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The principle’s the United States was founded upon has been debated at various times
during the two hundred plus years of its existence. The most recent debate has erupted in the
state of Texas, where a conservative Christian majority on the state board of education has
tainted the process that determines the content of the textbooks in their states’ public schools.
Many of the Texas Board of Education members are part of a grassroots movement by Christian
fundamentalists around the country to revise our nation’s history by claiming our county was
founded on Christian principles; when in fact our core Founding Fathers based America on
enlightenment principles. Because the decisions made in Texas affect the content of textbooks
throughout the United States, it is important for school boards, administrators and teachers to
understand the facts behind our founding fathers intentions, as well as gain awareness that
Christian fundamentalists view this debate as a “battlefield” in their culture war.
It is important to note that this debate is not Christians against Atheists or Christians
against secularists. The perpetrators of this myth are a group of extremists, Christian
fundamentalists, that has specifically targeted Texas as a place for imposing their ideology. The
textbook debate is a contentious topic within the state where other board members, within the
same political party, have had their faith questioned by the fundamentalist majority. The agenda
of these extremists has no allegiance to a political party, although they are Republicans, and they
do not seem worried about the quality of Texas’ public schools. The only thing on the agenda of
these fundamentalists is revising our student’s textbooks by inserting their own religious beliefs.
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Of course the fundamentalists would not consider their actions as revisionist history.
Don McLeroy the former chairman of the Texas State Board of Education and an unapologetic
fundamentalist. Mr. McLeroy sees the School Boards actions as “standing up to the experts”
(Shorto 2010, 4). Board members will point to an unbiased group of six experts, appointed by the
board, to help them establish the curriculum for the textbooks. These experts are supposed to be
teachers who are tasked with revising curriculum and advise the board on the need for potential
changes to textbooks. Upon closer inspection, one third of this group of experts is made up of
known advocates for conservative Christian causes (Shorto 2010, 5). Why would anyone expect
a partisan Board of Education to appoint a non-partisan group of advisors?
This debate may seem trivial; and it might be if it was isolated to one rouge
conservative southern state, but the effect of the Texas Board of Education textbook content
decision stretches nationwide. The major problem for school boards, administrators and teachers
around the country is apparent when professor of education at Texas A&M James Kracht notes
that “Texas governs 46 or 47 states” (Shorto 2010, 2). What professor Kracht is saying is that
because Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks, what they conclude should be in a
textbook goes into the textbooks of schools of up to 47 states. Our local school boards and
administrators cannot allow a group of seven fundamentalists to determine the content of our
nation’s textbooks, especially when they are determined to revise history by imposing their
religious agendas.
Because Texas buys the most textbooks they have the largest influence on what goes in to
our student’s textbooks and eventually is taught in our classrooms, Christian fundamentalists
have chosen Texas as the battleground. Mr. McLeroy, who was removed as chairman because of
his extreme views, said in an interview recently “But Christianity has had a deep impact on our
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system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of
individual rights comes from the Bible” (Shorto 2010, 2).
There is little question, nor any attempt by them, to hide the fact that the Christian
Fundamentalist members on the Texas State Board of Education view this as a battleground.
Liberty University is located in Lynchburg, Virginia and founded by the Christian
Fundamentalist Reverend Jerry Falwell. Farwell’s son and current chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr.
openly states that the University’s goal as a training ground for Christians is “to transform
legislatures, courts, commerce and civil government at all levels” (Shorto, 2010, 6). Board
member Cynthia Dunbar spends part of her time as an assistant professor at Liberty University.
Ms. Dunbar not only practices law in Texas and votes on the Texas Board of Education, she also
travels once a week to Lynchburg to give lectures to the future lawyers of Liberty University.
While Ms. Dunbar often downplays her beliefs in Texas, she wrote in her book, “One Nation
Under God” that “this battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and
training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.” Dunbar despises public schools and
will not allow her children to attend “the inappropriateness of a state-created, taxpayer-supported
school system.” When asked in an interview by Russell Shorto “why someone who felt that way
would choose to become an overseer of arguably the most influential public-education system in
the country, she said that public schools are a battlefield for competing ideologies and that it’s
important to combat the “religion” of secularism that holds sway in public education” (2010, 8).
Dunbar refuses to send her children to public school and spends a considerable amount of her
time in another state yet still sits on the Board of Education because she views Texas as a
“battlefield”. These fundamentalists insist our country was formed on Christian principles while
most scholars believe, almost unanimously, that our country was based on Enlightenment values.
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The Enlightenment began in Europe and can be defined broadly by describing it as, free
thinkers focused on human inquiry. One Enlightenment idea many of our founders came to
believe in is the Enlightenment religion of Deism. Deism is difficult to understand but was
defined by perhaps the most influential author of the revolution Thomas Paine:
It is free from all those invented and torturing articles that shock our reason… with
which the Christian religion abounds. Its creed is pure and sublimely simple. It believes in God,
and there it rests. It honors reason as the choicest gift of God to man… (Holmes, 40, 2006)
Deism allowed our founders to question everything and assume nothing. Deism was very
popular in colleges in the mid eighteenth century while many of our founders were being
educated. One byproduct of Deism, because of its open minded nature, is that it will have many
different beliefs and ideas. However Author David Holmes categorizes our founder’s beliefs up
by saying “if census takers trained in Christian theology had set up broad categories in 1790….
And if they interviewed Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, they
undoubtedly have placed every one of these six founding fathers in some way under the category
of “Deism and Unitarianism.” (51)
Historians have always argued the definition of “founding father” since the days of the
Revolution. Some will argue that a founder is anyone who signed the Declaration of
Independence; others will say the men responsible for framing the Constitution while some will
argue that anyone who contributed to the Revolution in any way is a founding father. One thing
almost all historians agree on is that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben
Franklin, and James Madison had the most influence on laying the foundation of America.
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For local school board and administrators to truly understand how corrupt the Texas
Board of Education is, it is important to know the individual beliefs of the core founders and
framers of our nation. While some of our founders may have related to some Christian ideals and
they publicly may have defined themselves as Christians; privately they would consider
themselves as desists. Benjamin Franklin was the oldest and most well traveled of the founders.
Franklin’s believed more in morality more than he did dogma and that no religion could be all
right or all wrong. Above all Franklin believed that religious toleration was vital to a free society.
(Holmes 2006, 56) Unlike Ben Franklin, George Washington was a regular churchgoer.
Washington attended Episcopalian services regularly but always declined Holy Communion.
Washington’s letter almost never spoke of God, Jesus or Christianity. Instead our first president
used words more familiar with Deism such as maker, Great Spirit, or The Grand Architect.
Our Fourth President James Madison was raised in a devout Christian family. He was
educated for the ministry at Princeton University but changed his mind after seeing the religious
intolerance on his return to Virginia. Like Washington, Madison refrained from using religious
wording in his official documents and was an ardent supporter of Jefferson’s idea of Separation
of church and state. John Adams was perhaps the most clear in his religious beliefs. Adams
attended church regularly, believed in the resurrection, and believed in the miracles in the Bible.
Adams was a true believer but described his disdain for organized religion as "Twenty times in
the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, this would be the best
of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!'" (Allen, 2005)
As we see many of our founding fathers were religious people. That is to say they
believed in a higher being, but as with most people in the colonies at that time their beliefs were
quite diverse and even those who publicly identified themselves as a certain denomination held a
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wide range of personal beliefs. Most of our founders believed in a divine being, or as Thomas
Jefferson called it “a superattending power”, (Holmes, 45, 2006) but privately held the belief that
organized Christianity was just another form of corruption.
This belief in the corruption of organized religion is one reason the wording of our
founding documents is based on enlightenment principles and not that of any religion. Brooke
Allen notes in the article Our Godless Constitution “Our Constitution makes no mention
whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate.” Our
founders purposely left out references to organized religion because they saw it as dangerous,
and a threat to the young nation. Thomas Jefferson once wrote in his book Notes on the state of
Virginia that “millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of
Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined imprisoned…” (Holmes 2006, 81) Jefferson is also
known for his belief that Jesus was a reformer and a person of great moral character, but denied
the Christianity teaching that Jesus was the savior. He expressed this belief to his friend
Benjamin Rush in a letter from 1803.
“To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed but not to the genuine precepts of
Jesus himself. I am Christian in the only sense in which I believe Jesus wished any one to be;
sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human
excellence, and believing he never claimed any other” (Holmes 2006,83)
Thomas Jefferson believed the leaders of Christianity had tainted and even blatantly lied
about the life of Jesus in order to gain power. Jefferson’s belief was so strong that he
meticulously removed all the supernatural parts of his Bible so he could focus on the morality of
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Jesus’ teachings calling it The Life and Morals of Jesus. Any person who distrusted organized
religion enough to write his own version of the Bible, would not base the principles of his newly
fought for country on those same principles. Perhaps that is why Thomas Jefferson, the author of
The Declaration of Independence, framer of the Bill of Rights, and third US President, is the
number one target of the fundamentalist on the Texas Board of Education.
Thomas Jefferson again gets in the way of the conservative Board of Education when
they attempt to attack the concept of separation of church and state. The Christian conservatives
on the Texas Board of Education like to point out that the words “separation of church and state”
are not written verbatim in the first amendment of the Constitution. Board member Ms. Cynthia
Dunbar opened a debate about the separation of church and state by saying that the United States
is a “Christian land governed by Christian principles" and that she believes “no one can read the
history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have
from the beginning been our guiding geniuses" (Stuttz 2010). For Ms. Dunbar, and other board
member’s eyes, the absence of the words, separation of church and state, leaves the first
amendment up for debate. The Christian conservative board members are correct in their
assessment that the first amendment does not directly state a requirement that church and state
remain separate. However, the Framer who insisted a Bill of Rights be drafted into our
constitution in order to protect our citizens against an overpowering federal government was
Thomas Jefferson, who in 1802 as President of the United States wrote a letter to a group of
Baptists in Connecticut worried about the federal government establishing a State religion:
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...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which
declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation
between Church & State.
Jefferson, perhaps our most influential framer, may not have expressed the concept of separation
of church and state verbatim in the Constitution, but he clarifies the spirit of the first amendment
in his letter to the Connecticut Baptists. This letter from Jefferson to the Connecticut Baptists
has been admitted as evidence proving the spirit of the first amendment as early as 1879 by the
United States Supreme Court. In 1947, Justice Hugo Black directly referred to the letter from
Jefferson to the Baptists by stating that "In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against
establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and
state"(Everson vs. Board of Education, 1947). The Jefferson quote has been recognized by the
Supreme Court as a justification of the separation between Church and State for the past 64
years.
Besides the argument of a wall separating church and state, there is one more peculiar document
from early on in our nation’s history proving America was not founded on Christian principles.
After a brief skirmish with the Barbary pirates in North Africa, our country sought to sign a
Peace treaty with Tripoli. The eleventh article of the peace treaty reads as follows:
As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense
Founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character
Of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen--and as the said States never have entered into any war or act
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of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the
parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever
produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the
two countries. (Allen, 2005)
It is also important to note that this treaty was passed during the presidency of John Adams and
was ratified unanimously by the United States Senate. This was the 339th vote that was recorded
in the senate and only the third occurrence of a unanimous vote. (Allen, 2005) It is hard to
imagine our countries founders passing this treaty without as much as a complaint, if they
actually founded our country on Christian principles.
WORK IN PROGRESS 
The Christian fundamentalists recognize the importance of Texas as a
battleground to impose their political and religious agendas on the rest of the United States.
Despite mountains of evidence, including letters between our founders, the fundamentalists insist
that our Founding Fathers, and therefore our founding documents, were based on Christian
principles. The true beliefs of our founders need to be brought to light in order to break the
myths the fundamentalists are portraying.