Having been ordained in the Congregational church, the church of the Pilgrims and Puritans, their history became my history. This means I had to embrace their absurdities as well as their magnificent accomplishments. They get blamed for far more than they deserve, and I often find myself defending them from their detractors. One incident that is a blot on their record (though understandable in light of the time) is the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson and her family from the Plymouth colony. Through the centuries Anne Hutchinson has been an icon for independent thinking, religious freedom. and standing up to authority.
Now, Anne Hutchinson may be expelled again—this time in the twenty-first century, by the Texas Board of Education.
The Board has the job of selecting textbooks for Texas schools. Board members keep trying to work ‘creation science’ into the science curriculum. Now they are focused on history, as well. One of the Board’s appointed academic experts, the Rev. Peter Marshall, believes that America needs to be restored “to its Bible-based foundations through preaching, teaching, and writing on America’s Christian heritage and on Christian discipleship and revival.” (Apparently, he also believes that Hurricane Katrina, Watergate and the Vietnam War are the result of divine wrath.) After all, he says, Hutchinson didn’t ‘do anything’ except get herself expelled for “making trouble.” Is that any example we should be holding up for our children? The answer is obviously ‘No!’
But there is more. Anne Hutchinson has been seen as an important person in the development of the idea of a separation of church and state. Such separation, according to Peter Marshall, is a ‘myth,’ for it promotes the false idea that America is not a Christian nation.
Junk history now joins junk science.
One could, see, if one wanted, other motives at work, since it is not just Anne Hutchinson who is banished. Also unsuitable models for students are César Chavez, labor organizer, and Thurgood Marshall, civil rights leader (head of the NAACP and the lawyer who argued the public school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education) and this nation’s first black US Supreme Court justice.
If Anne Hutchinson is banished again, Texas students will suffer, as will students in other states. Because Texas is the second largest purchaser of textbooks, this state’s selection helps set the standard for textbooks used in other states. I don’t think Anne Hutchinson would believe that, almost four hundred years after her death, she would again be in danger of being expelled.
Bob Tucker
August 2009
An extended commentary on this issue can be found at
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/churchstate/1726/texas_board_of_education_wants_to_change_history?page=entire
