Why History Matters

Why History Matters and why Christian history matters in particular

by Ted Byfield General Editor The Christian History Project

Why History Matters And why Christian History matters in particular

By Ted Byfield

© Ted Byfield, 2008 Any part of this booklet may be reprinted without permission but with attribution to the author and publisher Published by SEARCH – the Society to Explore and Record Christian History. Address: 203, 10441 178 Street, Edmonton, AB Canada. T5S 1R5

Copies of this booklet may be ordered from the publisher by telephoning the toll free line 1-888-234-4478, or through the publisher’s website christianhistoryproject.com The price is $7 per copy. The text may be downloaded free through the website.

“The democracies are losing the freedom which gives meaning to democracy, because they are losing that sense of direction which gives meaning to freedom.” – Hilda Neatby

“When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” –G.K. Chesterton

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” —Jesus Christ (Matthew 7:15)

To John E. Hokanson friend, benefactor, and believer

The 'simple rules,' without which we perish lease examine carefully the following five statements. They represent the kind of thing that may be heard any day in any office or job site, living room, board room, kitchen or pub, spoken by wealthy people or street people, literate people or illiterate, men or women, children or adults.

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“Okay, so we’ll meet there at five o’clock.” “I’ve got to return this shovel. It’s Charlie’s.” “She’s been in hospital for a week and I haven’t even visited her.” “No twelve-year-old should be out this late.” “But that’s what he said happened.” The point to note is that each of these statements implies a kind of expectation. The other person is expected to be there at five o’clock. If you borrow a shovel, you’re expected to return it. Just as people are expected to visit the sick, to control the whereabouts

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of their children, and to tell the truth. All five statements, that is, take for granted a kind of code of conduct, or standard of behaviour, that everybody can be assumed to recognize and respect. Simple morality, one might say. Simple perhaps, but also indispensable. A world in which no one could be expected to keep promises, to return what they borrow, to comfort the sick, to care for their children and to tell the truth would be a world that could not function. In the long run, these rules of conduct are as essential to our well-being as the food we eat and the air we breathe. They are the glue or thread that holds a civilization together. Sustaining them, which means sustaining their authority to guide and govern what we do, is necessary if the civilization is to survive. Something else is noteworthy. No previous civilization ever has survived; all past civilizations have perished. And the chief symptom of impending collapse was that respect for the rules began eroding. The glue failed, the thread broke, and they were gone. The rules of our own civilization—usually referred to as “the West” – originate in the ancient world. From the ancient Israelites, we derived our ideas about God. From the ancient Greeks, we derived our ideas about government. And from the ancient Romans we derived our concept of the civil law.1 These three strains were combined by the Christians into a unified whole known as Western civilization. Though certainly not without flaw, it has produced the most just, the most technologically proficient, the most compassionate, and the most prosperous society the world has ever known. And while it has become intellectually fashionable to deplore and denounce it, especially by critics living comfortably within it, the rest of the world seeks fervidly to emulate it or, better still, to move into it. 1. See. W.G. de Burgh, The Legacy of the Ancient World, Oxford, 1924.

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However, this influx of other peoples does not pose the threat to the West that is sometimes voiced. Indeed, Western society has been receiving and accommodating peoples from without ever since it began. Rather, it faces two other stresses, both of which could destroy it, though the second is much more insidious than the first. The first has come as the product of its success. Technological change, almost all of it innovated by the West, has been so astonishing, so swift and so sweeping over the last two centuries of the second Christian millennium that it threatens to sweep away everything that went before as obsolete, including many of the old rules for human behaviour. And yet they are as essential as they ever were. People must still be expected to do what they say they’re going to do, whether they’re running a biochemical experiment or a trapline. They are still expected to return what they borrow, whether it’s a shovel or a digital recording device. Their responsibility to the stricken is as imperative as it ever was, and so is the expectation that they can be relied upon to care for their family, and to tell the truth. So the necessity for the old rules is still very much there. In fact, a case can be made that it is more pressing than ever. The very complexity of our new technological world makes it much more vulnerable to subversive attack than was the old world. Knock out several major power plants and you could paralyze much of twenty-firstcentury eastern North America. Computers would stop. Airports would stop. Subways would stop. Elevators would stop. Gasoline pumps would stop. Furnaces would stop. Lights would go out. In northern cities in a severe winter, thousands would soon be in danger of freezing to death. Such swift and vast devastation would have been impossible in the nineteenth century. Technological society, that

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is, depends for its very survival on a high degree of behavioural conformity among the citizenry, something that terrorist movements have discovered and effectively exploited. But the other strain on “the rules” has proven far more lethal. For it strains them, not as an incidental effect of its activity, but because straining them, indeed effectually abolishing their foundation, is one of its central goals, what from the beginning it set out to do. What am I implying? Some kind of secret conspiracy to destroy our society? Not at all. No secret, no conspiracy. For what it has sought to do, it has been utterly candid about from the beginning. Moreover, it has taken over most of the levers that control the social machine, recruiting to its cause some of our best minds and most effective communicators. Curiously, however, very few of the latter seem to realize what they are actually communicating. And as the more astute among them become vaguely aware of this, their acute discomfort becomes evident. They tend to push the thought aside as something they do not wish to contemplate.

A deceptively unspectacular revolutionary o ascribe all this mischief to one man is, of course, excessive. Yet one man undeniably played a major role in the social and cultural revolution of America in the twentieth century. True, he was powerfully influenced by others who came before him—Rousseau, Hobbes, Darwin, Spencer—and helped by a coterie of like-minded revolutionaries who worked diligently alongside him. As in all revolutions, his message was carried by thousands of disciples who often went beyond anything the original visionary had proposed, though what they were doing was derived directly

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from what he taught. To most of these, however, he is today little more than a name. Very few have actually read what he wrote, let alone approve of what he was setting out to do, though they have often strenuously, if unwittingly, helped him do it. The man in question is the educator and philosopher John Dewey. The bare facts of his curriculum vitae are deceptively unspectacular. From a family of modest income, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Vermont in 1879, taught three years in high school and quit, received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1884, taught at the University of Michigan, then became a faculty member of the University of Chicago in 1894, soon after it opened, and established there experimental elementary and high schools. After a clash with the university administration he left for Columbia University in 1904 where he taught philosophy until his death in 1952. Creditable enough, but hardly the track record of a man who would more profoundly affect the culture and thinking of Americans than any twentieth-century president. However, that was because he knew something that no president since Thomas Jefferson has ever fully understood, namely that the way to fundamentally reshape a society is not by changing its citizens, but by changing their children—more specifically, by radically changing those who teach their children. For the teachers could change the children, and the children would become the citizens and voters of tomorrow. Dewey’s agenda was not, in its ultimate goal, educational. It was political. Like the founders of America, indeed of all the Western democracies, he was obsessed with the idea of freedom. But his object was to establish a new kind of freedom. While people were free to vote and many were free to choose paths that could lead them to wealth and comfort, they were not in Dewey’s view truly free.

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All but a few advanced thinkers were prisoners of traditionalist thought and morality that prevented them from achieving genuine freedom and becoming their “true selves.” It was this kind of freedom that he sought for all. He had achieved it himself; he wanted to confer it on everyone. He envisioned a new civilization, liberated from its ancient taboos and enslavement to outdated creeds and codes of conduct. Once delivered from this old morality, humanity would reach through science destinies vastly beyond present human imagination, he said. And the road to this nirvana lay not through some Marxist or Fascist revolution, but through an educational one. To Dewey, you didn’t need the politicians. If you could change the way the people thought, the politicians would have no choice but to go along with the new order. Over his lifetime he published some sixteen books, enunciating convulsive changes in education that would render the new schools unrecognizable to those who had attended the old. His vision was embraced, indeed devoured, not initially by teachers, but by “educators”—those who teach teachers—a species that Dewey’s era virtually brought into existence. Decade after decade a torrent of Deweyite disciples poured forth from Columbia University Teachers College, skilfully administered by Dewey’s senior lieutenant in the revolution, W.H. Kilpatrick. What could be more impressive than an education degree from Columbia? They rapidly infused his ideas into the new “faculties of education,” themselves largely a product of Deweyism. These gradually supplanted the old and hopelessly hidebound “normal schools.” Meanwhile, Dewey himself carried his ideas to the world in what he saw as personal “missions.” He favoured such biblical terms, sometimes referring to his message as “the gospel.” It proved a gospel eagerly embraced in the Soviet Union.

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Its principles became the foundational assumption of the new educators.2 The schools, they knew, must be used to work a wholesale rejection of all the old ideas about human nature. The concept of good and evil must be abolished, wrote Dewey. Such qualities as honesty, courage, industry and chastity must no longer be cherished, while things like malice, vindictiveness and irresponsibility need no longer be deplored. Such conduct is merely the response of the individual to the conditions around him. Indeed nothing should be transmitted to students from the legacy of previous generations. Whatever moral conclusions the student may reach, he must reach solely on the basis of his own experience. Most important, he must not see himself as somehow “judged” by what he does or doesn’t do. The idea of individual “blame” must be eradicated. He must regard himself as part of a community, part of “the public.” If a crime is committed, the criminal must not be considered responsible. The community as a whole must have somehow failed him. So too must the idea of the “will” be abolished. The concept that the individual “chooses” between good and evil leads only to the defeat of “selfhood.” There is no such thing as the human “will,” he said, and the old moral boundaries between good and evil have become obsolete and invalid. Moreover, gender stereotyping must be stopped. There must be no such thing as boys’ books and girls’ books, or boys’ games and girls’ games, because such distinctions serve to perpetuate the old order. His ideas would “destroy many things once cherished,” Dewey allowed, but that was the unfortunate price of human progress. 2. A comprehensive and understandable critique of Dewey’s work was written by Henry T. Edmondson, professor of political science and public administration at Georgia State University and director of the Center for Transatlantic Studies. It is is entitled John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Delaware, in 2006.

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The convulsive change in the schools s the 20th century unfolded, these concepts began taking deep root in the education faculties and appearing in the schools. Gradually, the teacher ceased being an authority figure in the classroom. She must instead become a guide, a counsellor, a friend, said Dewey. Student desks must be rearranged in such a way as to overcome any suggestion of managerial leadership. The students must learn to lead themselves. Any attempt by a teacher to impose structure—pass/fail, good/bad, right/wrong— must be viewed as a form of “pedagogical abuse.”

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Indeed, all semblance of superiority or inferiority must vanish. Report cards must no longer carry grade standings. Anything that suggests standards of performance must not appear. Children must not be criticized for making “mistakes,” nor be admonished to “sit still” because this may thwart their inner impulses. Checking those impulses must be considered another form of “abuse,” for they are the means by which the child expresses creativity. No student should be singled out for a distinctly good performance, nor certainly for a distinctly bad one, because the whole idea of good and bad must be removed form the child’s mind. “Self-esteem” must be encouraged in every possible way, but never predicated on actual performance. The student should esteem himself because he is a self, not because he has actually accomplished anything. Learning to read must be considered a useful thing, but not a primary essential. What ultimately matters is not what skills the child acquires, but whether he is becoming a “social being.” Similarly, in the higher grades “critical thinking” must be fostered, but it consisted of encouraging the student to question and challenge 8

the assumptions of the old order, especially those of his parents. A young adult who had learned to challenge the qualities and morality revered by his parents was deemed to be “thinking critically.” One who continued to respect and adhere to them was not thinking critically. His education had plainly failed him.3 In the 1940s, an unforeseen development sharply checked the educational revolution, notably the Second World War. Suddenly qualities like honour, courage, duty, tradition and responsibility became not only praiseworthy, but crucial. Without them, the Western democracies would certainly lose. By the ’fifties, however, the war was safely over, and the revolution in the schools resumed with full vigour. Old teachers resisted. Indeed, some courageously continued to battle the Deweyite revolution for the next half century. But such opposition was soon swept aside by the tens of thousands of young teachers pouring forth from the new faculties of education. These saw themselves as the harbingers of a new kind of society, with a new kind of citizen, that they were commissioned to bring into being. Entire school systems embraced the new ideas. Dewey himself, before he died, became a hallowed figure, the man who had liberated America from the narrow intolerance and vicious bigotry of its past. At his ninetieth birthday, tributes came in from all over the world, for by now his works had been translated into eight other languages.

3. Lest anyone conclude that children today are no longer under such influence, he should observe the current books for young people by Neale Donald Walsch, regularly on the New York Times best seller list, with such titles as Conversations With God and Conversations with God for Teens. Typically, “God” is represented as approving pre-marital sex, sexual deviation, and whatever other sexual conduct commends itself. In one instance, a girl asks about God’s forgiveness of sin. Walsch portrays “God” as replying: “I do not forgive anyone because there is nothing to forgive. There is no such thing as right or wrong and that is what I have been trying to tell everyone.” However dubious the Divine credentials, it’s certainly what John Dewey was trying to tell everyone. Conversations With God is currently being made into a Hollywood movie.

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As the American public system embraced the new “progressive” aims and methods, Canadian educators were at first nervous. They feared that Canada’s natural conservatism would sharply resist such innovations. They soon discovered, however, that Canada’s supposed commitment to conservatism was actually a commitment to conformity. Canadians would do whatever respectable authority approved. When it became evident “reputable educators” were urging these changes, that’s all they needed to know.

Pleasant young men of mediocre intelligence rom the start, it is true, there were discordant voices in the U.S., some of them authoritative. Parents and students, said one, “must be induced to abandon the educational path that, rather blindly, they have been following as a result of John Dewey’s teachings.” That voice belonged to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. A more raucous note was sounded by the acerbic Christian novelist Flannery O’Connor: “My advice to parents is… Anything that Wm. Heard Kilpatrick & Jhn. Dewey say to do, don’t do.”

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Canada produced its critics too, first and foremost among them a notable historian, Dr. Hilda Neatby of the University of Saskatchewan whose critique of Deweyism, So Little for the Mind, (Clarke, Irwin, Toronto, 1953) stirred rage across the Deweyite establishment, already securely ensconcing itself in various provincial departments of education. Dewey, wrote Professor Neatby, “is not only unintentionally antiintellectual, he is, it seems, quite deliberately anti-cultural… even ferociously amoral in his method and discipline.” Deweyism “is not

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liberation; it is indoctrination both intellectual and moral.” Dewey had translated the mantra “education is life” into “an injunction to the school to take over every part of a child’s life and every function of society. The family and church are ignored or patronized.” Moreover, she continued, there is strong evidence that Deweyism is being ruthlessly forced into the school system, and any challenge to it is harshly rejected in the education faculties. She quoted one Canadian student’s impression: “The atmosphere there curiously prefigured the authoritarian state. Any independent thought, any deviation from the Moscow line (for Moscow read, Teachers’ College, Columbia) is criminal non-cooperativeness and sabotage… Native common sense has no validity, and the candidate for certification who attempts to use it is warned of the consequences with a candour and directness which Molotov (a senior Stalinist lieutenant) could not have improved on.” The result, said Professor Neatby, was that the most competent students were discouraged from the teaching profession: “The soldier, the doctor, the business executive and the technician who wish to get on can do so by continued study and practice in the field which they have chosen. This is not true of the teacher. He must bid farewell to culture and genuine intellectual pursuits, and concentrate upon the endless minutiae and jargons which we dignify with the name of pedagogical studies.” The result was sadly evident in the departments of education: “The stars of the educational firmament today are too often bright young men of neat appearance, pleasant personality and mediocre intelligence.” Her book was studiously ignored in education circles, where she was personally shunned. Searching the Canadian news media of the day, she could find almost no interest in the changes being implemented

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in the schools – a couple of editorials in the Victoria Times Colonist, a protest from one columnist in the Globe and Mail, little more—the absence of criticism suggesting a general acquiescence with the new methods. Canadian newspapers would have grave cause to rue this 20 or so years later when their “penetration” of the market (meaning the percentage of the population who buy newspapers) began a slide which has never been arrested. They resignedly blame television. That was certainly one factor. But the other was the general illiteracy which the new schools were engendering and which the print media did nothing to resist. Too late, they discovered, people who can’t read, can’t read newspapers. Fifteen years after the Neatby book, Deweyism made its greatest advance in Canada through an Ontario study co-chaired by Mr. Justice Emmett Hall4 and a former Ontario high school teacher and Education Department consultant named Lloyd A Dennis. The “Hall-Dennis Report,” issued in 1968, became a Canadian beacon of Deweyite philosophy. Children are portrayed as invariably good; punishment as invariably bad. Poor performance by children is the fault of the system or the teacher, not the child. Learning should never be an unpleasant or arduous experience. Democracy should begin in the classroom. The teacher’s chief task is to understand the child, not to convey knowledge or skills. Exams must go, grade standing must go, punishment must go,

4. Emmett Matthew Hall (1898-1995), one of Canada’s foremost jurists and leftwing reformers, was a socialist in conservative clothing. After a youth spent on a Saskatchewan dairy farm and a long career as a Saskatchewan lawyer, he became known as an admirer of rough frontier values and the spirit of free enterprise. Opponents of medicare rejoiced in 1964 therefore when he was appointed to head an inquiry into a possible state-run health care system for Canada. To their horror, he recommended that socialist Saskatchewan’s system be extended to cover the whole country. Though certainly not without its detractors and problems, Medicare has enjoyed substantial public support in Canada ever since. Mr. Justice Hall’s infatuation with Deweyism is harder to comprehend and would hasten the educational catastrophe.

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and the child himself should a have a considerable voice in whether he passes or fails. The report was thoroughly eviscerated by Dr. James Daly, an associate professor of history at McMaster University, who in his book, “Education or Molasses?” challenged nearly all its recommendations, concluding that it was founded on an astonishingly naïve view of human nature, that it evaded the central problems of teaching morality in a pluralistic society, and encouraged rebellion against existing authority, while offering nothing whatever to replace it.5

The inconvenient obstinacy of mathematics uch negativity was, of course, dismissed as the death moans of a dying culture. Not so easily dismissed was the system’s inability to cope with such formidable obstacles as reading, spelling, English grammar and mathematics. Spelling was particularly distasteful to the Deweyite because it suggested a “right way” (and therefore “wrong ways”) to compose a word. There were such things, that is, as spelling “mistakes.” These, said the Deweyites, should be either overlooked by the teacher or observed

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5. Alberta had a parallel for the Hall-Dennis Report that emerged in 1971, the year the Conservative government of Peter Lougheed took office.Written by the University of Alberta’s dean of education, Walter Holmes Worth, the “Worth Report” directed the new government’s education policy for several years until, it was said, one of Lougheed’s children brought home from high school a book on “The Future.” Examining it, Lougheed asked his son what it was. “It’s about the future,” came the reply. “We’re studying the future.” “The future?” gasped Lougheed. “You hardly know anything about the past!” Inquiring, he found the book had been chosen to help fulfill the recommendations of the Worth Report. So for the first time, he actually read this document. Concluding it was “sheer nonsense,” he ordered changes in Alberta’s education policy, and the province was soon leading the country in efforts to repair the chaos created by its venture into Deweyist education.

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in passing but not “judgmentally.”6 The new kind of citizen didn’t need to bother about spelling, even if what he sometimes wrote began to resemble gibberish. Grammar posed a further challenge. Ostensibly, it was taught to enable a student to write confidently. He knew the rules so well that they became habitual. But to Dewey, a student’s confidence should not require such a prop. Grammatical rules were part of the past and could be ignored. The objective, remember, was to cleanse the youthful mind of the whole concept of “rules.” But grammar had always been taught for another reason. It was analytical. It required the student to know whether a group of words was or was not a sentence. It required him to break sentences into their component parts, to detect the function of each word, to discern how it worked with the other words to create a rational whole, the sentence. Its function, that is, was to introduce the process of reason. But to Dewey this kind of exercise was destructive. It conveyed the idea that there was a valid structure, the rational, to which acceptable human thought must conform. Irrational thought must be rejected. In other words, reason and the rules of reason were in fact authoritarian—to the Deweyites a very bad thing. So the study of logic was abolished from the post-secondary curriculum, and grammar, its introductory discipline, all but disappeared from elementary and secondary schools. Which left mathematics. For the Deweyites, this was an awkward area because it was difficult to teach without allowing for the concept 6. It’s interesting to examine the way the Dewey era has changed the moral value placed on two English verbs – “to judge” and “to discriminate.” Where we once commended a man “of judgment,” we now denounce “judgmental” people. Where we once admired a “discriminating” person, we now deplore and even prosecute “discrimination.” Behind this philological change, of course, lies the Dewey doctrine that good and bad, true and false, right and wrong do not exist.

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of “the mistake,” or even more dastardly, “the wrong answer.” Fivetimes-five would equal twenty-five, however much Johnny would prefer that it equal something else, and even the Deweyites could see that Johnny might get into serious trouble later with his own personally developed multiplication table. So it was finally resolved that the child must himself “experience” the multiplication table, discovering that when he multiplied five times five, things generally turned out better for him if he took the answer to be twenty-five. However, great care must be taken to assure that some other answer was not in any sense “wrong” because “right” and “wrong” did not exist. Beyond all these problematic areas there remained one other “subject”7 which, unless very carefully manipulated, had within itself the power to undermine the entire Deweyite construct. That subject was history. Though in the past it had often been taught badly –often limited to the laborious memorization of dates, names and dull data–Dewey knew that history could also be taught with such compelling effect upon the student that it would renew in his mind all the pernicious old ideas (as Dewey saw them) that must be destroyed. “It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of anecdotes to be drawn on to inculcate moral lessons on this virtue or that vice,” he wrote. “But such a teaching is not so much an ethical use of history as it is an effort to create moral impressions by means of more or less authentic material. At best it produces a temporary emotional glow.” Notice the implication. It is possible to use historical films on, say, the Nazi Holocaust to “create the moral impression” that such

7. Dewey opposed the entire concept of “subjects” in education. Learning, he said, must be “a whole,” and things experienced rather than taught. “Subjects” were purely a manmade and man-imposed contrivance to establish a “structure” to knowledge. But knowledge is best conveyed without structure, he said.

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things ought not to happen. Or in Canada to tell the story of Vimy Ridge or the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway to inspire admiration for courage or human enterprise and ingenuity. But this is “the practice of an earlier age.” Since it “is not useful to contribute to the development of the social intelligence,” it is pointless. History, however, could not be simply dropped wholly from the curriculum. Its absence would be noticed and this would have to be explained to an audience that might not understand. So instead it was amalgamated into “social studies” and restricted to what Dewey called “the relevant.” Thus fragments of it could be summoned here and there to reinforce a social cause8. But it must not be taught as a coherent story, unfolding era by era across time, because this would confer on it a dangerous credibility, in other words an authority. So a coherent presentation of the history must be discouraged. Above all, History’s uncertainties must be emphasized. Since all the existing records were ultimately somebody’s viewpoint, biased, subjective, essentially fictional, we can learn little from the past. That was the message.9

8. When I taught in a boys’ school, I remember asking an applicant student: “Who was Sir John A. Macdonald?” The boy replied, “Why, he’s the man who ordered the hanging of Louis Riel.” Did he know anything else about Macdonald, I asked. No, replied the boy, he did not. This puzzled me. Macdonald was the chief architect of the Canadian confederation, and our first prime minister, who spread the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and largely achieved its independence from Britain. Why did the boy not know any of this, yet did know of Macdonald’s decision to execute a convicted insurrectionist leader in the West? The boy had a ready explanation. Riel led a minority group, the Metis, he said, “and we studied minorities in social studies.”

9. The contention that all historical records are somebody’s “viewpoint” has been used to discredit history as a criterion of established fact. However, the contention is flawed. Here are four historical statements: 1. “Martin Luther King died. 2. “Martin Luther King was killed.” 3. “Martin Luther king was assassinated.” 4. “Martin Luther King was martyred.” The fourth may be a viewpoint; the other three are not. The contention that since the fourth is a viewpoint, they must all be mere viewpoints is irrational. The historical record, like our memory, is certainly subject to error. What we recall happening and what actually happened can differ. But we can scarcely go from there to conclude that our memory is therefore useless and we’re all no better than amnesiacs.

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Dewey triumphant: The ’Sixties Revolution y the early ’sixties, the first products of the new elementary and secondary schools burst upon the universities, creating what we know as the ’Sixties Revolution. To describe that phenomenon is beyond the scope of this essay, but certain aspects of it should be noted. As part of the generation responsible for raising the ’Sixties one, I can write reminiscently. It descended upon us like a tornado—loud, bewildering, incomprehensible, terrifying, sometimes wantonly destructive, a veritable nightmare.

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They were our children all right, but suddenly they had become unrecognizable. Their dress was strange; they seemed to be adopting dirt and rags as a kind of uniform. The males began to look like the females in that their hair grew long, though it was rarely combed, just as they had beards that they did not trim. Some began hanging trinkets from the ears and nose, much like savages. Their music was similarly aboriginal—all tempo and no discernible melody, inane lyrics (inane to us, anyway) and best sung through the nose, rather than from the throat. To be properly enjoyed, it must vibrate the whole premises from which it originated, and be audible at least one half block away. The young revolutionaries placed a great emphasis upon what they called “love.” Though the scope and meaning of the word was never actually defined, they were sure of one thing: their parents knew nothing about it. It apparently applied exclusively to under-empowered social groups and underprivileged peoples whose interests they championed aggressively. Whether they significantly furthered the wellbeing of those groups has been debated ever since. It certainly opened for them greater opportunities which many took advantage of. But it

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also implanted a sense of entitlement, very new to the democratic culture. That is, social advance, rather than something to be earned, became something to be demanded and bestowed, an ominous and costly departure from the tradition. Wherever else “love” might be applied, it soon became evident that the revolutionaries did not reliably extend it to what sociologists call “interpersonal relations.” In fact, they went on to establish what is probably the highest divorce rate of any society in human history. To contend that Dewey sought to create a world in which people felt no obligation to keep promises, pay their debts, tell the truth, relieve suffering, and care for their children is, of course, unfair. He was altogether aware that such rules were ultimately essential. But he diligently sought to destroy the existing basis for them. Children should be taught to do whatever serves “the community” or the public good,” he said. But each child was to decide for himself what this might be. In short, each was to make up his own rules, decide his own morality, and the byword of the era became, “Do your own thing.” This was most evident in the sphere of sexual relations. Concomitant with the ’Sixties Revolution came the Sexual Revolution, though its origins were as much technological as educational. Birth control, that is, became more accessible and dependable. Men wanted the freedom of sexual license without consequent marital responsibility. So why should they not have it, demanded Hugh Hefner through his Playboy magazine, which deftly conferred high-style market acceptance on the hitherto pornographic. The response of women was the Feminist Revolution, which presented itself as a quest for freedom from the tyranny of the man. But the real tyrant, as the woman well knew, was not the man, but the child. The consequence was a startling plunge in the birthrate, accompanied ironically by a demand for the legalization of abortion— 18

an irony because improved birth control should have meant fewer unwanted pregnancies, not more, and a diminished, not greater, demand for abortion. But the new freedom generated more unwanted pregnancies than ever, and it was soon discovered that “love” did not apply to unwanted babies. Though genetic science quietly affirmed that some fifty or more physical and mental qualities of the individual who is to become you or me are determined at the instant of conception, this was dismissed or ignored. What mattered was the woman’s “freedom to choose,” nothing else, and Canada went on to adopt the world’s most unrestricted access to abortion. But “love” very much did apply to those who practiced what had previously been deemed the unacceptable. Over a seventy-year period, such things as adultery, sodomy and extra-marital sex advanced from the status of criminal conduct in some jurisdictions to become first legal, then acceptable, then even admirable—so admirable that to question almost any sexual practice was deemed an outrageous bigotry.10 Just as “love” was all-important, so too was “peace.” Peace must at all costs be preserved. This could be done, as one un-emancipated commentator had dryly observed, “by scoffing at generals and reading newspapers.” By the ’Sixties, peace was to be safeguarded by

10. A “scientific” basis for the Sexual Revolution was furnished by Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the University of Chicago in two “studies” — Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Kinsey was neither a psychologist nor a physician, but an entomologist. His field of study had been bugs. His reports, however, purporting to describe the bizarre sexual behaviour of average Americans, both shocked and intrigued a nation, astonished to discover that this must be the way the folks next door carry on, (though they certainly didn’t themselves). The print media, whose gullibility for anything claiming “scientific credentials” was then (and still is) monumental, swallowed both reports whole, and from that point assured the world Kinsey had disclosed what routinely transpired in the bedrooms of America. It was later discovered, however, that Kinsey’s study of the sex lives of Americans was based on interviews with homosexuals, prison inmates, prostitutes, paedophiles, and those who eagerly discussed their sexual predilections with total strangers. Since these could hardly be called typical, the Kinsey reports were plainly frauds, but two generations of Canadians and Americans had been taken in by them.

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holding marches and public demonstrations and by learning to appreciate the virtues of slave states like Soviet Russia and Communist China. In the great test of the era, Viet-Nam, the ’Sixties Generation distinguished itself by losing the only war the United States had lost in its two-hundred-year history. Though its assumptions were by now becoming embedded in the culture, the exhibitionist manifestations of the revolution came to an abrupt end on a fixed date. On May 4, 1970, during a protest rally at Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a student crowd. Four were killed and nine wounded. There was, of course, universal outrage, but it’s notable that thereafter protest marches and rallies rapidly declined and soon disappeared. It was no longer fun. It was dangerous.11

The four keys that control society y now however, as Dewey planned, the new order had spread from the schools to take over the whole culture, principally through the vastly expanded universities built by history’s most affluent society, on the proceeds of the greatest economic advance the world had ever known. What at the beginning of the century had been the theory of a handful of academics at Chicago and Columbia by the century’s last decades

B

11. Thomas Carlyle in his history of the French Revolution tells how the Paris mobs, uncontrollable for years, were sharply and permanently subdued by a young French officer who turned the cannon on them and gave them what he called “a whiff of grapeshot.” The whole revolution, says Carlyle was at that instant “blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!” The Kent State incident had the same effect. The young officer’s name was Napoleon Bonaparte.

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had become the mindset of an entire generation of journalists, novelists, musicians, television producers, advertising executives, “forward-thinking” clergymen and, of course, school teachers. In this process, however, a certain deception was worked. The ’Sixties Generation certainly had the numbers. Their immediate forebears, having survived the Great Depression and then fought and won the Second World War, had come home to establish the twentieth century’s highest birth rate. But it was not their numbers that achieved the victory of the revolutionaries. In fact, it later became evident that they had converted only an insignificant fraction of their own generation. However, by shrewdly concentrating themselves in the four pivotal areas of modern society–the academy, the media, the bureaucracy and the seminaries of the mainline Christian denominations, including the Catholics—they were able to misrepresent the society as having wholly changed, when most of it had not. In fact, two incompatible societies began existing side by side – the minority one portrayed as a majority by the media and the “advanced” educators, bureaucrats and clergymen, the other by the increasingly bewildered majority.12 12. One figure revered in anthropological circles for much of the 20th Century was Margaret Mead. Her famous book, Coming of Age in Samoa–describing an idyllic, non-violent, free-loving Pacific island society, which encouraged pre-marital sex and recognized few restraining sexual rules at all—became required reading in first-year anthropology courses throughout the English-speaking world. In 1983, another anthropologist, Derek Freeman, having lived on the same islands for years, published another study of the Samoans that refuted Mead’s book in almost every particular. She was the victim, he said, of a Samoan hoax. The Samoans were in fact an exceedingly puritanical people with rigid rules against sexual promiscuity, though they had a mischievous sense of humor. Later yet another senior anthropologist, Dr. Martin Orans, emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, apologized for the way he and his colleagues had also been drawn in by the hoax. “The greatest fault lies,” he writes, “with those of us like myself who understood the requirements of science, but both failed to point out the deficiencies of Mead’s work and tacitly supported such enterprise by repeatedly assigning it to students.” Mead had gone to Samoa, said Freeman, pre-eminently to affirm the social views of her beloved mentor, Dr. Franz Boas. Boas’s close associate at Columbia for 31 years: John Dewey.

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One area of learning, however, remained of necessity proof against the revolution, notably the physical (as distinct from the social) sciences. Here, facts had to remain facts, and rules had to remain rules. In physics and chemistry, things were either proven or they weren’t. Experiments could fail, and so could students. Mistakes were real. Standards must be sustained. Here, in other words, authority remained firmly in place. But the humanities, wallowing in their new boundless “freedom” and captive to whatever “liberated” interest group could gain access to them, gradually declined into practical insignificance. Looking back on his years in high school, one male Canadian student I know sadly observed: “My literature courses were courses in feminism, my social studies courses were courses in socialism, and my sciences courses were courses in environmentalism. The only thing they couldn’t wreck was maths. I don’t want another four years of this in university, and I don’t want to take science or engineering, so why bother going?” He was not alone. Over the years of the Deweyite revolution, university registration as a whole changed from 60 percent male to 60 percent female. The female majority in the humanities alone is much higher. Meanwhile, drop-out rates in high schools run four-to-one male. Most males, one must conclude, can learn best in a world of right-wrong, true-false, good-bad, pass-fail, win-lose. The so-called “alpha males”–often the ones with the liveliest imaginations, the greatest potential and therefore the hardest to control, meaning the least able to see themselves as “social beings”–were proving impossible to educate. Some observers saw an explanation for this. Back to the beginnings of the human race, rambunctious young males had been controlled by simply spanking them. But the new Dewey generation was

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the first one to discover that “violence teaches violence,” so they used drugs instead and sedated the obstreperous males into dazed acquiescence. In the process, they somehow managed to raise what is arguably the most violent generation of children we have ever known. The role of drugs in the revolution was not confined to tranquilizing rambunctious little boys. The ’Sixties introduced youth to the world of pot, speed, crack, methadone and other chemical novelties, in the course of this wrecking the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people. Surely, one might respond, you’re not blaming John Dewey for creating the drug scourge. No, not precisely for creating it, but for undermining and destroying the moral barriers that would otherwise have obstructed it. Before his “progressive educators” arrived, the response the pushers would have encountered among young people would have been: “We don’t do that kind of stuff.” And by we, they would have meant their people, their crowd, their town, their country, their society, and more than anything else their parents, their family and the members of their church or synagogue. But these were the very people Dewey had diligently trained them to oppose. These were “the Establishment.” These were the old “Authority,” the people who must be superseded. So the barriers were down and the “drug culture” was born—a multi-billion-dollar industry, both in selling the product and in coping with the massive crime it brought into being.

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The consequence: an educational catastrophe ery soon came disturbing reports that kids weren’t actually learning much. The schools were costing more. Teacher salaries, once abysmally low, now appeared altogether adequate. But children didn’t seem to read as well. Many were unquestionably illiterate and some could not add, subtract, multiply or divide. Moreover, the schools had become laboratories for esoteric experimentation. In the 1960s came “new maths,” which by the 1970s had been quietly dumped as a failure. “Whole language” reading instruction came in with the ’Eighties and was mostly out by the end of the ’Nineties. How many lives had meanwhile been ruined by this irresponsible dickering, no one cared to say.

V

Then in 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Education produced a report that shook the American educational establishment to the core. It was entitled “A Nation At Risk.” In clear terms with unassailable data, it painted the picture of an educational catastrophe, revealing that the American school system, once one of the best in the industrialized world, was now one of the worst. There had been a steady drop for some years in Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores and the American College Test (ACT). (Canadian schools had no equivalent for such tests.) There had appeared a growing need for the universities to provide remedial classes to teach what the elementary and secondary schools had failed to teach. The performance of American students on international test scores was steadily declining. Knowledge of the great works of literature had virtually disappeared and all tests showed a deepening and repulsive ignorance of historical fact. Finally, the American level of “functional illiteracy” was higher than that of any other industrialized nation.

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Many wondered: How had this whole calamity been allowed to happen? Where were the defenders of our literary heritage when our literary heritage was being pitched out? Where indeed were the historians when their subject was being reduced to at best a dispensable adjunct of sociology? Even more astonishing: Where were the Christians when the whole premise of their teaching and theology was being rendered absurd? (How could Christ have died for our sins when there was no such thing as sin—or good or evil, or right or wrong?) It soon became evident that even Christian schools had been blind to the fact that what their teachers were being required to learn in education college to gain the indispensable government “teaching certificate” was fundamentally incompatible with what was being taught by the Bible and by their churches. Even most state-supported Catholic schools in Canada had so obediently embraced the new ideas that their curricula became largely indistinguishable from those of the public schools. But why should this have been surprising? Dewey himself was an avowed atheist. He saw the traditional teachings of the churches as a “delusion,” which erected “obstacles to a student’s intellectual and moral growth.” Religion engendered “a slave mentality.” It recognized “an intolerant superiority on the part of a few,” while imposing “an intolerable burden on the part of the many.” To Dewey, Christianity was “ a dying myth.” Christians were “preoccupied with the state of their character and concerned with the purity of their motives and the goodness of their souls.” All this was a form of ”spiritual egotism.” Teachers must strive to remove “the crutch of dogma” and “of beliefs fixed by authority.” They must seek to “liberate” people from Christianity and teach them instead “the service of the community.”

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Fifteen years after “A Nation At Risk” was published came a new report, “A Nation Still At Risk.” It brought the doleful news that despite supposedly herculean efforts to improve the schools nothing much had changed. Some 30 percent of freshmen entering university were in need of remedial courses in reading, writing, and mathematics, said the report. In California the figure was 50 per cent. “Employers report difficulty finding people to hire who have the skills, knowledge, habits, and attitudes they require for technologically sophisticated positions.” This second report found that American 12th graders scored near the bottom on the latest International Math and Science Study—19th out of 21 developed nations in math, and 16th out of 21 in science. “Our advanced students did even worse, scoring dead last in physics.” Why, asked the second report, had the many reforms proposed by the first report gone unfulfilled? It answered its own question: The authors of the first had “underestimated the resilience of the status quo and the strength of the interests wedded to it.” One of them, a former Minnesota governor, observed: “At that time I had no idea that the system was so reluctant to change.” Reluctant yes, but also incapable. Those who run the system were so deeply infected with the flawed philosophy lying behind it that they could comprehend no other. So a doleful conclusion seemed inescapable: The system cannot repair itself. No significant change in the schools could occur without somehow supplanting the Dewey philosophy which continues to inhibit any serious restoration of standards. However, to say that such a sweeping change is impossible would argue against the first contention of this essay, notably that Dewey and his fellow educators in fact worked just such a transformation which in turn went on to transform the whole society. Dewey himself, that is,

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may have shown us the way to defeat Deweyism. But it would involve a counter-revolution in the faculties of education as convulsive as the one Dewey engineered. And even if such a phenomenon could be brought about, it would still take at least two generations to restore the effectiveness of the schools. Do we have that much time? In the competitive modern “global” environment, with the educational performance of other nations soaring above the North American, it seems most unlikely. There was an even deeper problem, which Dewey himself acknowledged, and for which he offered no solution. A distinct amorality was becoming evident in society. The “self,” as it came to be called, was becoming the only value of the “Me Generation.” The Deweyite schools had successfully abolished the foundation under the old rules, but had found nothing workable to replace it. “Science,” Dewey was confident, would supplant the religious and traditional basis for ethical behaviour. But this is something of which science is incapable. That is, it can exhaustively describe how human beings behave. But it cannot authoritatively assert how they should behave or ought to behave. Sociologists might draw up rules for an ideal society, but precisely what obligates the individual to respect those rules? One might reply: “the general welfare of humanity.” But what obligates the individual to heed this “general welfare of humanity?” Suppose he elects instead to “look after No. 1?” Is he wrong? But how can he be wrong if there was no such thing? Dewey had turned to “science” for an answer, and science was of necessity silent. So too, it became clear, were the educators. Only they could save the schools, and they didn’t know how.

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The human instinct Dewey feared There is, however, another option, not in itself a solution, but something that would help pave the way to the kind of educational cataclysm that salvaging the school system will require. Most people have within themselves an element that few Deweyites understand, though Dewey himself plainly understood it and feared it. He no doubt saw it as an instrument capable of powerfully reinforcing the very beliefs, attitudes, rules and values that he strove so zealously to eradicate. That instrument is history. There exists among many humans an understandable desire to discover how they got here. They know of course the biological answer, but as an account of the way in which towns, toilets, baseball, rocketry, music, fire hydrants, archbishops, fashion shows, bank robberies, traffic accidents, socialism, television and all the other zillion things they see around them came about, biology alone does not offer a satisfactory explanation. Nor do any of the other sciences. What does offer it is history. Perhaps that’s why the historical, properly presented, often has a strange effect upon the modern psyche. History can become a sort of addiction, a good addiction, afflicting people of all ages and both sexes, of widely different educational levels, of different professional backgrounds, trades or careers, nationalities or religions. Such an addiction customarily develops when someone, often with little previous exposure to history, comes upon some person or event in the past, or perhaps merely the site of such an event, and finds developing in himself a keen fascination with this person, place or thing. He yearns to know more about it. He searches libraries, lays out money to buy books, and haunts the web seeking out others with a similar interest.

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It need not be some exotic figure from the past. It can be a personal ancestor, or a long-dead municipal politician, or even an abandoned railway line, or a deserted village. It holds, he realizes, a story, and he wants to know all about that story. So he pursues it, and in so doing to he begins to make a number of discoveries. His deserted village, for example, he finds was once a bustling community with a mayor and council and a school and a volunteer fire department. In an odd way, he begins to feel at home in that village. He knows some of the local people by name. But he also discovers that almost everything that happened there was determined by events outside it–by the province or state, which had a story of its own, which in turn was connected to other stories involving the whole country and a whole era in which all these things were going on. So his interest in the village carries him to things well beyond it, to a whole world of people and events, all of whom, he strangely begins to understand and somehow identify with. For he has also found out how similar they are to the people of his own day, though they lived a very long time ago. Living conditions certainly have changed, but people have not. Then he discovers something else. He is beginning to develop a broad picture of the past. His interest in the village has served as a path leading into a great forest. He has followed the path and found that it led to other paths, which in turn led to still others, until he was able to form in his mind a map of a whole section of the forest. This in turn connected to other sections he did not know, but which would no doubt all have stories of their own. Strangest of all, the result of this experience has been to subtly change his view of the place and time in which he himself is living. He once would have called this “the real world.” But now he

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knows there are other worlds just as real as his, and that other equally real worlds would follow the one he’s living in. Those past worlds had much to teach him because they enabled him to see more clearly what is going on in his own times. He has found too that good and evil have come into sharp relief. Some individuals really did shine like a light from a hilltop, spreading joy and truth wherever they went. Others brought darkness, and in the clash between the two the fate of their society was gradually being decided. He finds that those holding the popular view were frequently deluded, where those widely regarded as deluded were in fact on the right track. Often, supposed steps forward were actually steps back, and while the majority might rule, the majority could often be dead wrong. Through it all he discovers that good and evil, far from mere matters of opinion, were the qualities upon which everything, every event, ultimately turned. And he realizes too there is one profound difference between that earlier time and his own. Dealing with the past, he knows how the story turned out, what finally happened and why. Dealing with his own time, he does not know. It is still being determined. But now he can play an informed part in the outcome. Thus history serves him. Beyond all this, he discovers something else. He is not so afraid. He finds that the terrors of the present are not so terrible any more, because humanity has survived them before and he has (so to speak) watched them do it. He finds that current human attitudes and supposedly unprecedented ideas and events are often very precedented indeed and are simply coming back for the umpteenth time. He is living, he now realizes, in what’s actually the latest chapter in a very long book. He knows something about the earlier chapters, and he realizes that this gives him an extraordinary advantage over those who do not. It is not an accident that most of the great leaders of 30

the Western world were keen scholars of history. They shared the addiction. Now such an addiction wholly defeats Deweyism and for an understandable reason. While the great philosopher claimed to set men free by liberating them from the “shackles” of the past, the effect was to deliver them into the bondage of the present, making them prisoners of what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Dewey had led them to believe that the here and now, the going thing, the current style, the “acceptable” view, the latest “rage” was the only reality that existed. Thus fashion not freedom came to determine how they lived in a world where morality was a matter of “lifestyle” and truth a matter of viewpoint. They could not judge the world they lived in because they had no way to get out of it to look at it. He had locked them in. One way out was that path into the forest, so he made sure that few ever found it. History, he ruled, must be confined to “the relevant.”

The dawning rediscovery of the past e need, therefore, a general “rediscovery” of the past. Happily, this has already begun, not significantly in the sphere of education, but in the book publishing and entertainment industries. The heartening success of the History Channel on television (when it is not straying into fiction) the extraordinary work of Ken Burns with his brilliant series on subjects as varied as the U.S. Civil War, jazz, baseball, Thomas Jefferson and others, the captivating histories by the late Barbara

W

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Tuchman and William Manchester, the indispensable accounts of the 19th and 20th Centuries being turned out so magnificently by Paul Johnson. The astonishing revival of interest in Remembrance Day, the delightful histories of towns and the stirring military histories of local regiments, all these put histories in the top ratings on television and high on the best-seller lists. Similarly in Canada, we have the books of the late Pierre Berton who almost single-handedly provided a fascinating panorama of the country’s past, and Peter Newman’s portrait of the Diefenbaker and Pearson years, which introduced a whole new genre of Canadian political reporting. Less highly profiled were the writings of the late James H. “Jimmy” Gray whose delightful accounts of the Canadian West must soon be discovered nationally, while in Winnipeg the old house organ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Beaver magazine, has been taken over by Canada’s National History Society and become one of the best magazines in the country. In the national print media the names of Michael Bliss, Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson occur ever more frequently with commentary on current events. Always they give the past a new voice in the present, for all three are historians. Notably absent from this renaissance is the curriculum of most public schools, whose administrators, whether consciously or not, still view history through a Deweyite lens, requiring that it must be “relevant.” But relevant to what, one wonders. The answer is to whatever cause or movement the system is currently championing–whether environmentalism, feminism, anti-industrialism, and in Canada anti-Americanism. The technique is always the same: Some fragment of history is summoned to support the central cause being expounded. There may be other facts, firmly in the historical record, which support the opposing contention, but these are tacitly omitted. In this way history is contemptuously 32

reduced to propaganda. Better, surely, that it be ignored in the schools than perverted by them. The immediate use of history, that is, is preferably left to the popular media.13 Not that any of us are proof against bias. The news and print media accounts of day-by-day events are often classics of blatant prejudice, bringing to mind Humbert Wolfe’s amusing observation: You cannot hope To bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But seeing what The man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to. Yet, I’ve noticed that when the newspapers, and even television, delve into an historic subject, they often seem considerably more even-handed than they are with current events. Why this is so, I can only guess. We are not as close to the controversies of yesteryear as we are to those of yesterday afternoon. Journalists are (and should be) irrepressible story-tellers, and when we are writing of the long past, it’s the story that energizes us, not the cause.

13. A new kind of attack on history emerged in the closing decades of the 20th Century, notably the habit of blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, both in books like the celebrated Da Vinci Code, and in what television producers took to calling “docudramas.” These present as something that happened whatever the author or producer thinks he needs to reinforce the drama of his story, or its bias, or both. So he therefore quietly invents it. Manufactured quotes and facts are presented as authentic. In television, since the producer never tells us what part of his production is “docu” (that is, documented) and what part is “drama) (that is, fiction), an historical fraud is easily perpetrated, particularly on an historically ignorant audience The effect is to reinforce the Deweyite dictum that history is so undependable as to be worthless.

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Before we can work a change in the schools, we must set on foot a change in the culture, and popular history is the tool which can bring such a change about. Because it reflects the great values of the past, it will work to restore the great values of the past, and the magnificent works of music, art and literature will be restored along with them. For these are among the facts and treasures of history. If we can achieve this, we have no reason to fear the threat posed by other cultures and other societies. Our habit as a civilization has been to absorb the best of other cultures. Only one thing can prevent us from continuing to do so–that is, if we ourselves have forgotten who we are and what we have done.

But why ‘Christian’ history? ut why, someone has asked me, Christian history? The fact that I am the general editor of a twelve-volume series on the history of Christianity, now in production, gave rise to the question. The volumes begin at Pentecost, the Christian feast that follows 50 days behind Easter, and continue, century by century, era by era, through nearly two thousand years to the end of the second Christian millennium. Seven of the 12 volumes have been produced, reaching to the year A.D.1300. My answer to that question is that from the fourth century to the late eighteenth, Christian history and the history of the Western world are the same history, and any attempt to divorce the religious from the secular renders both incomprehensible.

B

Christianity, that is, begins in the first century of what the secularists have decreed must be called “the Common Era” (though the only thing common to it is Christianity). For its first three hundred years,

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the Christians grew from one of many eccentric Middle Eastern cults that had established a presence in Rome into a formidable force all over the Roman world, recruiting to the service of Christ about one quarter of those living in the eastern Roman Empire and one tenth in the western one. A point to observe is that the Christians achieved this astonishing success, not through physical conquest, but through suffering. That is, they were so persuaded of the truth of the Christian Gospel and the genuine presence of Christ in their lives that they endured the most hideous tortures, enslavement and persecution that the imperial government could inflict upon them. Meanwhile their undoubted valor and their unstinting care for one another and those around them drew into their numbers the meek and the mighty, the rich and the poor, the learned and the illiterate. Among the literate, they had something else going for them. They could rationally defend their faith against scoffers and skeptics. They did not shrink from philosophical disputation, and where in their earliest days the Greeks regarded their theology as “foolishness,” (1 Corinthians 1:23) the learned soon began to respect it. In the early second century, for example, the Christian scholar Justin, invoking the Greek philosophers, so bested an erudite pagan in a public debate, that the man in a fury had him arrested, tried and executed. But the Christians could remind the Greeks that it was their man Plato, five centuries before Christ, who had concluded that if the perfectly good man ever came into the world he would be “impaled.” Finally one would-be emperor, whether out of opportunism, conviction or a mixture of both, decided to back the Christians rather than fight them. With a Christian symbol painted on his battleshields, he

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triumphed over six rival contenders and gained the imperial throne. This suddenly reversed the status of the Christians within the empire. Rather than its most formidable enemies, they now became its foremost champions, and Christianity, rather than a personal peril became the means to distinction, affluence and social advance. However, its days of celebrity were brief and within a century and a half the whole western empire was overrun by barbarians whom the Christians slowly, diligently and painfully converted to the faith. In much of that dark era, the church was the only stable form of government that existed, and it produced over the succeeding thousand years what became Western civilization. The core of its morality, law, theory of government, respect for the individual and theology were all drawn from the Bible and Christian teaching. Since the late 18th Century, however, Christianity has once again become embattled (some would say with a new wave of barbarians, this time intellectual ones), and the story of John Dewey’s endeavors to destroy the Christian culture is part of that battle, and therefore part of Christian history. So why Christian history? Because in a sense that is all there is, and a strictly “secular” history of Western civilization is simply impossible.14 The story of the West is pre-eminently the story of Christianity. There is a further reason to produce an academically sound and yet popular history of Christianity, and that is for Christians

14. The single substantial criticism of Tim Burns’s magnificent television series on the Civil War was the absence of the role of the Christian faith on both sides of that conflict. Not only was it the principal spur for the emancipation of the slaves, it was also the prime factor in the willingness of both the men in blue and the men in grey to die for their convictions. Burns brilliantly depicts their astonishing heroism, but by ignoring the Christian factor, he fails to account for it.

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themselves. The Christian faith, after all, claims to be rooted in an historic event. The essayist Dorothy L. Sayers takes particular note of this: Christianity is not the only religion that has found the best explanation of human life in the idea of an incarnate and suffering god. The Egyptian Osiris died and rose again; Aeschylus in his play, The Eumenides, reconciled man to God by the theory of a suffering Zeus. But in most theologies, the god is supposed to have suffered and died in some remote and mythical period of pre-history. The Christian story, on the other hand, starts off briskly in St. Matthew’s account with a place and a date: “When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King.” St. Luke, still more practically and prosaically, pins the thing down by a reference to a piece of government finance. God, he says, was made man in the year when Caesar Augustus was taking a census in connection with a scheme of taxation. Similarly, we might date an event by saying it took place in the year that Great Britain went off the gold standard. About thirty-three years later (we are informed) God was executed, for being a political nuisance, “under Pontius Pilate”-much as we might say, “when Mr. Joynson-Hicks was Home Secretary.” It is as definite and concrete as all that. – From Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos, London, 1949

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Nevertheless, Christians are as notably ignorant of our own history as the world around us. Most of us are familiar with the New Testament era in the first century and the challenges we face in the twenty-first, but for the two millennia in between we have only the vaguest notions of what happened. And while we say we really must do something about that, the fact is we don’t actually care. Which is a mistake. We Christians have gone wrong in the past many times, and we will go wrong again, if we fail to profit from our past errors because we don’t know anything about them. We might have seen in the doctrines of John Dewey, for instance, the same sinister content that the historians Neatby and Daly saw, and we would not perhaps have been so ready to turn our children over to his disciples. Having done this, however, we now find ourselves facing a crisis. Unless we can somehow restore the unity we once shared, our society will either disintegrate or change into something unrecognizable. The chief essential in restoring it is to return to the teaching of history as an indispensable element in public education. Not fragments of history as an adjunct to some other subject, but history as a subject in itself, taught effectively from kindergarten to university. However, before that is likely to happen, we must first advance history through the popular media—in books, documentary films, art, movies, plays, music, the web, and every other means of communication open to us. But the books must come first. Before any substantial return to our Christian origins can occur, there needs be a restatement of what those origins are—that is, a presentation of the whole two-thousand-year Christian story, enticing to an educated reader, generally acceptable to Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, to the religiously

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sceptical and the doctrinally polemical, always in sufficient detail for all the major events to be adequately described and all the foremost players to be seen in their historic roles. Upon that foundation, children’s books can be produced, and the other media will be free to find subjects of wide popular interest. What am I suggesting? That the direction of society can be changed by a set of books? No. But as the old Jewish saying goes, it’s better to light one candle than complain about the dark. This series, we believe, is such a candle.

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