How the Christian Right Hijacks History: Prof Kathleen Wellman

Join us on November 22 at noon (AZ time) as we welcome special guest Professor Kathleen Wellman, author of Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters.

Click here to watch on Secular AZ ‘s YouTube channel

Kathleen Wellman is Dedman Family Distinguished Professor of History at Southern Methodist University. She is the author of La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment; Making Science Social: The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot, 1633-1642; Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France; and, most recently, Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters. While she continues to research elite women and eighteenth-century medicine, she is also trying, admittedly in vain, to keep up with contemporary assaults on the teaching of history.

About Prof. Wellman’s book: “The teaching of history has long been the subject of partisan warfare. Religion often plays a prominent role in these debates, as secular progressives and conservative Christians disagree over which historical figures are worthy of study, how (or whether) certain events should be portrayed, and ultimately how tax dollars should be spent. But what about students who are educated outside the public schools, either in religious schools or at home? How are they learning history, and what effect does that have on our democracy?

Hijacking History analyzes the high school world history textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials. In these books, the historian, informed by his faith, tells the allegedly unbiased story of God’s actions as interpreted through the Bible. History becomes a weapon to judge and condemn civilizations that do not accept the true God or adopt “biblical” positions. In their treatment of the modern world, these texts identify ungodly ideas to be vanquished-evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science among them.”