Religion in American History: Is a Balanced Narrative Possible?

by Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter Williams

In March 2010, the Texas State Board of Education capped nearly a year of discussion by approving a new social studies curriculum for the second largest state system in the United States. The crafting of the new curriculum provoked considerable controversy, particularly with the respect to the inclusion of references to the role of Christianity in the life of the nation.

“Textbooks are mostly the product of a liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,” said Don McLeroy, a dentist from Bryan, Texas, who served as a elected member of the school board. A little more than a year later, on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary formal commemoration of the attack on New York’s World Trade Center included no religious leaders.“We’re not France,” protested Richard D. Lord, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. New York Mayor “Mr. [Michael R.] Bloomberg is pretending we’re a secular society, and we are not.”

These two incidents point to major cultural tensions over religion’s presence and its role in the public square. In fact, as a number of academic American religious historians have noted, religion seems to be disappearing, or appearing only in highly circumscribed roles, in narratives of U.S. national history written in the last four decades.
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