Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Over at Reddit, a parent shares a handout given to his daughter's high school history class that is basically a copy of one of those ridiculous emails circulated among wingnuts about America being a Christian nation. The class was apparently given an assignment of writing an essay around these "facts":
Is the United States a Christian Nation?On July 4,1776,55 men signed the declaration of Independence. Of the 55,52 were deeply committed Christians; the other three believed the Bible to be Divine Truth, they believed in the God of the Bible and His personal intervention for the sake of mankind.
Immediately after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, the Continental Congress approved the purchasing of 20,000 Bibles for the American citizenry.
Patrick Henry: It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often, that this great Nation was founded not by Religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
Modem historians claim Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian. He wrote these words inside the cover of his well-worn Bible: "I am a real Christian, a disciple of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the principles of Christianity."
President John Adams, on July 4,1821, said, The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected, in one indissoluble bound, the principle of civil government with the principles of Christianity."
In 1782, Congress voted this resolution: "The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in all schools."
Of the first 108 universities founded in America, 106 were Christian, including the very first university in the US -Harvard. In Harvard's handbook were these words: let every student be pressed to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and, therefore, to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments."
President Reagan said, "If we can get the federal government out of the classroom, maybe we'll get God back in."
The idea of separation of church and state does not exist in written form in our Constitution. What our founding fathers intended was this: there should be no national Church controlled by the government, such as exists in European countries.
Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration said, "Without the foundation of Christianity in a government or society, there can be no virtue, and without virtue, there is no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.
James Madison said, "Christianity is the basis and foundation of our government."
George Washington said, "National Morality cannot be obtained in the absence of Christian principles. The smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained."
In 1831, a visitor to the United States observed, "I looked for America's greatness; and I discovered the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been about 200 years. During those years, these civilizations went through the following sequence: "From bondage to Spiritual Faith; from Faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; and from dependence back into bondage."
Someone posted a link to something I wrote many years ago debunking a lot of these claims. Several of those quotes are outright fakes, others are highly inaccurate, and much of it is totally irrelevant. I certainly hope that the parent is going to go to the school administration and raise hell about a history teacher passing on fake history to students.
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Won't somebody think of the children?
Posted by: Herod the Freemason | September 8, 2010 9:49 AM
I hope there's a parent in that class who knows these "facts" are bunk, and has the willingness to take a stand. I'm fortunate in that a couple of our local principles know me by name, and my wife used to work for our district superintendent. If one of my daughters came home with an assignment like that I'd be their offices the next day with the correct facts, a copy of the Constitution, and a list of Supreme Court cases prohibiting religious indoctrination in the public schools.
Fortunately, despite this being a pretty conservative area, I've yet to hear of anything like that (including promotion of creationism) happening in our district. That's something to be grateful for.
Posted by: James Hanley | September 8, 2010 9:54 AM
I hope you'll be following this up. It should be interesting to see what the school administration does when confronted by such obviously religious tripe.
Posted by: Janice in Toronto | September 8, 2010 10:00 AM
II am glad my two kids are long out of school, if I ever saw crap like this there would be hell to pay.
Posted by: Ex Partiot | September 8, 2010 10:01 AM
Ugh... between this story and Dale McGowan's recent encounter with a creationist science teacher, I'm terrified to have kids.
Posted by: Heretic | September 8, 2010 10:02 AM
That teacher has no business ever teaching again* unless they shoulder the obligation of providing convincing evidence they've learned their lesson and have actually and totally reformed. I'm skeptical such reform is possible.
How do you reform a history teacher who would actually promote ahistorical claims in spite of having a formal education in teaching* and most likely history? The latter being irrelevant to my point since teaching as a profession should teach all teachers how to discern objective well-framed truth from propaganda and other falsehoods.
It's really irrelevant regarding the root cause* for this massive failure. Whether they're too stupid to not understand an email full of claims is not equivalent to a vetted educational text or that their fealty to Christianism motivates them to promote a false history in support of their cause; both still yields the same bad outcome. I'd argue both motivations argue they are in no way qualified to teach nor do they provide any confidence they're capable of reaching a necessary minimal standard of competence. Teaching kids is far too important a task to allow such behavior - let them find a niche in a career far less critical.
Hopefully this school has the moral courage to use this defect as a teaching opportunity to all the stakeholders in the school, including parents, by pervasively distributing information that clearly and:
1) thoroughly debunks these claims,
2) presents a more honest framing,
3) presents information on what history is and how it differs from propaganda along with,
4) how people become either susceptible to such or help promote it,
5) and the marginal harm to society, especially students, if such propaganda were allowed to flourish.
*I qualify my statements as being held provisionally given Ed didn't link to the story where I'm working solely with the contents of his blog post. Perhaps there are extenuating circumstances favoring more leniency on the teacher than I argue.
Posted by: Michael Heath | September 8, 2010 10:09 AM
WTF is that Reagan quote doing in there? They really worship him as a lesser god, don't they? "Reagan said it so it MUST be true!."
Posted by: Dugglebogey | September 8, 2010 10:15 AM
I don't know, I think it would be great for a history teacher to give this as an assignment to write an essay on it. And any student that didn't do fact checking would get an 'F' with a chance to rewrite the essay after they had done proper fact checking.
Posted by: NoOneOfConsequence | September 8, 2010 10:20 AM
The really sad thing is that this teacher, who probably studied history and.or historiography at a tertiary level probably thinks every bit of this is true.
Posted by: Ian Gould | September 8, 2010 10:29 AM
Sheesh, you don't need CSI Miami to find the truth on this one...
Posted by: William George | September 8, 2010 10:30 AM
Sorry, forgot the link. It's in there now.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | September 8, 2010 10:33 AM
Is there a link to more info about this story? Google is failing me.
Posted by: highnumber | September 8, 2010 10:33 AM
The fakes should of course be revealed as fakes. But beyond that, the parent could use this as a 'teachable moment' to show the kid how the the founders weren't always right. Some of them probably did advocate Christianity be preferred in law...but some of them probably advocated blacks counting as 3/5 of a person, limiting voting rights to males, and appointing senators. Use the teacher's ham-handed attempt at indoctrination to explain that we've used the amendment process to correct the founders mistakes before, and probably will again.
Posted by: eric | September 8, 2010 10:37 AM
Ed, you and I need to work on our timing.
Anywho, could the teacher have been putting this out as a check on the students' BS detectors? I'd be interested in seeing someone follow up with the teacher.
Posted by: highnumber | September 8, 2010 10:37 AM
This is not as uncommon as you might think. As a practitioner of education law, this does not in any way surprise me. It's not typical, but it's anything but unheard of. Often, it sets off a frenzy in the community. My favorite recently is the District that had created alimited public forum and was thus required to let a Bible group use its facilities at specified times. A couple of very bright students formed a Wiccan group and asked to use the forum. Navigation became difficult. Result: End of public forum.
Posted by: godot | September 8, 2010 10:53 AM
As an aside, I find it amazing when these sorts of folks mention Jefferson. Were I a Christian-nation supporter, that would be the last person I'd want students to learn about. The fact that he's even mentioned probably means the teacher who handed out the list is ignorant of TJ's true beliefs, because otherwise he'd never point a student in TJ's direction.
Posted by: eric | September 8, 2010 10:56 AM
I went to reddit.com and pasted Is the United States a Christian Nation? into the search box, then sorted the results by age. The most recent story was dated five months ago, and doesn't show the words in that order; the older stories didn't seem to match either.
Bracketing the question with quotation marks to search for it verbatim produces two results, one a link to freethoughtpedia.com and the other a comic.
As a Floridian - living in the infamous student-murdering, Qu'ran-burning town of Gainesville - I'm concerned about just how close this infection of the school system is creeping. Can anyone here point me towards a source for this sick story?
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | September 8, 2010 11:17 AM
Modem historians claim Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian. He wrote these words inside the cover of his well-worn Bible: "I am a real Christian, a disciple of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the principles of Christianity."
I had to laugh when I saw that one. Whoever wrote that wouldn't know a modern historian from a well-worn hole in the ground. And the irony of the "I am a real Christian" quote-mine made me do the classic "spit take" on the computer screen.
Posted by: 386sx | September 8, 2010 11:18 AM
Oops, what I get for not refreshing before I post... pls disregard # 17.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | September 8, 2010 11:19 AM
Separation of church and state is not in the Constitution either. You know what the colonies thrived on? Prayer. We would not be where we are today without the Christian faith.
Posted by: Canny | September 8, 2010 11:28 AM
eric @ 16:
No need to be surprised. The fact is that this particular set of historical revisionists/propagandists purposefully misrepresent the founding fathers with confidence their sheep will neither validate their claims and lack the mental capacity to adopt their position to an honest one. In fact I read somewhere recently that corrective attempts actually reinforce previous misconceptions in the set of people that are ideologues to a point they're even more convinced of their misperceptions.
My prescriptive list above was presented knowing this and was presented to put students and non-ideological stake-holders on call they have people in their midst wishing to misinform children and others. It's intent is also a hope for some sabre-rattling aimed at the propagandists that those concerned with objective truth will not stand for such abuse of children while enjoying the full weight of the government to defend these childrens' rights.
Posted by: Michael Heath | September 8, 2010 11:30 AM
... Jefferson ... wrote these words inside the cover of his well-worn Bible: "... I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the principles of Christianity."
In other words, even by this fictional version, Jefferson recognized that his "whole country" was not "rallied to the principles of Christianity."
But his bible was "well-worn" - cut to pieces by scissors, in fact.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | September 8, 2010 11:44 AM
Posted by: JBC | September 8, 2010 11:46 AM
Sounds like some teacher's gonna be wearing a dunce cap soon.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | September 8, 2010 11:51 AM
In fact I read somewhere recently that corrective attempts actually reinforce previous misconceptions in the set of people that are ideologues to a point they're even more convinced of their misperceptions.
I buy that. But the teacher is presumably trying to convince naive students like the child of the person who wrote the article. So its not just about reinforcement, its about conversion of non-ideologues. Getting students interested in TJ is a risky way of doing that, because any actual research by non-ideologue students is going to backfire. I agree that quote-mining TJ to current ideologues is probably not risky, because they won't bother following-up.
Posted by: eric | September 8, 2010 11:51 AM
Re Eric @ #16
Ditto for John Adams, who, in his post presidency exchanges of correspondence with Jefferson agreed with the latter on religious matters. Adams was, at best, a Unitarian.
Ditto, possibly, for George Washington who famously refused to take communion after church services.
Ditto for Ben Franklin.
Ditto for James Madison, whose dislike of organized religion in general and Christianity in particular has been well documented.
Posted by: SLC | September 8, 2010 11:52 AM
The last two quotes weren't covered in your old post, but they're worth addressing:
The 1831 "visitor," while unnamed here, is supposed to be Alexis de Toqueville. But this is not a legitimate quote of his: http://www.tocqueville.org/pitney.htm And no instances of the quote have yet been found before WWI, much less from 1831.
As a matter of fact, I wrote the definitive piece on this quote: http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html . While often attributed to Alexander Tytler, they've left off the attribution here. That's wise, because my research suggests that the latter sequence was actually written by the president of a cork company in the 1940s. Meanwhile, the "average age" line, as you might expect, started appearing about a decade before the bicentennial.
Posted by: Loren | September 8, 2010 11:54 AM
Re Canny @ #20
I see that Mr. Canny has replaced Mr. MRoberts as the boards resident moron.
Posted by: SLC | September 8, 2010 11:55 AM
Michael,
I graduated college with a B.S. in science and did not intend to teach. However, because of the area (Mississippi) and the few jobs I had to grab a position as a high school science teacher in order to survive.
The only 3 additional courses I was required to take involved: a) Some sort of statistics that I never understood the point of, b) Some sort of psychology that basically just told me to stay calm with the kids no matter what, and c) Some sort of computer class that taught me how to a make primitive sort of PowerPoint thing.
That's it. No other education courses required. Everything else I learned in the "school" of hard knocks. Needless to say, I got out of the field as quickly as I could. For our state at least, education is a joke.
Posted by: Skepticat | September 8, 2010 12:06 PM
"We would not be where we are today without the Christian faith."
So now we know why the economy is struggling and we're in a difficult spot in Afghanistan. Thanks canny.
Posted by: dean | September 8, 2010 12:15 PM
A lot of items on the list sound suspiciously like ones I found while browsing a copy of 48 Liberal Lies About American History at Borders, specifically "lie" # 12--a litany of irrelevant points i.e. these quotes by Reagan and SCOTUS Justices who lived long after the founding, etc.
The book may have been a source for some of these, or perhaps the book and this letter both borrow from well-worn arguments in conservative Christianist circles.
http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Lies-About-American-History/dp/1595230564/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283963348&sr=1-1
Posted by: EricJ | September 8, 2010 12:44 PM
Canny @ #20:
I couldn't agree more. That's what this whole thread is about. Christian faith has to be among the top five* causes of America's loss of greatness.
*Don't ask me for the other four. Certainly fear, hate, and greed are up there, but ranking them is tough, and some of them are codependent.
Posted by: ERinSTL | September 8, 2010 12:53 PM
"We would not be where we are today without the Christian faith."
You are totally correct. We'd probably be colonizing space by now if not for the anti-science and anti-learning christianists holding us back.
Posted by: Fifth Dentist | September 8, 2010 12:56 PM
"You know what the colonies thrived on? Prayer. We would not be where we are today without the Christian faith."
....also, slavery.
Posted by: Siamang | September 8, 2010 1:14 PM
Some of those same claims are in this letter to the editor today:
http://www.wpcva.com/articles/2010/09/08/chatham/opinion/opinion05.txt
along with the Beck Mishmash of anti-"Liberation Theology"
Posted by: Chilidog | September 8, 2010 2:06 PM
Also, tobacco.
Posted by: Mal Adapted | September 8, 2010 2:58 PM
oops, I C&P's Ed's refutal of the e-mail without attributation.
Sorry Ed. I posted the link in a follow up post
http://www.wpcva.com/articles/2010/09/08/chatham/opinion/opinion05.txt
Posted by: Chilidog | September 8, 2010 3:08 PM
Big Brother rides again.
Posted by: Paen | September 8, 2010 3:25 PM
Skepticat: To cut Mississippi some slack, they're probably desperate to get teachers with science backgrounds.
Posted by: ildi | September 8, 2010 3:27 PM
Especially ones who teach it properly, from the Bible.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | September 8, 2010 4:01 PM
Ed said:
Hmm. I wonder what a pupil would score if they wrote an essay that ripped this screed apart, exposing all the lies and fakery, backed up with all the relevant citations, facts and figures, and quotes showing that the quotemines were, in fact, quotemines, and submitted it?
Posted by: Zmidponk | September 8, 2010 4:04 PM
Michael, Ian: In most states, teachers are trained in generic Education; I doubt many require much subject expertise.
Canny: You know what else isn't in the Constitution? Separation of powers. Except that the concept is embedded deeply in the structure of the government, even if the phrase itself doesn't appear in the document. Likewise, separation of church and state is an excellent description of the First Amendment, even if that isn't the exact phrase used.
Want to start a list of Christian terminology that doesn't appear in the Bible? We can start with Original Sin and move on to Trinity....
Posted by: Scott Hanley | September 8, 2010 4:52 PM
I would think she'd only have to write an essay about the Treaty of Tripoli to put to rest any notion of this being a Christian nation.
Posted by: Jen | September 8, 2010 5:08 PM
So far, I like my kid's kindergarten. At the PTA meeting there was a handout with a list of "useful things that parents should do with their kids", with stuff like spending time doing sports, reading, etc. Also on the list was "age appropriate religious activities". My wife thought this seemed unnecessary. Before she said anything, a few other parents around her also commented that it seemed that it wasn't the school's job to remind parents to send their kids to church. (The handout was written by the Search Institute, not by the school)
I'm happy with this attitude, and grateful I don't have to deal with a community where parents want the school to teach sunday school during school hours.
Posted by: Anomaly | September 8, 2010 5:13 PM
Genocide of the native inhabitants? Slavery? Exploitation of natural resources? All of the above?
That's for sure. We'd be smarter, healthier and happier.
Posted by: Budbear | September 8, 2010 5:25 PM
A few observations:
There were 56 signers of the Declaration, not 55; the reference is to a study pseudo-historian David Barton likes to cite about the religion of the 55 framers of the Constitution.
Strictly speaking the Continental Congress never got around to approving the purchase of 20,000 Bibles to be sold to the American people; the proposal died before it got that far and no Bibles were actually imported. Chris Rodda has a nice rundown on this in Liars for Jesus.
The alleged Patrick Henry quotation is nothing of the sort; as I demonstrated it came from a 1956 writer commenting on the faith of Patrick Henry and was misattributed to him some time in the late 1980s.
The Thomas Jefferson "quotation" is a corrupt version of the "Forsaken Roots" concoction; this in turn was made up from two sentences Jefferson wrote in two different letters to two different people at two different times. The first, in reference to the Jefferson Bible, was written to Charles Thomson on 9 January 1816, while the second, referring to in particular to the doctrine of the trinity, was written to Timothy Pickering on 27 February 1821.
The John Adams "quotation" was actually written by John Wingate Thornton in the introduction to The Pulpit of the American Revolution, and supposedly summarizes something John Quincy Adams said.
The 1782 congressional resolution about using the bible in schools is a fake. There is no such resolution. The model for the fake appears to have been the resolution approving the Aitken Bible for accuracy and care in printing. That resolution says nothing whatsoever about Congress approving it for use in schools.
Derek H. Davis and Matthew McMearty, in a piece published in the 22 June 2005 Journal of Church and State describe the claim about American universities as "patently false." Davis and McMearty say that five of the sixteen colleges founded before independence in 1776 were strictly non-sectarian and the equivalent of today's secular universities. (These were the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Delaware, The College of Charleston, Hamden Sydney College, and William and Lee University.)
What Benjamin Rush actually wrote was "...I beg leave to remark, that the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments." Note that "Christianity" has been substituted for "Religion" in this teacher's version. Rush went on to write "Such is my veneration for every religion that reveals the attributes of the Deity, or a future state of rewards and punishments, that I had rather see the opinions of Confucius or Mahomed inculcated upon our youth, than see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles." He preferred however "that of the New Testament."
The James Madison "quotation" is a misquotation of a well-known fake--and again "Christianity" has been substituted for "religion". The original words were cherry-picked from his Memorial and Remonstrance, partly from a title of a piece he was citing. Here's what he actually wrote. See if you can pick out the pieces used.
George Washington said nothing about "Christian principles." In his farewell address he said "...reason & experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle". The rest of it is mangled from his first inaugural address.
The de Toqueville and Tytler fakes were dealt with above--and by the way, that piece on the Tytler quotation is a stunning piece of work.
Many of these fake quotations are dealt with at my Fake History blog, and I wrote a somewhat more detailed refutation of "Forsaken Roots" than Ed's (first part here) (/shameless self-promotion). I had Ed's piece to work with, as well as three others, of course.
Posted by: sbh | September 8, 2010 5:48 PM
Dugglebogey | September 8, 2010 10:15 AM:
President Ronald Reagan resurrected the Economy from the Death of the Carter Depression. Then he led the the American Engine of Capitalism forth to victory over the Godless Communist hordes of the Soviet Union. He outlawed Russia forever, and they were so craven he didn't need to carry out the threat of bombing.
All of these great deeds, along with this signature on the Declaration of Independence, right above Thomas Jefferson's, and twice as big as John Hancock's, qualifies President Ronald Reagan as a Founding Father. And not just any Founding Father, but the greatest of Founding Fathers. Even so great a General and a President as George Washington described Ronald Reagan as his "right arm".
Posted by: llewelly | September 8, 2010 9:33 PM
Scott Hanley - here in Texas, we are required to be "highly qualified" in our content area - which basically means we need at least a Bachelor's Degree, and we have to take a test in our content area, which can be hard - a friend of mine failed his three times and he is good in math. However, that is pretty much it - if you are good in tests, or can give the answers that are expected, you can become certified (the actual process varies) and teach. What you teach (or how you teach it) is pretty much up to you, despite the standards and testing. It also means that you can be really ignorant in other areas (I know a chemistry teacher who doesn't believe in evolution, and know of a creationist biology teacher who was in another district - sorry sack of suet! - I also know teachers who wear magnetic bracelets). We're human too, and despite the focus to teach critical thinking, there are many who do not apply it to their own lives and beliefs.
Posted by: Badger3k | September 9, 2010 12:40 AM
Myself, I'm trying to think of any examples of these great civilizations which lasted an average of 200 years and went hrough those odd stages. Certainly Rome skipped most of the steps and lasted a great deal longer than 200 years, even counting only the Western Empire. Great Britain has certainly lasted longer than that. As has France. As did The Russia of the Tsars, various permutations of China, The Islamic Caliphate, The Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, Japan, The Papal States, Spain, both Hapsburg and Bourbon, The Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Ottoman Empire, and any number of Indian States, not to mention the Persian Empire and the Egyptians. Even a ramshackle conglomeration like Poland-Lithuania lasted longer than that.
And pretty much all of them skipped the 'Liberty' stages.
Maybe if you average the Eastern Roman Empire with Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia, you get 200 years...
Posted by: longstreet63 | September 9, 2010 10:16 AM
That guy's probably teacher of the year material in Florida.*
* In Alabama he would be up for the Roy Moore lifetime achievement award.
Posted by: Fifth Dentist | September 9, 2010 5:47 PM