The Publishers and Their Books

This chapter discusses the three publishers of the textbooks this book treats: Bob Jones University, Abeka Books, and Accelerated Christian Education. It addresses when and why they began to publish and the controversies and legal challenges they subsequently generated. It explores the history of their sponsoring educational institutions and their stated missions. It places them in the context of Christian opposition to public education as it developed in response to the teaching of evolution, the Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s prohibiting prayer and Bible reading in public schools, and, most importantly, desegregation. These three publishers have offered an alternative “Christian” education since the early 1970s.

Hijacking History

Hijacking History analyzes world history textbooks for high school students produced by the three most important publishers of Christian educational materials—Abeka Books, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education. Initially intended for Christian schools, they now are also widely used for homeschooling. They have already been used by several generations. According to these textbooks, historians, informed by their faith, tell the story of God’s actions interpreted through the Bible. History becomes a weapon to judge and condemn civilizations that did not accept the true God or adopt “biblical” social and political positions. In their treatment of the modern world, these textbooks identify ungodly ideas to be vanquished—evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science among them. These curricula’s judgments, as Hijacking History documents, are rooted in the history of American evangelicals and fundamentalists and the battles they fought with secular culture. These curricula’s use of history has important civic ramifications. They assume that God sanctions their positions on social, political, and economic issues. Thus God’s providential relationship with American Christians entails that America should be a Christian nation advancing evangelical Christianity and capitalism throughout the world; American foreign policy and military interventions are invariably virtuous. Christianity, as these textbooks present it, is proselytizing but intolerant of other religions and Christian groups, hegemonic, and unquestionably anchored to the political right. As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these world histories promote resonate in contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education; reinforce cultural divisions; and challenge civic values of a pluralistic democracy.

Performing White and Fine

In this article I explore the ways my identity was shaped while I attended Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Bob Jones University has been praised by some for its fundamentalist stands, its focus on Christian education, and its tireless pursuit of excellence. Unfortunately for me, a young African American man, this was also a place where I experienced hurtful jokes, slurs, institutional racism, and racist microaggressions. I argue that the aftereffects of these events are analogous to the effects experienced by survivors of posttraumatic stress disorder and sexual abuse victims. I call upon my memories of Bob Jones University and how my time at the university prompted myriad feelings that ran the gamut from painful to poignant.

American Dionysus: Carl W. Hamilton (1886–1967), collector of Italian Renaissance art

For nearly a decade Carl W. Hamilton was in possession of one of the most important private collections of Italian Renaissance painting in America. A self-made millionaire from humble beginnings, the young Hamilton captivated the art dealer Joseph Duveen and Duveen’s foremost experts in Italian Renaissance painting, Bernard and Mary Berenson. By inspiring and instructing Hamilton, Duveen and the Berensons hoped to focus his wealth and ambition to create a great collection and thereby profit by both him and the glory of his achievement. Though Hamilton’s personal collection proved ephemeral, many of his most important works of art nevertheless found their way into American public collections. Furthermore, Hamilton’s formative collecting experience – which developed his prejudices and preferences, sharpened his keen negotiating skills and solidified his zeal for collecting – helped to shape two significant collections of Old Masters in the Carolinas: the Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University and the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Billy Graham Was a Transfer Student

By the 1950s, tensions within the world of fundamentalism led to a new effort at reform. Self-proclaimed neo-evangelical reformers hoped to strip away some of the unnecessary harshness of fundamentalist traditions while remaining truly evangelical Christians. Often these reforms were personified in the revival campaigns of evangelist Billy Graham. The network of fundamentalist schools struggled to figure out its relationship to this new divide in the fundamentalist family. Some schools embraced the reform, while others decried it. At the same time, faculty members at all the schools wrestled with strict supervision of their religious beliefs and teaching. From time to time, schools purged suspect faculty members, as in the 1953 firing of Ted Mercer at Bob Jones University.

Is the Bible Racist?

The civil rights movement helped all Americans reevaluate their ideas about racial equality and justice. On the campuses of evangelical and fundamentalist schools, that debate was fueled by a conflicted history of racism and anti-racism among white evangelicals. A few schools, led by Bob Jones University, insisted that racial segregation was an intrinsic part of true fundamentalist religion. Most other institutions, however, moved in fits and starts toward greater racial egalitarianism. By the 1970s, those debates also included a new and expanding network of evangelical and fundamentalist K-12 schools, schools dependent on colleges and universities for their teachers and textbooks as well as for their guiding philosophies.

Fundamentalist U

Why do so many conservative politicians flock to the campuses of Liberty University, Wheaton College, and Bob Jones University? In Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America’s culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, and a proper American, all within the bounds of biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools have thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. If we hope to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to understand this influential network of dissenting institutions. Plus, only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America’s continuing culture wars. After all, our culture wars aren’t between one group of educated people and another group that has not been educated. Rather, the fight is usually fiercest between two groups that have been educated in very different ways.