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The New York Times Magazine is making some waves with a feature entitled "How Christian Were The Founders?" It looks at the movement to rewrite history books and make it clear the Founding Fathers intended to create a Christian nation.

I don't see this movement as a positive thing, mostly because I think they're wrong. If the Founders wanted to create a Christian nation, they could have made that point quite clearly. Instead, they created a Constitution that never mentions a deity in its body, and a Declaration of Independence that only refers to a Deity in the most general, mechanistic terms. Certainly Jesus Christ is never invoked. The Founders may have believed religion to be a positive force, but they were also wary of it mixing too directly with politics.

Yes, certainly religion played an important role in our history. Don't textbooks already note this? And certainly most of the Founders were Christians--Protestants, in fact. But this new movement goes further and wants to emphasize our Christian past more than the facts warrant. As such, the people who support it, no matter how large in number, sound like any other special interest group--comparable to those who insist the Constitution is derived from the Iroquois. They make exaggerated claims and then want the curriculum to cater to them.

The odd thing is I honestly don't see what they think they'll be getting if they win this battle. For they seem to want to remake American society, not just its history lessons. Yet even if everyone started believing the Founders felt certain ways, how would it change life today? Imagine if we rewrote textbooks to claim the Founders always believed this nation would be composed mostly of Northern Europeans, and would reflect their outlook. I think the response would be "well, it didn't turn out exactly as they expected." And if the Founders thought this nation would be decidely Christian--not merely majority Christian, but have civic life built around it--then things didn't turn out that way, either. We have freedom of religion and a pluralistic way of doing things (even among Christians), and that's not going to change any time soon.