These Textbooks In Thousands Of Ok-12 Schools Echo Trump’s Talking Points

Christian textbooks utilized in hundreds of colleges across the nation train that President Barack Obama helped spur harmful Black Lives Matter protests, that the Democrats’ selection of 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton mirrored their concentrate on identification politics, and that President Donald Trump is the “fighter” Republicans need, a HuffPost evaluation has discovered.

The evaluation, which centered on three well-liked textbooks from two main publishers of Christian instructional supplies ― Abeka and BJU Press ― checked out how the books train the Trump period of politics. We discovered that each one three are characterised by a skewed model of historical past and a way that the nation is experiencing an pressing ethical decline that may solely be fastened by conservative Christian insurance policies. Language used within the books overlaps with the rhetoric of Christian nationalism, usually with overtones of nativism, militarism and racism as effectively. 

Scholars say textbooks like these, with their alternate variations of historical past and emphasis on Christian nationwide identification, characterize one small a part of the circumstances that result in occasions like final week’s riot on the U.S. Capitol, an episode that was permeated with the symbols of Christian nationalism. Before storming the Capitol, some teams prayed within the title of Jesus and requested for divine safety. They flew Christian and “Jesus 2020” flags and pointed to Trump’s presidency as the need of God. The linkage between Christian beliefs and the violent assault on Congress has since pushed evangelical leaders to confront their very own relationship with Trump and their help for the rioters.

“These textbooks made this brand of nationalism more mainstream,” mentioned Kathleen Wellman, a Southern Methodist University historical past professor who’s engaged on a e-book concerning the two Christian publishers. “I’m struck by how coherent of a worldview [the textbooks] promote and how thoroughly it resonates in current culture.” 

Representatives from BJU Press and Abeka didn’t reply to inquiries about what number of faculties use their merchandise. However, a 2017 HuffPost investigation discovered that about one-third of Christian faculties collaborating in personal faculty selection applications used a curriculum created by these two publishers or an analogous firm referred to as Accelerated Christian Education, amounting to round 2,400 faculties. The variety of faculties utilizing these firm’s merchandise that don’t take part in a voucher program doubtless quantities to hundreds extra. (Voucher applications permit college students to make use of taxpayer funds to attend personal faculties.) 

Both Abeka and BJU Press have ties to Christian faculties. Abeka was launched within the Nineteen Seventies by Arlin and Beka Horton, who additionally based Pensacola Christian College, a Florida establishment that outlaws dancing and different “satanic practices,” comparable to astrology. BJU Press is affiliated with the evangelical Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, which famously misplaced its tax-exempt standing after banning interracial relationship within the ’80s, a coverage it didn’t reverse till 2000.

“We unequivocally condemn any rhetoric that promotes illegal or violent behavior,” Amy Yohe, managing editor of Abeka Publishing, informed HuffPost. “One of Abeka’s core goals is to teach constructive citizenship through textbooks that accurately represent the facts of history, enabling students to learn from the life lessons it teaches, both positive and negative.”

BJU Press didn’t reply to requests for remark.

However, students who research faith in America say that most of the concepts current within the publishers’ textbooks overlap with rhetoric heard from the rioters final week. Christian nationalists argue that the United States was based as a Christian nation and has a particular covenant with God, which means that its residents should implement a specific imaginative and prescient for this nation or they’ll fall out of favor with God. The textbooks parrot these concepts, mentioned Andrew Whitehead, affiliate professor of sociology and director of the Association of Religion Data Archives at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

“As we see in these textbooks, they’re afraid of outside forces or the U.S. won’t be what it should be,” mentioned Whitehead. “There’s always a particular prescription ― they have to be on God’s good side. I think that’s a big part of it.”

Passages from the textbooks replicate an overarching worldview during which America is consistently transferring away from an ethical heart, with Christians on the entrance traces beating again the forces of immorality. 

One passage in an Eleventh-grade U.S. historical past textbook from Abeka states, “Although many false philosophies were popular in America before 2000, the new millennium heralded a dramatic acceptance of immoral ideology on a national scale. … Three such philosophies are globalism, environmentalism, and postmodernism.” 

“Believing religion — particularly Christianity — to be divisive, globalists discourage its influence on public life,” it continues.

By parroting such conservative political opinions beneath the guise of Christianity, the textbooks give these views extra legitimacy, making it troublesome to tell apart between truth and opinion. While all textbooks, together with the secular, cherry-pick narratives and have their biases, these ones fuse a non secular worldview with Trumpian speaking factors utilizing anti-media and anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

“Obviously it’s too simplistic to say these textbooks are causing people to think something, but they play a unique role in giving visual credibility to these ideas by having them be in a very traditionally trustworthy artifact,” mentioned Adam Laats, professor of historical past and training at New York state’s Binghamton University. “There’s a sense that they couldn’t put it in a schoolbook if it wasn’t true.”

HuffPost’s earlier investigation of those textbooks discovered that in addition they dismiss evolution as junk science, characterize Nelson Mandela as a “marxist agitator” who helped drive South Africa to “radical affirmative action,” and recommend that Satan hatched the thought of recent psychology. Many of the colleges that use these books additionally ban LGBTQ college students and households, and the books repeatedly condemn homosexuality. At one level in an Abeka textbook, slavery is described in purely financial phrases, saying that “slaves seemed to be better investments than indentured servants.”

“I absolutely thought of these textbooks when watching what played out last week,” Wellman mentioned. “It’s the anti-science culture, anti-elite, the identification of Christianity with military culture.”

When discussing protests towards the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s low approval score on the time, the Abeka Eleventh-grade U.S. historical past e-book factors the finger on the media partly, saying that “much of the war opposition in America was the media, supported by a large number of Hollywood entertainers,” and that “spurred on by the media, many Americans wanted a change from the policies of the previous eight years.”

When discussing President Obama, the textbooks accuse him and his administration of stoking racial divisions. Below is a passage from that Abeka historical past e-book:

“Many Americans’ views about race relations had improved at the time that Obama was inaugurated. Unfortunately, Americans’ views of race relations declined after Obama came into office. Race riots in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, greatly escalated racial tensions and worsened strife between minorities and local police. President Obama’s attempts to resolve these problems often seemed to make the situation worse.” 

The books don’t point out that such protests got here in response to the deaths of unarmed Black males, together with Michael Brown and Freddie Gray Jr., by the hands of police.

A high-school-level textbook from BJU Press additionally blames the Black Lives Matter motion for racial discord. It says:

“Despite President Obama’s call for racial harmony, his eight-year term of office saw an intensification of racial discord. Several controversial shootings of black men led to protests, some of which were violent and destructive with black communities bearing the brunt of most of the destruction. Groups such as Black Lives Matter sharpened the divide between police and citizens, and black and white, with divisive rhetoric. Mixed messages from the Obama administration, the Department of Justice in particular, seemed to increase the racial discord.”

The textbook doesn’t point out that these “controversial” shootings have been by the hands of law enforcement officials or clarify the societal adjustments Black Lives Matter is making an attempt to attain with its supposedly “divisive rhetoric.” The e-book doesn’t lay out for its teen readers what these “mixed messages” from the Obama administration have been. 

Other targets of the textbooks embrace “globalists,” environmentalists and “multiculturalists.”

“According to multiculturalists, advancing the achievements of western civilization was an act of hatred toward other cultures. They encouraged people to define themselves by race, sex, or sexual orientation rather than by the pillars of western civilization, such as nation, family, and God,” reads the Abeka American historical past textbook. “However, many conservatives and Christians within America have attempted to quell these philosophies and once again turn America into a united, moral nation.”

The textbooks don’t give a full-throated endorsement of Trump, noting his crude remarks and beforehand liberal positions, however they finally characterize him as somebody on the aspect of Christians who’s combating for his or her values. One description from the Abeka textbook reads:

“Contrary to the excessive hopes that Obama’s presidency would convey the nation collectively, Americans have been bitterly divided main as much as the election in 2016. The Democratic Party had change into more and more involved with identification politics, which is the concept that an individual’s race, intercourse, and sexual orientation kind a very powerful components of their humanity and that politics ought to replicate that perception. Republicans, in the meantime, believed that their politicians had been too compromising with the more and more radical left and that they wanted a political outsider who wouldn’t again down or compromise with the Democrats. 

“… The Republican Party nominated real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump from New York, whose determination and bombastic mannerisms gave Republicans the fighter they wanted. As a businessman, Trump stated that he would ‘take the brand of the United States and make it great again.’ However, many conservatives were wary of Trump because of his occasional vulgar speech, his past immoral behavior, and his public support of homosexual marriage; but some were persuaded by Trump’s choice for his running mate — Indiana’s conservative governor Mike Pence.” 

Evangelical Christians have been one in all Trump’s most essential voting blocks. Though white evangelicals solely characterize about 15% of the citizens, they made up about 23% of the vote in the course of the 2020 election, in accordance with the Associated Press. About 8 in 10 white evangelical Christians voted for Trump final 12 months. 

Images from the Capitol riot felt extra acquainted than surprising to 28-year-old Mel Garman, who grew up attending evangelical Christian faculties. 

There have been the Christian flags, like those she used to pledge allegiance to at school, waving alongside American flags. The rioters’ rhetoric, centered round saving the nation, defeating enemies and selling the need of God, might have come straight out of one in all her childhood lecture rooms, the place she mentioned she was taught a distorted model of historical past with nods to white Christian supremacy. Last week’s insurrectionists might have been her classmates, her lecturers, her pastors. She felt a wave of recognition as she watched the photographs on social media. 

“Over the course of my life I can see how what I was taught in Christian schooling has impacted me, and the riots on Jan. 6 played into it. That whole belief system revolves around the idea that you want the rest of the world to think like you,” mentioned Garman, who’s now a social employee. “It’s a ‘the ends justify the means’ type of thing.”

Since Jan. 6, well-liked pro-Trump evangelical leaders have felt pushed to guage the rioters’ actions, with some providing full-throttle condemnations and others issuing extra temperate responses.

“The Secret Service had to escort the vice president of the United States to safety out of the Capitol building. Gunshots were fired. Tear gas was deployed in the Capitol Rotunda. People were killed. … This was an assault on law. Attacking the Capitol was not patriotism; it was anarchy,” mentioned Rev. John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio throughout his Sunday sermon, earlier than happening to rally help for legislation enforcement, in accordance with the Associated Press.

Miles away in Kentucky, Brian Gibson, pastor and founding father of His Church, blamed the riot on antifa agitators, a conspiracy principle for which there is no such thing as a proof. 

“You don’t get 2 million people together without having some radicals in the crowd or some simple people in the crowd that you could lead anywhere, right?” he mentioned, additionally enormously exaggerating the scale of the gang that day.

In different locations, lecturers in public faculties that don’t depend on Christian textbooks are struggling to clarify to their college students the dynamics that allowed such violence to happen. In Chicago, highschool trainer Raven Althimer mentioned the tough realities of the rebellion together with her college students, who’re Black.

“They think of when they had Black Lives Matter over the summer, peacefully protesting, and were tear-gassed. People are literally storming the Capitol and nothing is happening to them,” Althimer informed HuffPost. “One of my students said, ‘If 20 of us had done that, we all would have been dead.’ I said, ‘No, 20 of you wouldn’t have even gotten that close.’”