My new favorite quotation of 2026 so far comes from a school board chair in South Carolina explaining why history textbooks that include “too much material” on indigenous genocide, slavery and the Holocaust have been “eliminated” (rather than banned).

“We want history books that focus on the future rather than the past.”

This joins my favorite quotation of 2025 from a university president (of a school not too far from where we now live) who explained why the decision had been made to eliminate any hint of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). A reporter asked, “won’t the elimination of DEI adversely impact the school’s ability to teach critical thinking” and the president replied,

“We are an institution of higher learning, NOT critical thinking!”

What are some folks in our society so afraid of when it comes to history? Do we really believe it can be sanitized for our protection? Do all of us immigrants hold a secret shame of the treatment of the earliest Americans? Do we really think racism, slavery, colonization, and violent bigotry will disappear with a good whitewashing? Do our historic and histrionic practices of sexism frighten us so much that we must pretend they never happened? Is our hypersensitive, “accuse everyone of antisemitism” culture truly committed to denying the horrors of the Holocaust? Shall we really benefit from the burial of numerous war atrocities committed under the American flag? Can we actually believe that a false and fabricated fiction is preferable to facing facts and accepting the bad and the ugly from our past along with the good?

Christians should have a significant contribution to make here. While our country is barely 250 years old, Christ-based religion is eight times as old, and has been used in every age to try to revise history and paint a pretty picture from some pretty awful paints. Look at how scripture, orthodoxy, positional power, and ecclesial politics have been bastardized to persecute, judge, condemn, and punish the poor, the marginalized, the fringe, the immigrant, the infirm, as well as women and children. Our Christian faith has held master class in how to take gold and spin it into straw, beauty and spatter it with filth, truth and desecrate it with unmitigated lies. The only way the body of Christ has ever been able to rise toward God’s vision and will is through the remembrance of who we do not want to be as well as who we believe God wants us to be. The record of our failings may be more valuable than the list of our successes. We often learn more from our mistakes and missteps than from our progress. Neither should we take for granted.

I tire of hearing that the United States is a Christian nation and/or that our founding fathers intended such. Our founding fathers were a hodge-podge of thinkers and believers very much defined and influenced by the Christian faith of their time – both in what they believed and what they rejected. It would have been impossible for this country to exist without the influence of post-Enlightenment Christianity. But the historical context meant that these men, and yes, unfortunately we only have the product of the male end of the species (even more so than throughout Christian history, but not much), were more concerned with the abuses of the faith than the hegemony of the faith. Religious freedom, that which we take so easily for granted, was paradigm shifting and monumental at the time of our founding as a nation. The organized institutional church should lead the conversation in why we are NOT a Christian nation, nor should we ever want to be. Relationship with God in Christ cannot ever exist as mandate, coercion, imposition, or law, otherwise it is not truly a faith-based relationship. True Christian witness only has true power on an open, level playing field.

I am not sure how we came to this place where intelligence is suspect, knowledge is disparaged, expertise is mocked, wisdom is disregarded, and clear systemic critical thinking is denied. The deification of the ignorant, the stupid, the short-sighted, the coarse, the mean, the greedy, and the intolerant is not new, but the only way we can see our way clear of such dysfunctional values is by studying, knowing, and understanding our history. Perhaps this is why the ignorant, greedy, and intolerant are so committed to denying history. With such knowledge and awareness available, they will find themselves out of a job.