Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

You've sacrificed for years to impart an accurate understanding of history in your homeschool. The complete opposite is occurring in America's colleges and universities. On today's Home School Heartbeat, Michael Farris discusses this troubling trend.

Michael Farris:


Senior writer for U.S. News and World Report Michael Barone describes a disturbing phenomenon in his article, "Forgetting the Founding Fathers." Barone notes that interest in America's founding has waned to an alarming degree, and today's history professors are instead consumed with studies in "race, gender, identity, and the like."


Those professors who do take an interest in colonial and revolutionary America are presenting an account the Founders themselves would not recognize. Jon Butler, a historian at Yale University, is one such individual. Butler takes advantage of every opportunity to prove that America's liberty, religious or otherwise, was the result of decidedly secular convictions. He cites Virginia's 1776 Declaration of Rights as evidence that Christianity was not a dominant force in early America because the Declaration protected religious freedom for all sects, not just Christians.


In this account, however, Butler ignores the rest of the very declaration he's citing, which says: "That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence," and "that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other."


Butler's assertions that religion had no impact on the founding aren't innocent; in the university classroom, the thoughts of such scholars warp the minds of the next generation.


I'm Mike Farris.