consistent with God’s moral absolutes, and they will be
held accountable.
• God has allowed human freedom and consequent sin. 20
Because He is sovereign, He is not threatened by devia-
tions from His will.
• The greatest good is the glory of God. A key way for
humans to demonstrate that glory is to reflect the image
of God that they bear.
• As a revelation of God’s will and working, history
should be interesting to those in His image. Teachers
should present history with all the drama and person-
ality that we find fascinating. We all love stories more
than essays.
Within these boundaries, there is considerable flexibility
in our study of history. We may see different trends at work,
but we will agree that they are divinely directed. We may
emphasize different actors on the stage for different reasons,
but we will agree that they are in the image of God and also
depraved. We may champion different political systems or
cultural practices, but we will agree that they all are account-
able to God and that the Scripture is the standard by which
they must be judged. In his study of history, the Christian
will constantly be updating, correcting, and revising his
facts and even his interpretations, within the bounds laid
down by Scripture.
CONCLUSION
Because government-sponsored schools are currently
prohibited from espousing a particular theological view-
point, they cannot teach history from a biblical worldview—
or as a conservative Christian would say, truthfully. Because
they are written primarily with government schools in
mind, secular textbooks cannot demonstrate the one great
unifying truth of history: that it is a story the Creator God
is telling, a story that tells us much about Himself and us.
The battles over history standards will continue. Differ-
ent factions will take the ascendancy of decision-mak-
ing power and then lose it. But for Christian educators,
parents, and pastors, the curriculum will have to come
from somewhere else. ■
Dr. Dan Olinger serves as Chairman of the Division of Bible at Bob Jones University.
ENDNOTES
1. Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster; Auflage: 1st Touchstone
Ed, 1988).
2. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Vintage; 1st
Vintage Books edition, 1988).
3. These were not the first in the field. In 1979, Frances FitzGerald lambasted the quality of
history textbooks.
Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Little
Brown & Co; 1st edition, 1979).
4. As one example, see “Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century,”
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED441736.pdf. It summarizes a 1999 study on pages 4–5.
5. Russell Baker, “SUNDAY OBSERVER; Relevant Ignorance,” The New York Times Magazine,
(July 12, 1987).
26
“Ocala Star-Banner - Apr 23, 1998,” Google News, accessed September 10, 2018.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Y39RAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SAgEAAAAIBAJ&p-
g=4881,4975597&dq=survey+students+history+ignoran%20t&hl=en.
“Toledo Blade - Apr 19, 1993,” Google News, accessed September 10, 2018. https://news.
google.com/newspapers?id=a0xPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TAMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6073,5693647&d-
q=survey+students+history+ignorant&hl=en.
6. This is not to say there were no animated discussions on the topic before that year, but
public interest in the problem was heightened by the two bestsellers.
7. There have been numerous cases of textbooks with egregious errors.
“D-Day for History Texts,” BJU Press, accessed September 10, 2018. http://www.christianvs-
secular.com/textbook_trap/history_errors.php
Valerie Strauss, “The rich irony in Virginia’s history textbook error,” last modified October
20, 2010. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/curriculum/the-rich-irony-in-
virginias-hi.html.
8. “How Is an Author like an Appendix?,” BJU Press, accessed September 10, 2018. http://
www.christianvssecular.com/authors.
“Content Cloning,” BJU Press, accessed September 10, 2018. http://www.christianvssecu-
lar.com/authors/no_author.htm
9. Arthur Woodward and Kathleen Carter Nagel, “Old Wine in New Bottles: An Analysis of
Changes in Elementary Social Studies Textbooks from Old to New Edition,” Book Research
Quarterly 3 (Winter 1987–88), 22.
10. In 1995, James Loewen criticized history textbooks primarily from the left in his book
Lies My Teacher Told Me. His criticisms involved not factual errors but what he viewed as
errors of emphasis and of inclusion and exclusion. A similar example is Ray Raphael’s
Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past (2004). Whether one agrees with these
authors’ political positions or not, historical controversy erupts primarily on the issue of
interpretation of the facts rather than the facts themselves.
11. One educator has noted that the importance of textbooks is not so much that they
determine what the students will learn by reading but that they determine what the
teacher, particularly the novice teacher, will teach.
Kyle Ward, “The Missing Key to the Texas History Textbook Debate,” http://hnn.us/
articles/127976.html.
12. The most influential textbook adoption states are Texas and California because of the
size of their student populations and thus sales potential for textbook publishers. As most
publishers seek to gain access to these markets, smaller states tend to follow the larger
states’ decisions out of market necessity. The decisions of the Texas committee tend to
receive more attention from the mainstream media probably because Texas tends to be
more politically conservative, and thus more controversial than California, in the thinking
of the media decision makers.
13. For a summary of the various states’ U.S. history standards, sponsored by the conser-
vative Fordham Institute, see https://edexcellence.net/publications/the-state-of-state-us.
html. The authors of this study define standards as “the substantive guidelines for de-
termining what a state intends (or at least hopes) its young people will know when they
complete various grade levels ... a reasonable and acceptable minimum level of content
expectations.” Interestingly, the same authors commented, “Twenty-eight states rated a
D or an F, and the average grade was a D.” They find, surprisingly to most Americans, that
only one state—South Carolina—got an A on all rated factors.
Sheldon Stern and Jeremy Stern, “Run Down by Traffic in Both Directions: Is it Possible to
Have a Rational Discussion of State U.S. History Standards?” last modified March 1, 2011.
http://hnn.us/ articles/136874.html.
14. Incidentally, the centrality of cause and effect in the study of history presupposes that
at some point the study is presented chronologically. One must know, for example, that
the Renaissance preceded the Reformation in order to deduce that it helped cause it.
It’s noteworthy that much modern teaching of history is done thematically, allegedly so
that it will be more interesting. Thematic study is, of course, a legitimate enterprise, but
without the chronological foundation, it will lead to simple guessing about causes—a
highly subjective, biased approach rather than a more disciplined one.
15. The current popularity of relativism is only imaginary. Even people who assert that
there are no absolutes do not live by that philosophy; they are unanimously quick to hold
others to their own moral standards by “sticking up for their own rights.” It has often been
observed that relativism is self-defeating, for the statement “there are no absolutes” is an
absolute.
Matt Slick, “Discussion on logical absolutes as a proof for God’s existence” accessed Sep-
tember 10, 2018. https://carm.org/discussion-logical-absolutes-proof-gods-existence.
16. The New Atheists have strenuously objected to this characterization. Sam Harris, for
example, argues that atheism can indeed find a moral and ethical standard. He proposes
the reduction of human suffering, but his argument suffers from lack of authority. Is his
discrimination against sadists moral? On what grounds?
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton,
2004), 170–71.
For further discussion of this concept, see https://apologetics315.com/2011/04/wil-
liam-lane-craig-vs-sam-harris-debate-audio and http://www.scribd.com/doc/4531646/
Arthur-Leff-Unspeakable-Ethics-Unnatural-Law.
17. Dr. Bryan Smith, “Secular vs. Christian,” The Renewanation Review, Vol. 10, No. 1, 22;
quoting James A. Banks, Our Community and Beyond (McGraw-Hill Education, 2013), 31.
18. Ibid., 23, quoting Jackson J. Spielvogel, World History & Geography: Modern Times
(McGraw-Hill Education, 2014), 4.
19. The theological term for this concept is providence and specifically, a subcategory of
providence called government. A good survey of the concept appears in Charles Hodge’s
Systematic Theology. See http://www.ccel.org/ccel/hodge/theology1.iv.xi.ii.html.
20. There is considerable disagreement, of course, over the relationship between divine
sovereignty and human will. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to engage in that
debate. Suffice it to say that God is indisputably sovereign and that He indisputably does
not force complete conformity to His moral standards in the short term.