Ep 112 - Who Gets to Write the Past?

The Pentagon is introducing a new history course for students in the Department of Defense Education Activity school system. On its face, there is nothing especially remarkable about that. The course is called Western Civilization to 1500, and Western civilization is obviously a legitimate subject for students to study. The controversy begins when you look at the textbook the Pentagon has chosen, the way that textbook frames Christianity and Islam, and the worldview of the man overseeing the school system.

Who gets to write the past matters almost as much as what gets written. When the Pentagon chooses the textbook, the framing deserves scrutiny.

The book is The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom. According to reporting by the Associated Press, historians who reviewed the text say it does more than recount events. It constructs a particular story about Western civilization, one in which Christianity often receives sympathetic historical context and moral credit while Islam is presented through a considerably harsher lens.

That distinction matters because history can be distorted without inventing a single date or fabricating a single battle. Sometimes distortion is created through selection. One event receives context while another is allowed to stand alone. One atrocity becomes an aberration. Another becomes evidence of something fundamental about an entire religion or civilization. One side gets a defense attorney. The other gets a prosecutor.

And before going any further, I should explain where I am coming from personally. I consider myself a Christian. Not a MAGA Christian, and certainly not a Christian nationalist. I am closer to what people sometimes call a red-letter Christian. I put far more emphasis on what Jesus actually taught about how we treat other people than I do on Christianity as a political identity. So this is not an atheist standing outside Christianity throwing rocks at it. It is a Christian asking why the federal government appears to be favoring one particular version of Christianity in a public-school history course.

According to AP, The Golden Thread presents Christianity as an important source of humane universalism and Western moral development. Historically, Christianity did profoundly shape Western civilization. That should be taught. It would be absurd to teach the history of Europe, the medieval world, the Reformation, Western philosophy, art, politics, or law without giving Christianity enormous attention. The problem is not Christianity being present in the story. The problem is whether Christianity and other religions are being judged by the same historical standard.

Consider the Crusades. The book reportedly places considerable emphasis on their defensive context, including Muslim expansion and threats to Christian populations and territory. There is history behind that argument. Muslim empires did conquer territory. Islamic rulers fought wars, committed atrocities, practiced forms of religious coercion, and built empires through force. None of that needs to be sanitized. Teach it.

But then teach the other history too. Crusaders massacred Muslims. They massacred Jews. Christians fought other Christians. Religious authorities persecuted heretics. Christian governments used faith to justify conquest, political repression, and violence. Christianity’s contributions to Western civilization do not disappear because Christians sometimes did terrible things in its name. The history simply becomes more complete.

The contrast becomes especially striking when The Golden Thread moves from historical Islam into the modern world. According to AP, the book invokes September 11 and the October 7 Hamas attack and makes broad claims about the reactions of ordinary Muslims to Islamist terrorism. That raises an obvious question: Does Christianity receive the same treatment? Does a discussion of medieval Christianity suddenly leap forward hundreds of years to modern Christian extremism as a lens through which students should interpret Christianity itself? If not, why not?

That is the deeper issue. History becomes dishonest when one civilization gets complexity and another gets a prosecution brief. The problem is not that the negative facts about Islam are necessarily false. The problem is what happens when similar context, nuance, and moral generosity are distributed unevenly.

It is also important not to caricature the people who wrote this book. These are not random political hacks pretending to be historians. James Hankins is a serious scholar who spent decades at Harvard. The authors have defended the book and argued that it does acknowledge Islamic contributions to Western civilization and that critics have selectively represented their work. Those defenses deserve to be considered.

But expertise does not eliminate interpretation. Every historian selects. Every textbook condenses. Every author decides what deserves a chapter, what receives a paragraph, what gets explained, and what becomes a footnote. The fact that the authors are qualified actually makes the central question more interesting: Why did the United States government choose this particular interpretation of the Western tradition?

That question leads directly to Pete Hegseth. Long before becoming secretary of defense, Hegseth was publicly advocating classical Christian education. In his 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, he argued that progressive education had pushed God and religion out of American schools and that parents should turn toward classical Christian schooling. He described the struggle in sweeping civilizational terms, warning about the loss of America and Western civilization itself.

Now Hegseth oversees a school system being redirected toward what DoDEA has described as “patriotic values” and “classical learning.” Neither phrase is inherently sinister. Neither patriotism nor classical education is something I oppose. But when those priorities are being imposed by someone who has spent years arguing for a specifically Christian recovery of American education, his prior statements become relevant context.

So do his religious associations. Hegseth has documented ties to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network co-founded by Doug Wilson. Wilson openly embraces the Christian nationalist label and has argued for a more explicitly Christian political and social order. Hegseth has praised elements of Wilson’s teaching, amplified material associated with his movement, and invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon.

Hegseth has also hosted recurring “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Services” at the Pentagon, including events involving his own pastor, Brooks Potteiger. Voluntary worship in the military is not unusual. Military chaplaincy is not controversial. Service members absolutely have religious rights. The question is different when explicitly Christian worship is organized and branded around the office of the secretary of defense himself.

Those services have already generated a lawsuit from Americans United for Separation of Church and State. That lawsuit does not prove Hegseth has violated the Constitution. A complaint is not a verdict. But it does show that concerns about the way Hegseth is using his office to promote Christianity are not something invented solely because this textbook became controversial.

Put the pieces together. A defense secretary who has spent years advocating classical Christian education. A defense secretary connected to a religious movement whose most famous leader openly calls himself a Christian nationalist. A defense secretary who invites that leader to preach at the Pentagon. A defense secretary who hosts recurring Christian worship services under the banner of his office. And now a federal school system under his authority is introducing a history course that critics say gives Christianity preferential treatment. None of that proves motive. But refusing to notice the pattern would be its own form of denial.

That leads to the church-state problem. Teaching Christianity is not the problem. Teaching the historical importance of Christianity is not the problem. The line is crossed when government moves from teaching that Christianity influenced Western civilization to presenting Christianity as the preferred moral framework through which Western civilization should be understood.

These are not private Christian schools. These are schools operated by the United States government. The government hires the teachers, approves the curriculum, chooses or approves instructional materials, and establishes the educational priorities. If one religion consistently receives the benefit of sympathy and context while another is repeatedly associated with conquest, fanaticism, and modern terrorism, it is entirely reasonable to ask whether government has moved from teaching religion to favoring religion.

I am not claiming that a court has ruled this curriculum unconstitutional. It has not. Establishment Clause law has also changed considerably in recent years, and the constitutional question is not as mechanically simple as it once appeared. But the absence of a court ruling does not mean there is no legitimate church-state concern. It means we should state the concern accurately.

And then there are the students themselves. DoDEA serves roughly 70,000 military-connected students, although that does not mean all 70,000 will take this particular course. Those students come from families representing many religious traditions and no religion at all. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and others are all part of the military community.

Imagine a Muslim teenager whose mother or father serves in the United States military. Maybe that family has moved repeatedly because of assignments. Maybe they are attending a federal school overseas because that is where the government sent them. Then the government gives that student a history book in which Christianity is repeatedly presented as a source of Western moral development while Islam keeps appearing alongside conquest, jihad, September 11, and October 7. What message does that send about who belongs at the center of the American story?

The irony should be impossible to miss. Some of the children potentially being made to feel like religious outsiders are the children of Americans serving the country. Their parents wear the same uniform, take the same oath, deploy to the same places, and accept the same risks. A federal school should be extraordinarily careful about suggesting that one religious tradition occupies a more authentic place in American identity than another.

And that brings us to parental rights. Conservatives have spent years insisting that parents deserve to know what schools teach, what books their children read, what values are being introduced, and what controversial ideas are being presented. On the basic principle, I agree with them. Parents should know.

The new Western civilization course is optional. That matters, and it should be stated clearly. But optional does not mean ideologically neutral, and it does not resolve the question of whether parents are receiving meaningful information about what is in the course.

DoDEA parents do have statutory rights to review curriculum and instructional materials. Curriculum information is publicly available. So this is not some secret program hidden from military families. But access is not the same thing as meaningful notice. There is a difference between telling parents what book their child is reading and telling parents what that book is actually telling their child.

A school can disclose the course title, textbook title, and historical period while saying virtually nothing about the controversial parts of the material. “Western Civilization to 1500” sounds about as neutral as a course description can possibly sound. It does not tell a Muslim parent how Islam is treated. It does not tell a Jewish parent whether Western identity is framed primarily through Christianity. It does not tell a secular parent whether the course presents Christian moral assumptions as foundational to the West.

I could confirm that parents have the right to review curriculum. I could not confirm that DoDEA is required to proactively explain the disputed religious or ideological framing of this particular textbook. Maybe additional notice exists. If it does, that matters. But I cannot confirm it.

And this is where the conservative parental-rights argument needs to be applied consistently. If parents should not have to become detectives to discover ideological material involving race, gender, or sexuality, why should they have to become detectives when the ideological material happens to be Christian and conservative?

Imagine the politics reversed. Imagine a Democratic defense secretary introducing an optional history course that focused heavily on the Crusades, inquisitions, Christian persecution, religious violence, and modern Christian nationalism. Imagine the text describing secular humanism as one of the great moral achievements of Western civilization. Imagine the materials being developed with help from a famously progressive institution.

Then imagine the Pentagon responding to conservative criticism by saying, “Relax. It is optional. The syllabus is online.” Nobody seriously believes that would end the controversy. There would be congressional hearings, cable-news outrage, accusations of indoctrination, and demands that parents be told exactly what their children were being exposed to. And some of those complaints would probably be justified.

That is the point. A principle that only applies when your political opponents control the curriculum is not much of a principle. Parental rights cannot mean parents get a veto over values conservatives dislike while government gets broad discretion over values conservatives support. If ideological influence in education is the concern, then the direction of the ideology should not change the standard.

This is why I think the story is ultimately much bigger than one textbook. There is a broader ideological chain being built here: Western civilization becomes Christianity. Christianity becomes the American founding. The American founding becomes American identity. American identity becomes patriotism.

Those concepts are related. They are not interchangeable. Once they are treated as interchangeable, criticism of Christianity can be recast as hostility toward Western civilization. Criticism of the Founders can be recast as hostility toward America. Criticism of American history can be recast as a lack of patriotism.

At that point, history education begins to resemble a civic catechism. Here are the approved heroes. Here are the approved beliefs. Here are the conclusions you are expected to reach. Now repeat after me.

Every country teaches some version of its national story. Every curriculum selects. Every history teacher decides what deserves emphasis. But there is a difference between helping students understand the history that produced their country and designing a course to produce a predetermined emotional response to it.

History class should trust students with the whole story. Western civilization produced representative government, philosophy, extraordinary scientific achievements, legal traditions, literature, art, and powerful ideas about individual liberty. Students should learn that. They should know why those achievements mattered.

Western civilization also produced slavery, imperial conquest, religious persecution, sectarian warfare, authoritarianism, and genocide. Students should learn that too. Those truths do not cancel each other. They coexist.

Christianity inspired extraordinary acts of compassion, reform, charity, courage, and resistance to oppression. Christian institutions and governments also committed acts of persecution, violence, and repression. Both are true.

Islamic civilization engaged in conquest, war, coercion, and intolerance. It also made enormous contributions to mathematics, medicine, philosophy, science, art, architecture, scholarship, and the transmission of classical knowledge. Both are true.

That is what mature history looks like. It does not need spotless heroes or uncomplicated villains. It does not need civilizations sorted into moral teams. It gives students enough evidence, context, and competing perspectives to wrestle honestly with the past.

The goal of history education should not be to make students ashamed of Western civilization. It should not be to make them venerate it either. The goal should be to make them understand it.

Understanding is stronger than mythology. A student who knows both the achievements and the failures of a civilization is better equipped to recognize what is worth preserving and what should never be repeated. Patriotism should be strong enough to survive that kind of honesty.

Students deserve history that trusts them with the whole story. Parents deserve meaningful transparency about what the government is teaching their children. And a federal government should be extremely cautious when it stops merely teaching students what happened and starts deciding what conclusions they are supposed to draw about religion, civilization, and national identity.

Because if your version of history can only produce patriotism by trimming away the parts that complicate the story, you are not teaching patriotism. You are marketing it.

SOURCES

Associated Press — Pentagon introduces new Western civilization course using The Golden Thread; includes historians’ criticism of its treatment of Christianity and Islam, Hillsdale involvement, DoDEA leadership changes, Hegseth’s classical-education agenda, and the roughly 70,000-student DoDEA population. (AP News) — https://apnews.com/article/c29537087c0dbf3271cf293a9b17053f

Department of Defense Education Activity — Parent Pathways and Resources; summarizes DoDEA parents’ rights to review curriculum and instructional materials. (DoDEA) — https://www.dodea.edu/parent-pathways

U.S. Code, 10 U.S.C. § 2164a — Federal statute establishing parental rights in DoDEA schools, including the right to review curriculum and instructional materials and requirements for public curriculum disclosure. (GovInfo) — https://www.govinfo.gov/link/uscode/10/2164a

Department of Defense Education Activity — Official DoDEA curriculum information and overview of standards and instructional materials. (DoDEA) — https://www.dodea.edu/education/curriculum

Associated Press — Background on Pete Hegseth’s CREC affiliation, Doug Wilson’s Christian nationalism, Wilson’s views, and the relationship between Hegseth and Wilson’s religious movement. (AP News) — https://apnews.com/article/e71c3ea072fa959b5bee09a4d2093f1a

Associated Press — Hegseth reposts video featuring CREC pastors, including opposition to women’s suffrage; Pentagon confirms his church affiliation and appreciation for Doug Wilson’s writings and teachings. (AP News) — https://apnews.com/article/d962f472910fb47a0c66cd37b01f550d

Reuters — Hegseth launches the “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” at the Pentagon with his pastor Brooks Potteiger and says the voluntary services will occur monthly. (Reuters) — https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-defense-chief-hegseth-leads-christian-prayer-service-pentagon-2025-05-21/

Associated Press — Hegseth’s Christian rhetoric, CREC connections, Doug Wilson’s self-identification as a Christian nationalist, and Wilson preaching at the Pentagon at Hegseth’s invitation in February 2026. (AP News) — https://apnews.com/article/pete-hegseth-pentagon-christian-nationalism-iran-war-f246bca60f2927336b5d06b2c9daee80

Associated Press — Pentagon Christian worship services, Doug Wilson’s participation, and the lawsuit challenging Hegseth’s use of his office for explicitly Christian worship activities. (AP News) — https://apnews.com/article/30db48b6ceb8af5e6172fb3ba2eafaa0

Americans United for Separation of Church and State — Lawsuit challenging the Pentagon’s recurring “Secretary’s Christian Prayer & Worship Service”; includes details of the legal arguments against the services. (Americans United) — https://www.au.org/how-we-protect-religious-freedom/legal-cases/cases/americans-united-for-separation-of-church-and-state-v-department-of-defense/

Americans United for Separation of Church and State — Original federal complaint challenging the Pentagon prayer services, including details of how the services were organized, advertised, and conducted. (Americans United) — https://www.au.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/AU-v.-Dept.-of-Defense-Complaint-3.23.26.pdf

Reuters — Pentagon confirms Hegseth supports women’s right to vote after he shared a video featuring a pastor advocating repeal of the 19th Amendment; also covers Hegseth’s CREC affiliation and admiration for Wilson’s teachings. (Reuters) — https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hegseth-supports-womens-right-vote-pentagon-says-despite-his-having-reposted-2025-08-14/

Associated Press — Additional reporting on Hegseth’s blending of his evangelical Christian worldview with Pentagon leadership, his Christian-nationalist associations, Wilson’s views on Muslim immigration, and changes to the military chaplaincy. (AP News) — https://apnews.com/article/f246bca60f2927336b5d06b2c9daee80

That gives you a 13-source list, with the AP textbook investigation serving as the anchor and the rest supplying the primary-law, parental-rights, Hegseth, Wilson, and church-state documentation.