Religion in United States History Textbooks

Abstract

PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS BEEN BESET in recent years by one controversy after another involving religion. As American society has become increasingly secular, public schools have often become the center of the debate over the degree to which religion should be confined to the private realm. School prayer, the teaching of evolution, aid to parochial schools, and religious content in commencement ceremonies are just few of the issues that continue to be debated. While some of these issues have been concerns for many years, another controversy involving religion and education has arisen in just the last decade. This is the question of whether history books have unfairly excluded religious events and personalities from America's past. Many significant events in American history involve religion. Yet because religious issues can create strong emotional response, and textbook publishers want to avoid any possible controversy that could hurt sales,' the concern has been raised by many in recent years that textbooks are deliberately avoiding religious topics.2 A great deal of publicity has been given to studies that found such things as an elementary social studies textbook that defined Christmas only as a warm time for special foods or European history texts that skipped the Reformation, rather than having to explain