Who Tells the Better Story?: Fundies vs. Howard Zinn

The Times Magazine published a long-form essay this weekend titled "How Christian Were the Founders?" For a few days, it was listed as the most popular article on the website.

The gist of the article, if you didn't get a chance to read it, was that there's a right-wing group of fundamentalists in Texas who are systematically trying to re-write children's schoolbooks through strong-arm tactics in the Texas state board of education. The author, Russell Shorto, gave some examples of the madness--insisting that intelligent design be given a fair hearing in biology books; editing American history books to downplay Ted Kennedy, say, and give more page space to Newt Gingrich. The examples were pretty damning and the arch-villain in the story, Don McElroy, appears as a conniving buffoon. The message for Times readers: "BEWARE the scary evangelicals... they're out there plotting to take over the country in still-unknown nefarious ways!"

Easy. Down boy. I remember reading about this Texas schoolbook thing years ago. Not new. And as the article suggested, even in Texas, this thing doesn't fly far--McElroy was removed from his post because people in both parties seemed to agree he was a nutcase.

But there's something in this article we need to pay better attention to. This piece caught my eye because it illustrated for me how much better conservatives have proven to be at organizing around what matters to them. I don't fault evangelicals for trying to re-write history. That's how history is made! There is NO fact in history--all history writing is present-tense political speech. Congratulations to Texas conservatives for trying to rewrite the textbooks--liberal professors on college campuses have been re-writing history for a long time, doing essentially the same thing that liberal Times readers are supposed to now be outraged about!

The story of who we are is always being re-written. Always. Every day. Every one of us is, consciously or not, involved in the same process that Don McElroy developed into a perverse art: we write the book. What we choose to read or ignore. What we remember or forget. How we use information--history or science--to justify or explain the whos, whats, and especially the whys of life. We write the book. Selectively.

I learned this lesson unmistakably in high school, when I was at the library (yes, I was a dork) and picked up a book called "The Peoples' History of the United States," by Howard Zinn, who died last week (Bill Moyers, my preacher, eulogizes Zinn here). Here's a brief, YouTube friendly rendition of the way Zinn approached American History:

Zinn had no problem suggesting that there were always many ways of telling a story. There's no "objective" history--there are histories--many of them. Which do you choose? What does that choice reflect about you and the values you hold most dear? What matters in history are the underlying values of the stories we claim. Are we committed to those values--and to that story? Don McElroy, God bless (or curse) him, sure was.

Are we willing to organize with one another around our core values? Are we willing to get messy and political in making sure those values--and our stories--are shared? Are we willing to run for office, show up at school board meetings, organize in our communities so that our story--and the values the story promotes--get the widest possible hearing? Don McElroy doesn't scare me half as much as a liberal, blinded by the premise of objectivity, who won't scrape and work and fight to make sure their story is heard.