The Jefferson Lies (29 page)

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5.
Academic Collectivism
relies on the claims of “experts” rather than original documents as the standard for truth. It advances an incestuous system of peer review as the measurement for whether a historical fact is accurate or errant. Thus, modern professors quote each other in their declarations that the University of Virginia was secular and had no chaplain, that Jefferson hired only Unitarians to be its instructional staff, that Jefferson penned the first Amendment, and so forth, when in reality Jefferson's own writings, documents of the university, and the testimony of original professors prove exactly the opposite.

The countless errors resulting from these five historical malpractices have so thoroughly infused modern textbooks, the Web, and popular knowledge that it has now become difficult for the average citizen to even discern when history is being misrepresented. But recognition is the first step to avoidance; that is, once one knows what the five tools are, it becomes much easier to spot them and avoid being caught in their errors.

Because early detection helps defeat an enemy, recognition training has always been a regular part of military preparation. For this reason, GIs in World War II were regularly grilled and tested on the identification of Axis tanks and planes so that they would be able to quickly spot and destroy enemy forces. Similarly, the reason animals are caught in traps is that they don't recognize the snare into which they have stepped; once a beaver, wild hog, or any other animal learns to recognize the device, it is no longer effective. This is why 2 Corinthians 2:11 reminds us that if we can identify Satan's traps, then he won't have an advantage over us.

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This same principle should guide our approach to the study of history: recognize and avoid the traps of historical malpractice. But once you recognize a trap, there is more. It is not enough simply to personally avoid the trap; it must also be exposed and removed so that others will not be injured. Thus, when a soldier discovers an IED, minefield, RPG, or weapons cache, he takes steps to neutralize and remove the danger so that no one else will be harmed by inadvertently stumbling into it.

The best means for overcoming the five modern historical traps is given in Romans 12:21, which instructs us to defeat the evil with the good—that is, not just to avoid evil ourselves but also to apply its antithesis, or its antidote, to neutralize the effect of its poison. For example, praise prevails over criticism, light over darkness, gentleness over anger, humility over arrogance, and so on. So what is the antithesis for each of the five poisons so often injected into American history today?

The effects and influences of
Deconstructionism
can be avoided by training oneself to search out the rest of the story and discover if there is a second view or whether there are positive aspects of the account that were omitted from the original portrayal. Of course, the negatives will always be easy to find, just as they were in Numbers 13 and 14 when ten of twelve leaders went into a land filled with milk and honey but came back talking only about its giants and problems. Joshua and Caleb demonstrated in that story that while the negatives are indeed present and cannot be ignored, the positives must also be pointed out: it was a vast, abundant, verdant land of prosperity and plenty just waiting to be entered. Identifying the negatives comes naturally; acknowledging the positives takes deliberate effort.

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Thomas Jefferson understood this and therefore refused to let negatives prevail in his conversations. His grandson recalled learning this lesson directly from Jefferson.

He [my grandfather] spoke only of the good qualities of men, which induced the belief that he knew little of them; but no one knew them better. I had formed this opinion, and on hearing him speak very favorably of men with defects known to myself, [I] stated them to him; when he asked if I supposed he had not observed them (adding others not noted by me, and evincing [demonstrating] much more accurate knowledge of the individual character than I possessed), observing, “My habit is to speak only of men's good qualities.”
²

Especially in today's Deconstructionist-dominated environment, it will always be easy to find (or concoct) negatives about any historical figure, but it will require deliberate effort to identify the positives that have been omitted. And omission is one of the most egregious but most effective tools of revisionists.

This point was brilliantly made by Dr. Paul C. Vitz, a professor at New York University. He was contracted to review history textbooks through a grant from the Department of Education and after examining those texts, he concluded:

Over and over, we have seen that liberal and secular bias is primarily accomplished by exclusion, by leaving out the opposing position. Such a bias is much harder to observe than a positive vilification or direct criticism, but it is the essence of censorship.
³

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In fact, he observed a strikingly aggressive secularist tendency among those texts:

And the facts are clear: religion, especially Christianity, has played and continues to play a central role in American life. To neglect to report this is simply to fail to carry out the major duty of any textbook writer—the duty to tell the truth.
⁴

It is indeed the duty of those who present history to tell the truth—to tell the whole truth, not just a part of it. As John Adams explained:

[T]ruth and right are invariably the same in all times and in all places. . . . But passion, prejudice, interest, custom, and fancy are infinitely precarious [unstable]; if therefore we suffer our understandings to be blinded or perverted by any of these . . . we shall embrace errors.
⁵

Very simply, when we don't tell the whole truth but are “blinded or perverted” by passion or bias, then “we shall embrace errors.”

One of the best ways to find the complete story about an individual is not through a sterile academic study whereby one slice out of a complex historical life is extracted and analyzed under a modern microscope. Rather, the best means is by examining the full life, events, and writings of an individual.

In the case of Thomas Jefferson, one of the easiest ways to check his complete story is to read some of the earlier biographies about him, such as the 1858 three-volume set by Henry Stephens Randall. Even today, this work is still considered the most authoritative ever written on Jefferson, for Randall was the only biographer approved by the family and given full access to the family papers, records, family members, and family remembrances. Many other early biographies of Jefferson are also worth the read
⁶
and are usually available for reading online or downloading, as is Randall's work.
⁷

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In short, an antidote for Deconstructionism is to get the full story, especially the part that includes the good things. Lady Margaret Thatcher once wisely repeated the words of a great educator on this point.

Teach them [children] everything that is
best
in life—teach them all the
good
things our country has done—and you will find we shall get a very much better education.
⁸
(emphasis added)

The remedy for the second device,
Poststructuralism
, is (1) to acknowledge individuality—to examine the person himself rather than the various groups and agents to which others are trying to attach him and (2) to recognize and acknowledge fixed and absolute overarching transcendent principles. For example, citizens are entitled to enjoy their God-given inalienable rights (as specified in the Bill of Rights) not because they belong to any particular group but rather because they are individual human beings. Someone does not receive the right of habeas corpus or religious expression or self-protection because he or she belongs to the majority or the minority, is black or Latino, is male or young. Rather, it is because those rights are bestowed on every individual by our Creator. Recognizing individuality is the approach that God takes: everyone is accountable to God individually rather than as part of some group; God provides salvation to individuals not groups. So, too, good history focuses on an examination of the individual and not just his group.

And because Poststructuralism also encourages personal interpretation of history based on how one “feels” about the person or event, individual feelings must be set aside in the quest for truth. It really doesn't matter how someone “feels” about Jefferson or whether or not they like him; what matters are facts and truth. As James Madison affirmed, “For what is the object of our discussion? Truth, sir—to draw a true and just conclusion.”
⁹

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Personal feelings must be subjugated to objective truth. Either Jefferson did or did not promote emancipation, did or did not encourage public religious expressions, did or did not include religion in education, regardless of whether someone agrees or disagrees with him on those issues. Truth is transcendent and immutable, not individually constructed and interpreted. Therefore, in order to overcome Poststructuralism, make the quest for objective truth the highest goal. Realize, too, that achieving this goal will always require hard work and deliberate, even aggressive, effort rather than just sitting back and complacently accepting whatever is set before us.

Jefferson expressed this truth when he declared, “If a nation expects to be ignorant, and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
¹⁰
You can have truth and security; or you can have an unworried oblivious ease; but you cannot have both at the same time.

The antidote to
Modernism
is to learn about and understand the past, not just the present. Unfortunately, this is becoming difficult for two reasons. The first is a growing lack of knowledge about even the most basic facts of American history among those who have been educated in our governmental school system. For example, for citizens who have been trained with our current educational methods:

• 65 percent do not know what happened at the Constitutional Convention.

• 88 percent cannot name even one writer of the
Federalist Papers
.

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• 40 percent cannot name an American enemy during World War II.

• 81 percent cannot name even one of the federal government's powers.

• 70 percent do not know that the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
¹¹

Because our educational system now graduates students lacking even minimal proficiency of the simplest facts, whatever extravagant charges Modernists may make about Jefferson or any other historical figure or event seem plausible. The general public is simply no longer knowledgeable enough about history to recognize the claims as false. Regrettably, much of this growing historical illiteracy is actually a direct result of current education laws.

For example, federal laws such as “No Child Left Behind” require student accountability testing in order for schools to secure federal funds, but that testing covers reading, math, and science, not history. Most schools instruct their teachers to focus on teaching students the subject matter covered in the testing, whether mandated by state or federal law. History is rarely a part of that focus, so it receives minimal attention.

The second impediment to historical literacy is evolution, which is not simply a science controversy but rather a philosophy-of-life debate. Even attorney Clarence Darrow, who argued the case for evolution in the famous 1925
Scopes
trial,
¹²
acknowledged that he was arguing it as “a death struggle between two civilizations.”
¹³

When evolutionary belief is applied to law, it results in the “living Constitution,” asserting that what was written two centuries ago is not applicable today and that judges must allow the Constitution to evolve to meet today's needs. Constitutional history, therefore, becomes irrelevant, and has largely been dropped from legal studies in most law schools.

205

When evolutionary belief is applied to education, it results in the constant seeking of new methodologies of instruction, even if the old ones still work well. Consequently, traditional “old” math instruction that involves memorizing the math tables is discarded and replaced with “new” math. Of this, a US senator correctly observed:

This new-new mush-mush math will never produce quality engineers or mathematicians who can compete for jobs in the global market place. In Palo Alto, California, public school math students plummeted from the 86th percentile to the 56th in the first year of new math teaching. This awful textbook obviously fails to do in 812 pages what comparable Japanese textbooks do so well in 200. The average standardized math score in Japan is 80. In the United States it is 52.
¹⁴

Similarly, on the grounds that old methods of teaching English are boring and need to be evolved, diagramming sentences and traditional grammar instruction was dropped several years ago. But now only one-fourth of students can write at a proficient level, and only 1 percent can write at an advanced level.
¹⁵

Since evolution seeks to leave the past behind and move forward to something new, the academic study of history is the most severely impacted by this philosophy. After all, since evolution states that man is ever progressing, then what is in the past is of little relevance today. The study of history is therefore a complete waste of time.