Whose History?

The 19th-century English author Samuel Butler once said that people generally ‘are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted and at seeing it practiced’. The Texas state school board has proven him right.

That body voted to import its racist worldview into the history textbooks of millions of defenseless schoolchildren who now will read less dangerous boosting of the civil rights movement and more reminders that the Founding Fathers were Christians—even if they weren’t.

I wish someone would point out the opportunistic hypocrisy of these people in insisting that children be taught their silly ‘creationist’ bullshit in the spirit of ‘hearing all sides’ of an issue while immediately rushing to stamp out discussion of anything they don’t like as soon as they get a little power.

Among the many changes to be incorporated into Texas students’ views of American history is a mandate to essentially equate Abraham Lincoln and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, giving ‘equal time’ to both the preserver of the Union and the head of an armed movement of sedition against it.

Why stop there? writes Paul Thornton in the LA Times. We might as well put in some relevant quotes from the state of Texas’s declaration of secession itself, like the reference to ‘protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits, . . . which her people intended should exist in all future time’.

The Texans, preparing to join Jeff Davis in his war against northern race-mixers, went on to praise the ‘beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery’ and blast the ‘debasing doctrine of equality of all men. . . a doctrine at war with nature’.

[Right: one book probably not on the State of Texas reading list]

The Christian majority on the school board will be pleased to note how the secession statement also refers to the ‘plainest revelations of divine law’, specifically to buttress its positions on the slavery issue.

Butler was famously agnostic but more importantly thought that getting worked up over religion did no one any good. He would have found the Texas Christians annoyingly common—in the English sense—because they are so insufferably ill-informed. ‘I do not mind lying’, he said magnanimously, ‘but I hate inaccuracy’.

Butler probably would have applauded de Toqueville’s critique of American democracy after seeing this gaggle of elected dentists and housewives riding the headwinds of their church-based, Rove-inspired activism. He would take it as proof against excessive faith in the wisdom of common bipeds inflamed with the thought that their average ideas are in fact something special. ‘I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek’, Butler explained. ‘They do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted’.