Virginia Baptists Take on Revisionist History

Last weekend the Baptist General Association of Virginia issued a resolution defending religious liberty and challenging the revisionist views of American history propagated by religious conservatives in Texas and elsewhere.  Here is a snippet from an article in the Associated Baptist Press.

The officer elections came a day after the resolution was passed following lively debate. Meeting in the port city of Hampton, Va., messengers slightly altered the statement before ultimately adopting it by a wide margin on a show-of-hands vote.

Virginia Baptists should “regard it as a threat to the flourishing of religious liberty when any version of our nation’s history minimizes or denies the historical basis” of church-state separation, the resolution says. It also says Virginia Baptists should “be diligent in resisting and correcting any such mistaken version of our history.”

Rob James of Richmond, who chairs the BGAV’s religious-liberty committee, said the resolution was prompted in part by recent attempts by a conservative Christian majority on the Texas State Board of Education to amend standards for the state’s social-studies textbooks. The majority accused the old standards of undermining Christianity and conservative values.

“One of the things that frightened us [the committee] was that the next 10 years of social-studies textbooks would raise questions about the founding of this country and to what extent, if at all, the idea of separation of church and state is part of our national commitment,” said James, a retired professor of religion at the University of Richmond.

“It appeared to us that what was going on amounted to a change of our historical memory,” he added. “If we as individuals are robbed of our memory we can no longer be the same person and can’t be faithful to the same principles. The same is true of a collective body. Its memory can be tampered with.” 

In the interest of full disclosure, I was approached by a representative of the Virginia Baptist group responsible for this statement.  They wanted to use parts of my forthcoming Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Primer in their resolution.  I sent them a copy of the manuscript and we had a phone call and a few e-mail exchanges about it.  But in the end they were a bit disappointed with the book’s historical and even-handed approach.  They wanted a more blatant attack on the “Christian America” view of history.

For what’s it worth. 

By the way, have I mentioned that Was America Founded as a Christian Nation will be published in February 2011 with Westminster/John Knox Press?  Buy a copy and decide for yourself if I am too even-handed.

RECOMMENDED READING

Christian nationalism on display in the Tennessee General Assembly Liberty University sues Jerry Falwell Jr. for $10 million Anyone who wants to believe that Independence Day is a Christian holiday should read Frederick Douglass’s “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” David Barton speaks at First Baptist-Dallas. “Legitimate political discourse”