Students Deserve to Know Religion’s Role in America’s Founding

While most American schoolchildren learn about the First Amendment, they are taught almost nothing about what God and religion really meant to the men and women who built, defended, and sustained our country. But Utah is now taking the lead in rectifying this glaring gap in history and civics education.

Rediscovering the crucial role of religion in our nation’s founding is especially important as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday and the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Put simply, there is no United States of America without faith. Students learning America’s story without understanding religion’s influence are being taught a version of history with its soul edited out.

Accordingly, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, recently signed into law an amended curriculum requirement for K-12 classrooms to “examine the role of religion in United States history and primacy of religious liberty to American constitutional government.” The law explicitly gives teachers permission to discuss the historical impact of religion to protect educators from legal threats of militant liberal activists bent on eradicating faith from schools and public life.

Predictably, anti-religious liberals are outraged. “We are not aware of another state requiring Bible instruction through statute this broadly and in this level of detail,” said Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Legal Director Patrick Elliott. He later added a chilling warning to grade school educators: “If a teacher violates students’ constitutional rights, they can be sued [and] can be held legally responsible.” (Elliott failed to explain how teaching students about Christianity’s undeniable central importance to the founding of the United States constituted a violation of their rights.)

Decades of these same vague threats have all but eliminated religion from American history lessons. Liberals have used Supreme Court cases prohibiting school-sponsored prayer or worship rituals to invoke fear anytime an instructor mentions religion in a public school, even in history lessons.

The resulting overly cautious approach by teachers is the intended effect of these anti-religious scare tactics. The result is often an erasure of the moral and religious motivations of the greatest heroes in American history. Students know dates and names, but they miss the motivations – the deeper struggle over liberty, justice, duty, and human dignity driven by faith that gave those moments meaning.

But the left’s threats won’t work this time. Utah’s law does not promote any particular religious belief. It simply seeks to accurately teach history as it unfolded, recognizing that not teaching about religion’s influence in our nation’s history is intellectual dishonesty.

History is not merely a timeline to memorize. It is a record of men and women facing moral questions that still confront us today: What is freedom? What do citizens owe one another? When students are denied that context, they are not being protected from controversy. They are being robbed of wisdom.

Schoolchildren may understand the historical significance of the Emancipation Proclamation in the timeline of the Civil War. But without understanding religion, they miss the moral context of why President Abraham Lincoln told his cabinet that he had made “a solemn vow with God” to issue “a declaration of freedom for the slaves” if the Union army were granted victory.

Highlighting the role of religion will help students understand that religion was often the catalyst for change in American history, from the American Revolution to the Civil War and later in the Civil Rights era.

The British complained about a “Black Robe Regiment” of influential clergymen who encouraged their parishioners to join George Washington and the Continental Army’s fight for American independence. Similarly, preaching during the Second Great Awakening influenced many Americans to join the abolitionists’ cause to end slavery in the United States because it stood in violation of the Christian principle that all are sons and daughters of the same loving God. And ministers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement, grounding their demand for equal treatment under the law in America’s constitutional promises and the moral authority of the Bible.

Thanks to Utah’s new law, students will learn that America’s earliest experiment in self-government began thanks to explicitly religious motivations. The Mayflower Compact opens with, “in the name of God, Amen,” underwriting the Pilgrims’ purpose in voyaging to the New World for “the Glory of God” and their freedom to worship God how they wished.

It is especially crucial during America’s semiquincentennial that students understand that the signers of The Declaration of Independence not only appealed to political theory when writing the founding document that forged us into a nation, but also to divine authority. The Declaration refers to “Nature’s God,” says rights are endowed by a “Creator,” appeals to the “Supreme Judge of the world,” and closes with reliance on “divine Providence.”

Ignoring religion’s role in the establishment and sustainment of America will continue to leave students ignorant of the inward conviction detailing the “why” surrounding historical events. When those same students later face similar conflict in their lives, they will have been denied the very moral instruction history is meant to provide. The example of our forebears will have been preserved in fact, but not as a lesson.

The First Amendment bars the government from establishing a state religion, but it does not require schools to pretend that religion played no part in building our nation. When religion is removed from the story, students are taught our history without its deepest arguments, its highest appeals, its fiercest convictions, and its most solemn vows.

Utah has restored a measure of sanity by empowering educators to teach students about the past as it actually happened.

It’s time for more states to summon the courage and stand up to the left’s anti-religious intimidation. Let’s pray the rest of America’s students will soon be allowed to also encounter the evidence of a civilization wrestling with the questions of right and wrong under the historical context of religious influence.

W.J. Lee has served in the White House, NASA, on multiple campaigns, and in nearly all levels of government.