive and modern cultures. Anthropology has pointed out ways religion shapes values, prescribes moral codes, and regulates norms of both public and private behavior, whether in politics, economics, or professional conduct, even in multi-ethnic societies such as Indonesia or Brazil. This has deepened American historians’ interest in the role of religion in American culture, affecting not only their specialized works but also the textbooks written for college undergraduates.

High-school history textbooks, however, simply do not give America’s young adults the information they need to understand the place of religion in American life. I have seen this firsthand as I have investigated the contents of 14 major textbooks recently in use, looking carefully at how they deal with religious forces in American history. In general, these books fall far below the standard of American collegiate scholarship in showing the place of religion in America’s development, and when they do mention religion, the picture is often incomplete or warped.

The texts I reviewed, for example, uniformly ignore the colonial and later history of the Pennsylvania Germans, especially the so-called peace sects of Mennonites, Amish, Brethren (popularly called German Baptists, or Dunkards), and Quakers.

They likewise omit, without exception, discussion of the well-known religious views of those Founding Fathers who were deists. Historians have long known that the beliefs of men such as Jefferson and Franklin rested on a rational rejection of the divinity of Jesus, but their ethical principles, emanating from the idea of a creating and beneficent deity, closely resembled those of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets. While they were devoted to the separation of church and state, deists thought government should encourage religion in a general way, and they advocated “civic virtue” as the basis of the republic. Textbooks ignore this.

With similar oversight, all but a very few of the books make no more than scant reference to the series of Protestant religious awakenings that occurred in the periods before and after the American Revolution. Or they ignore religious aspects of the large migration of Jews and Catholics from Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, although lengthy sections describe the immigrants’ social, economic, and political lives.

All the textbooks, by contrast, provide a sketch of the religion of the first settlers of New England, usually distinguishing properly the views of Pilgrims in the Plymouth colony from those of Puritans in Massachusetts Bay. But every treatment perpetuates the myth that the Puritans fled from persecution in England in search of religious freedom in the colonies. Those were not the aims of the settlers of Massachusetts, though they did motivate Roger Williams in Rhode Island and the Quakers and the German “peace people” in Pennsylvania. Instead, the New England Puritans were committed to a positive “errand into the wilderness” that would benefit all humankind.

And while nearly all the textbooks discuss the role of religion in precolonial American Indian cultures, and several give a brief picture of Roman Catholic missions in Hispanic California before the Gold Rush, they all omit the history of other Catholic and Protestant missions to the Native Americans. Nearly all of the authors spell out the story of white cruelty and oppression of Native Americans, which continues even to this day. But they make no reference to the long history of protest against this policy by Quaker, Methodist, and Roman Catholic missionaries to the Indians in the Mississippi Valley, the Great Northwest, or Alaska.

The few discussions of religion in the movements for social reform in the pre-Civil War period are generally so brief or distorted in these textbooks, compared with the host of analyses published by historians in the past half-century, as to provoke amazement. For example, the story of the movement for women’s rights, told in all of the texts, virtually denudes these pioneer female leaders of their religious commitments and motivations.

Catherine Beecher, her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, and notable black women—Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth—frequently appear without any reference to their well-known religious motivations. The Methodist women and religious leaders who are now at the center of feminist historiography do not appear in these textbooks at all. The authors sometimes describe even the early nineteenth-century temperance movement without reference to religion.

The situation is little different when it comes to the textbooks’ portrayal of antislavery efforts. Little is said about the part religious beliefs played in inspiring both black and white abolitionists. Rarely are the theological sources of their views even mentioned.

No Shabby Bill Of Goods

Unfortunately, the abolitionist movement was the last great issue on which any of these authors made more than passing mention of the role of religion in American life. They entirely omitted reference to the religious aspects of the common-school and public-school movements. The writers ignore the role of religion in the formation of new communities on successive frontiers and never refer to the religious roots of the idea of “manifest” destiny. The centrality of black religion in black culture after the Civil War is a closed book to that generation’s great-grandchildren. The role of immigrant religion in shaping the foreign policies of the American people seems equally unmentionable, though it often determines the headlines of today’s newspapers.

Likewise, Martin Luther King, Jr., only occasionally merits the remark that he was a minister. More typical are the accounts of how he learned nonviolence from Gandhi (not Jesus) and led a company of black radicals in opposing segregation. Those who listen to Billy Graham or know about former President Jimmy Carter also should be allowed what they can never find in these textbooks: a brief but analytical account of the place of evangelicals in modern American politics and culture.

These textbooks, then, represent unsatisfactory accounts of American history precisely because they neglect or omit well-known facts about religion’s role. None of the authors of these textbooks could hold the respect of his or her colleagues by conducting a college course exhibiting such neglect.

The educational results of depriving high-school students of such information are manifold, and in every case deplorable. I now understand why for years I have found college students initially reticent and confused in discussions of religious forces in American history. Hearing them described analytically for the first time, many students wonder if their professors are presenting them with a shabby and outdated bill of intellectual goods.

Such ignorance hinders students who want to develop the upright character that most of them are taught about in their homes and churches. Jewish, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, and liberal Quaker families instill the conviction in their youngsters that character stems from religious faith and commitment, just as certainly as do evangelicals. By ignoring and occasionally scorning many manifestations of traditional religion in American history, these textbooks leave students doubting the moral views of their parents. The result is to intensify the inclination of youngsters to throw off what they think are outdated restraints. It does little to encourage them to discipline their lives or dedicate them to the general welfare, and to reject the reigning moral (or immoral) philosophy that says the individual must live according to his or her own values.

The Founding Fathers believed what many state constitutions have also affirmed: that religion and the ethical convictions it inspires are good for the republic. We have no reason to believe any differently now.

Fortunately, the tide may be turning. There are signs of hope as religious scholars in several of our state universities are conducting summer seminars for high-school teachers, educating them in the content of the world’s great religions and making them aware of the broad degree of legal freedom they have to teach about religion. In addition, several states have completed new guidelines that allow textbook publishers to include more direct information about religion in their history texts. We can hope that in years to come these efforts will be clearly reflected in our schools and in the textbooks they use.

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