By LeRoy Lawson
The problem with history is that it doesn”t sit still. The older I grow the more it changes. Many of my public school history lessons have flunked the tests of time.
If you want to retain confidence in your high school grasp of the past, this one thing you must do: Stop reading. Or at least stop reading history.
The Rest of the Story
Here is the first book to put on your list of books not to read: James W. Loewen”s Lies My Teacher Told Me (Touchstone, 1996). As you can tell from the date, I took my own advice for 12 years. My teachers wouldn”t have lied to me, so why should I allow Loewen to disparage them? At last, though, I weakened (the book was on sale).
What I read confirmed a growing suspicion that my school”s texts simply didn”t do history right. They were too glib, too sweet, too orderly, too high-principled””and too often wrong. Actual history is more complicated, bitter, disorganized, decidedly unprincipled, and often distorted by the historian. There”s a lot more to the story, and a lot else besides the story, than is revealed in required texts.
Loewen challenges many accepted “facts”:
“¢ That Columbus deserves his fame as the discoverer of America. (He didn”t get here first.)
“¢ That Ponce de León went to Florida to find the fountain of youth. (His real objective was to find Native Americans who would make good slaves.)
“¢ That the first colonies to legalize slavery were in the Deep South. (Would you believe Massachusetts?)
“¢ That Helen Keller was just a nice deaf and blind lady who is important because she inspires students to overcome adversity. (But what about the radical socialist who, among other things, marched for women”s right to vote and championed socialist programs to aid the downtrodden?)
“¢ And that Woodrow Wilson was a thoroughly high-minded idealist. (Let”s not talk about his segregationist policies at home and interventionist ones abroad.)
The more closely we study all the facts, the less likely we are to make heroes of flawed humans or to despair because our own era seems so much worse than earlier ones.
It isn”t.
Enjoying the Story
Turning from Lies to Nathaniel Philbrick”s Mayflower (Penguin Books, 2006) is to find written history that approaches Loewen”s standard. This finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in history doesn”t strain out the unsavory bits. Tracing the pilgrimage of the Mayflower”s religious refugees from England to the Netherlands and on to America, Philbrick writes respectfully (but not hero-worshipfully) of the major players in the drama that brought forth this nation.
Mayflower is history that doesn”t read like the textbooks. The documentation is here, and the scholarship is evident but not intrusive; but what Philbrick does so well is tell a story as true as he can make it. His Pilgrims come alive (they are not the one-dimensional spiritual seekers of religious freedom we recall from Thanksgiving pageants), and his complex Native Americans aren”t ignorant savages.
When the Europeans arrived, Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem (chief), was fighting to save his disease-ravaged (bubonic plague?) tribe, down to a few hundred from a population of 12,000. The Pilgrims and their fellow travelers were fighting to survive in a strange land fraught with many possibilities and much unforeseen peril. Foreigner and native needed each other; they cooperated for their mutual benefit, their collaboration lasting for 55 years.
Then it didn”t work any longer. And we can”t just blame the Native Americans. Greed for land on the one hand and intertribal tensions on the other led to the bloodbath now known as King Philip”s War in 1675″”and the subsequent battles that define our origin.
Mayflower is storytelling at its best, including all the drama, conflict, contradictions, and messiness of real life. And for those of us who want to understand history as it was lived so we can comprehend faith as we live it today, this account of our spiritual fathers provides””even though Philbrick has no religious ax to grind””insights to ponder and inspire.
Church and State
The Pilgrims survived and gave birth to descendants who gave birth to a new nation. Jon Meacham”s American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006) studies the heritage of these religious pilgrims””and how their original spiritual/political vision had to be modified in order for the nation as we know it to emerge.
Not everybody will like Meacham”s nonpartisan treatment of religion and government in America. Those who insist that ours is a Christian nation established by Christian leaders will be disappointed. So will others who want to prove just the opposite. He does not believe the founders intended to erect a solid, impenetrable wall between religion and government and that every modern initiative to remove religion from public places and public discourse is simply carrying out of their initial intent.
Meacham, who is managing editor of Newsweek, speaks with the quiet voice of reason. He gives ample evidence in his heavily documented but easily read book that there has from the very beginning been tension where the prerogatives of religion and the proprieties of secular government bang against each other””and there always will be if we are serious about honoring the vision of the founders.
He understands that, in spite of the loud voices from the right, our (and any other) country cannot be a “Christian nation.” Neither can it be totally secular. “Christian” applies to persons, not nations. He quotes with approval Chief Justice Warren E. Burger”s insight (written half a century after Justice Hugo Black borrowed Thomas Jefferson”s “wall of separation” metaphor) that “the line of separation, far from being a “˜wall,” is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.”
To make his point, the author surveys America”s defining documents and speeches (including John Winthrop”s “city on a hill” sermon, Thomas Jefferson”s Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King”s “dream,” and Ronald Reagan”s faith-based messages) and argues convincingly that in the interaction between believers and state we find, in the title of his last chapter, “our hope for years to come.”
Meacham says
The great good news about America””the American gospel, if you will, is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Belief in God is central to the country”s experience, yet for the broad center, faith is a matter of choice, not coercion, and the legacy of the Founding is that the sensible center holds. It does so because the Founders believed themselves at work in the service of both God and man, not just one or the other. Driven by a sense of providence and an acute appreciation of the fallibility of humankind, they created a nation in which religion should not be singled out for special help or particular harm. The balance between the promise of the Declaration of Independence, with its evocation of divine origins and destiny, and the practicalities of the Constitution, with its checks on extremism, remains perhaps the most brilliant American success.
This isn”t exactly what we learned in history class, but it makes sense, doesn”t it?
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Roy Lawson, a Christian Standard contributing editor and member of the Publishing Committee, serves as international consultant with Christian Missionary Fellowship. When he”s not traveling the world, he makes his home in Payson, Arizona, and always, everywhere, he”s reading. His reviews will appear periodically, especially in this year”s monthly special issues.
Typical Hypocritian: you recommend NOT reading a book you yourself have read half-awake. Loewen’s work is a reach-based treatise into why America doesn’t work and what to do about it. Why not join the 21st century, put down your book of myth, and read to think.