When the Texas Board of Education meets this week, potential revisions to standards in the social studies curriculum will be presented. Still unclear is the role that will be played by controversial recommendations sent to those writing the drafts that will be considered, including some that would greatly enhance the part Christianity plays in the story of US history. Today's Austin American-Statesman offers a preview of the expected debate:
If their changes are accepted, students who now receive a more generic overview of religious freedom and its importance in the country's founding would be taught that the nation's founders wanted to shape America based on biblical principles.
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"I'm an evangelical Christian, and I think David Barton and Peter Marshall are completely out to lunch," said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, a Christian institution. "They are not experts on social studies and history. Neither of them are trained in history. They are preachers who use the past and history as a means of promoting a political agenda in the present."
