America: A Christian Nation?

Reconnecting With History, Part 7

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Now that we’ve talked a lot about what history is and how it works, I will be tackling more specific subjects based on subscriber questions and more topical issues. In these installments, I will aim primarily to provide context to the disputes in question, and while my own attitude will invariably peek through, I intend and hope to provide a context that renders comprehensible the slogans and claims at issue.

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When your father works at a Bible College, you get to go to a private Christian school even when you’re so poor that you miss meals—especially if you’re growing up in the 1980s in the world’s hot-bed of cults and Satanism and left-wing activism pushed in public schools (i.e. San Francisco). The local Christian school was part of the Bible College’s denomination (free-ish tuition!), it got consistently excellent scores for math and reading, and there was no need to worry about all that left-wing demonic socialist indoctrination (which, to be fair, is a cartoon description of what was actually going on in the local public schools, as I later learned first-hand).

My elementary alma mater deserved its high marks in reading, not so much in math. The social climate was nasty and authoritarian, but I never had occasion to question the value of the education I was getting until one afternoon when I had been assigned essays on

1. How the Loch Ness Monster proved evolution was a lie and

2. Why the Constitution wasn’t the highest law in the land

My father, the Bible College history professor, happened to be home that evening. He was watching a movie while I did my homework, and a news story about a dinosaur discovery came on. I scoffed, like a good Christian school kid, at the notion that anyone could fall for carbon dating, which was a complete scam, because everybody knew the Earth was only 6,000 years old.

After we repaired the hole in the roof left by my father launching himself into orbit, I got a quick-and-dirty education in the history of creationism and the deliberate, conscious fraud contained therein.

After that, we delved into the rest of my homework, at which point another hole in appeared in the roof.