A feature article in this weekend's NYTimes Magazine asks "How Christian Were the Founders?" Examining the efforts of the Texas Board of Education to revamp the Social Studies curriculum in a way that elevates the role Christianity has played in America's early history, author Russell Shorto interviews major anti-church-state separation activists in the battle, like board members Cynthia Dunbar and Don McLeroy, uncovering the longer term goals and beliefs behind the misguided project.
Ask Christian activists what they really want — what the goal is behind the effort to bring Christianity into American history — and they say they merely want “the truth.”… But the actual ambition is vast. Americans tell pollsters they support separation of church and state, but then again 65 percent of respondents to a 2007 survey by the First Amendment Center agreed with the statement that “the nation’s founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation,” and 55 percent said they believed the Constitution actually established the country as a Christian nation. The Christian activists are aware of such statistics and want to build on them, as Dunbar made clear. She told me she looks to John Jay’s statement that it is the duty of the people “of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers” and has herself called for a preference for selecting Christians for positions of leadership.
Dunbar’s book lays out the goal: using courts and public schools to fuse Christianity into the nation’s founding. It may be unlikely that it will be attained any time soon, in which case the seeding of Texas’ history-textbook guidelines with “Christian nation” concepts may be mostly symbolic. But symbols can accumulate weight over time, and the Christian activists are in it for the long haul. . . . “The more you can associate Christianity with the founding, the more you can sway the future Supreme Court,” Martin Marty says. “…Establish the founders as Christians, and you have it made.”
History is not their goal. It is the means to an unsettling end.
