KEITH HOAR

Chapter One: Erosion of a Dream

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"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." George Orwell

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Something Went Terribly Wrong

 

“America! America! God shed His grace on thee.” So goes the middle of the first verse of the once-adored song “America The Beautiful”. Until somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century, those stirring words would evoke a sense of pride and thankfulness in most Americans. Whether it was pride in their country, or gratitude for the things they possessed, or their hope for a bright and promising future, the outlook of the majority of the citizens in America was profoundly optimistic.

     America was a better place to live. Even in the face of some serious setbacks and numerous wars, there had been improvement in most Americans’ lives. Improvement that they could point to in their own lifetimes. Intellectually, technologically, financially, and medically; all facets of American life were being revolutionized. One single sentiment stretched all across America. That sentiment was optimism.

In 1968, on the opening page of his book, Redeemer Nation, Ernest Lee Tuveson wrote that three centuries earlier in America (circa 1668) a hope he called ‘Christian optimism’ sprang up in the colonies. It was an optimism that revealed hope about the future of humanity and of human society. However, two years before the publication of Mr. Tuveson’s book there was an address given on BBC that spoke of a ‘Christian pessimism’ that began to arise during the middle of the 1960s.

     From the end of World War II until the mid-1960s there was an American Dream and it was coming true for thousands of Americans.

Then, quite suddenly, something seemed to go terribly wrong. An American president was assassinated. America was dragged into a military, police action (aka war) that threatened to fracture the country. America’s youth, disillusioned and angry, began to revolt on a scale never seen before. They rebelled against any and all levels of authority, plunging into the mindless void of free love, mind-altering drugs, and psychedelic rock music. As America’s youth become more and more discontented and disengaged, they began praising brutal, socialistic dictators. Angry crowds of rioting youths parroted the communistic slogans being chanted by violent radicals.

     The most devastating breakdown of all was America’s loss of its moral compass. The family, the fabric of America, was blowing apart at the seams. The American family, began deteriorating at an alarming rate. All over America, divorce was becoming the norm. Sexual promiscuity was not just on the rise, it was rampant. The government and the public education system, failing to grasp the severity of the problem, did nothing more than stick a band-aid on the symptoms. In actuality, the government exacerbated the problem by accommodating America’s escalating sexual promiscuity through legalized abortion, permissive sex education, and access to better birth control methods. Some states and school districts went so far as to provide free condoms to students. Not just to high school students but, unbelievably, to middle school students. America was in serious trouble!

     What happened to the American Dream? Just a few short years earlier, the mood had been so much different. America was confident. America was proud. America was filled with optimism and hope for the future. Then, everywhere you looked there was despair, anger, rage, and revolt. The people blamed the schools and the politicians. The schools and the politicians blamed the people. There was much wringing of hands and demanding more and better solutions, but nothing was accomplished. What happened in the span of a few short years? Why did America’s optimism so rapidly turn to despair, anger, rage, and revolt? What suddenly went so terribly wrong?

     Where there had once been confidence and determination there was now uncertainty and a feeling of helplessness. Rather than attempting to identify the real problem, conservatives blamed the liberals, liberals blamed the conservatives, parents blamed the schools, the schools blamed the parents, and the young people blamed everyone over thirty. Literally, everyone blamed everyone else. There was finger pointing and blame all around. Soon the finger pointing turned into apathy and capitulation.

     Most Americans, quickly tiring of the steady stream of depressing newscasts, simply gave up and quit asking what happened. They shook their heads, and said, “It’s a sign of the times.” Hoping it would all just go away, they went back to their lives and gave little thought to what was happening to their once proud America!

     The title indicates this book is about the assault of ‘Revisionist History’. That is true. There is a lengthy discussion of the untruths being propagated by the ‘historical revisionists’ regarding the discovery, development, and display of America’s Christian heritage in Chapters Five and Six. Then in Chapter Seven there is a discussion of the dismantling of America’s Christian heritage.

     Before detailing some of the untruths being disseminated, it is crucial to reflect on and understand the current chaos in which America finds itself. The final chapters will reveal how individuals (the revisionists) have chipped away at the Christian motives that drove the colonists, early settlers, and Founders to risk life and fortune to found this great country. A thorough understanding of the turmoil, disorder, and the looming threat America faces, will give the facts in the final chapters much more impact. As you consider how the distortion of the facts of history has caused many, especially impressionable youths, to question the motives of the explorers that discovered America and even America’s Founders, it will become quite clear how evil men, whose express intention is to destroy America and its system of capitalism, have accomplished many of their stated goals. Hopefully, as you read those final chapters with the current situation in mind, you will be able to say, “I understand ‘what happened’. I see how America has reached the state it is in.”

     Some recently uncovered explanations for the current pessimism, anger, rebellion, and apathy, and the evidence supporting those explanations, will be presented in the final chapters. But first, some alarming information and facts that many individuals would rather not hear.

 

What They Do Not Want To Hear

 

George Orwell’s quote that appears on this chapter’s opening page bears repeating here: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The concept affirmed in that quote is critically important as this book begins to set out the facts that will answer the question asked earlier, “What happened?” To many, the facts behind ‘what happened’, as detailed on the following pages, will be shocking, outrageous, and, worst of all, unwelcome and unwanted.

     Drawing from research in economics, psychology, and sociology, Carnegie Mellon University’s George Loewenstein, Russell Golman, and David Hagmann authored a lengthy paper titled Information Avoidance, illustrating how people deliberately avoid information that threatens their happiness and/or sense of wellbeing. Referring to that article, David Hagmann, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, said, “Bombarding people with information that challenges their cherished beliefs — the usual strategy that people employ in attempts at persuasion — is more likely to engender defensive avoidance than receptive processing.”

     The ‘cherished beliefs’ that Mr. Hagmann spoke of could also be defined as ‘cultural biases’. When considering a person’s beliefs, not all beliefs are equally important. There may be no particular emotional attachment to certain beliefs. However, other beliefs may carry significant emotional importance and, therefore, are held very dear, making it quite painful to alter or abandon them. Those beliefs would be considered ‘cherished beliefs’. There are many reasons why certain beliefs would carry special emotional importance to an individual. Those reasons are numerous and varied and are beyond the scope of this book.

     The crucial point to understand here is that most beliefs, especially the ‘cherished beliefs’, are seldom, if ever, isolated. The ‘cherished beliefs’ either support or challenge the validity of other beliefs, and they, in turn, may be supported or challenged by other beliefs. If an individual were forced to doubt, alter, or give up a ‘cherished belief’, in the face of strong evidence against that belief, the emotional impact of such a shifting of beliefs could be severe and life altering. Rather than deal with the emotional stress, the individual faced with such a distasteful situation may choose to minimize, sidestep, or totally ignore the unwanted information even though it is valid information. The valid information referred to here is that information which is true and corroborated.

     The article Information Avoidance states, ”A straightforward implication is that valid information should never be actively avoided, except for situations in which ignorance confers a strategic advantage.” The concept of information avoidance is not a matter of simply not looking at the information. There are many tactics people use to avoid information they find distasteful or threatening. For example, people may form inconsistent or flawed conclusions from the information due to their firmly held biases (‘cherished beliefs’). They may divert their attention away from, conveniently forget, simply ignore, or outright refuse to hear information that would challenge their beliefs.

A dangerous condition arises when valid information is actively avoided because of a perceived strategic advantage. As with ‘cherished beliefs’, the rationale behind the perceived advantages are greatly varied and beyond the scope of this book. The key issue is that valid information, otherwise known as facts or the truth, is deliberately ignored.

     In his book titled, Proper Studies, the English critic and novelist Aldous Huxley said, "Each person will choose the rationalization which suits his prevailing or passing mood." That perfectly expresses the act of someone deliberately ignoring facts because of their ‘mood’ or ‘cherished belief’. What would drive someone to deliberately ignore facts? For this book, that would take place when someone was confronted with valid information that challenged a strongly held belief. As this section’s title suggests, the information that will likely challenge one or more of an individual’s ‘cherished beliefs’ is something ‘they do not want to hear’. A few pages later in his book, Mr. Huxley wrote, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

     The truthfulness of Mr. Huxley’s statement is obvious and inescapable. Facts are facts. Truth is truth. Truth is simply ‘telling it like it is’. Truth is the way things really are or were. Any other perception or view or opinion is wrong no matter what the motivation or perceived ‘strategic advantage’ may be.

     The only way to avoid the truth of history is to ignore it, to misrepresent it, or to alter it. The everyday individual on the street will likely be guilty of the first. He or she will simply ignore the facts by turning a blind eye to them. The ‘historians’ who wish to report history the way they ‘wish it was’, a history that does not challenge any of their ideological biases or ‘cherished beliefs’, will be guilty of misrepresenting, altering, or revising history. Hence, they have been assigned the label ‘historical revisionists’.

     Be aware: The information that follows will most assuredly be ‘what they do not want to hear’! Perhaps, dear reader, what follows may also be ‘what you do not want to hear’. If that is the case, resist the urge to simply dismiss or ignore the information that follows. Give the true facts of history and the individuals that lived that history an opportunity to speak for themselves before you form a final conclusion.

 

Stunned Amazement

 

Several weeks into the initial effort of gathering and organizing content for the first edition of this book, the original premise of the book was abandoned. A rapidly growing sense of astonishment began to develop as article after article was discovered that exposed an escalating breakdown of the traditional family unit and also a rapid increase in immorality that was taking place in America.

     While collating information from dozens of books to construct an outline, an opportune discovery pointed to what might be a partial answer to the question, “What happened?” Was there a driving force that could explain, at least in part, the escalating immorality and violence afflicting America? Yes there was. One book said many Americans no longer believe that we are one nation under God. Some do not think about it, some have forgotten it, and some totally reject the notion that America is one nation under God. America is on the verge of abandoning its Christian heritage. Much more information to amplify and support that claim will be offered in later chapters.

     One single article containing a lengthy quote attributed to Christopher Columbus put an immediate and final halt to further development of the original premise and outline of the first edition. Numerous historical revisionists, and others, claimed, with increasing influence, that America was not and is not a Christian nation and America did not have a Christian founding. The quote attributed to Christopher Columbus completely contradicts the ‘revisionists’ claims. Here is a small snippet from that quote:

 

“It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel his hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scriptures.”

 

     The shocked reaction upon reading those words was, “What?” The entire quote, printed in a little known newspaper, was read two additional times to be certain it had not been misread or misunderstood. With each reading the reaction was the same - stunned amazement. Did Columbus really believe that? Did Columbus really say those words? All we had ever been taught in school said Columbus had discovered America by accident while trying to sail to the Indies. Why was there no mention of Columbus’s faith contained in the history texts? Where did those words come from?

 

     The public school system during the last half of the twentieth century made no mention whatsoever of Columbus’s faith, let alone that he believed he had been given that mission by God Himself. Quite the contrary. Many books and articles called him a mysterious figure. An official United States Government website called him a greedy imperialist. Several biography and history websites said his intent was fame and fortune. A well-known encyclopedia website said he was deeply flawed. However, not a single one of those websites listed even one reference to support their assertions.

 

     The citation for Columbus’s quote in the newspaper article mentioned above indicated Columbus’s quote came from a book written by Columbus himself titled Book of Prophecies, which had not been translated into English until sometime after 1971. A lengthy search of available library resources revealed just one copy of the book, published in 1997, existed in the entire United States at the University of California - Berkeley. Much additional information concerning Columbus’s words, his faith, and his reason for sailing to the New World appears in a later chapter (see page 108).

     Immediately, the first edition’s premise switched to one of discovering the Christian founding and heritage of America, the propagation of that heritage, and the continuing attempts to rewrite history and deceive the American people into believing America is not and was not founded as a Christian nation.

 

Let The Truth Speak

 

In the twenty-first century, Americans are suffering from information and sensory overload. Persuasive advertisers, amazing new products, and innovative ideas clamor for America’s attention twenty-fours a day. The world-wide web with its ubiquitous search engines has only intensified the deluge of information. Today’s consumer, whether a student searching for reference material for an assignment or report or a consumer searching for products or information, has been conditioned to expect results immediately. A few simple keystrokes can literally put thousands of results at the consumer’s fingertips in seconds.

     Not all of the available information is reliable. Far from it. A large portion of the information is inaccurate and some is outright false. A significant portion of the articles returned by an internet search contains no citations whatsoever that point to a source of primary information or how the author reached his or her conclusions. That may be acceptable for general information, but it is NOT acceptable for ‘supposed’ scholarly articles and it is especially NOT acceptable for the reporting of history.

     To fully understand and evaluate articles and books in the social sciences, natural sciences, and especially history, you must be able to differentiate between primary and secondary research. Specifically, the source material that was used to form conclusions or to present ‘facts’ must be identified. The distinction between primary and secondary research illustrates the degree to which an author is removed from the event or events being described. The difference being whether the author is reporting first hand impressions and experiences or if the author is merely repeating the opinions of others, using material which may be second hand and unverified.

A description of these two information sources follows:

 

Primary Sources: These are accounts of an event, written by someone who experienced or witnessed the event being reported. They are original documents and are not quotes or material copied from other documents or accounts. These documents include books, diaries, letters, memoirs, journals, speeches, and manuscripts.

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Secondary Sources: These are documents that restate information from primary sources. Therefore, they are at least one step removed from the actual events being reported. Secondary sources often interpret, speculate upon, and/or propose differing conclusions regarding the events reported in primary sources. These documents may take the same form as primary sources.How does the author know the details (persons, places, names, dates, times, etc.)?Was the author present at the event?Where did the information come from: public record, personal experience, or eyewitness accounts?Is the information second-hand; reported or written by others who did not witness the event(s)?Are the author's conclusions based on evidence or opinion? When quoted material is placed inside double quotes, it is expected to be an exact quote of the original. The quoted material in those books and articles was checked using the exact book cited, based on author, volume number, publisher, and date.

 

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."

DEMOSTHENES, Third Olynthiac, paragraph 19, Minor Public Speeches.

 

     This book does not use any secondary quotes, except for several quoted conversations reported from television interviews that are no longer available. Using verified material is critically important as any valid history of America’s founding must come from the mouths and pens of the people who lived that history. As is stated elsewhere, “The ‘true facts’ of history really do matter and the truth that establishes those facts is paramount.”

     The quote above from Demosthenes, a contemporary of Plato and Aristotle, who lived from 384 BC until 322 BC, rings as true today as it did some twenty-three hundred years ago. The things a person wishes (aka their ‘cherished beliefs’), they also believe to be true. When an individual believes something to be true without allowing the evidence to speak simply because he or she wishes it to be so, that belief is then, at best, an opinion and, at worst, it is a lie and not a fact.

     Writers, historians included, are often guilty of mixing fact and opinion. Some would say it is not always easy to tell whether something is based on facts or whether it is only someone’s particular viewpoint or opinion. In view of that, it is important to read with a questioning mind. Just because someone says something is true – it does not make it true, regardless of how impressive their credentials may be. That is especially true with regard to the subject of history.

     No matter how much you may wish to avoid the truth and no matter how much the truth may fly in the face of an opinion or ‘cherished beliefs’, it is still the truth. Truth absolutely must be accepted for what it is.

     Former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, politician, sociologist, and adviser to U.S. President Richard Nixon, is quoted as saying, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”

Mr. Moynihan’s statement certainly seems logical and correct. Why then do those who would revise history, whether it be done deliberately or unconsciously, report erroneous or distorted versions of history? A quote from the American diarist, essayist, and novelist Anais Nin answers that question quite succinctly: “When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.” The implication behind that quote speaks to the topic of information avoidance discussed earlier. Because of ideological biases, also known as ‘cherished beliefs’, historical revisionists minimize or avoid the true and corroborated facts to produce a version of history that they ‘can bear to live with’; a history that aligns with their worldview and does not challenge their closely held beliefs (aka biases).

     The critical task for this book, when reporting history as it relates to America’s Christian heritage, is separating the truth of history from assumption and opinion. To accomplish that task, primary sources only were used on the subject of America’s founding and heritage in order to allow the eyewitnesses that lived and produced that history to speak for themselves. They were individuals driven by faith, seeking a new land where they could live in freedom. The voices of those brave men and women, many separated from families, that embarked on a hazardous journey fraught with great dangers and many unknowns, must be heard.

     The truth from their mouths must be allowed to speak. Any other choice would be to dismiss the toil, struggle, and lives that were sacrificed to plant the seeds of freedom. It is from those sacrifices that America’s freedom spread and now exists.

Untruth, falsehood, and lies will not be overcome by mere denunciation. Neither will untruth be overcome by eloquent criticism. Such criticism certainly has its place. However, it must be accompanied by truth. The Scottish philosopher, essayist, and historian Thomas Carlyle said the truth will not be preserved by the act of mangling and slashing asunder the false.

 

"It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak and another to hear."

Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

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     The oft quoted witticism, “Yet it is far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.” first appeared in 1907 in a sermon preached by W. L. Watkinson as recorded in The Supreme Conquest and other Sermons Preached in America. Rather than cursing the untruth of revisionist history, this book will light the candle of truth. Now begins an inspiring journey to shine the bright light of truth upon fairy tales, opinions, and deception regarding the Christian founding and heritage of America.

Before focusing specifically on the threat of ‘revisionist history’, chapters two, three, and four will expose some of the sweeping changes that have led America to the place where it finds itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century, where radical, destructive forces have altered political and societal norms.

     The last three chapters of this book will detail the Christian influence behind the discovery of America. Then the Christian intent behind the founding of America and of the great ‘experiment’ called the Constitution. Then follows a discussion of the dismantling of Americas Christian heritage due to influences of affluence and a growing modernism. Those final chapters are based on the words of the brave men and women who sacrificed their fortunes and their lives; literally everything they had.

Only through the revealing of the truth of history, shall lies and untruth diminish, grow pale, and fade away.

Will you not join the journey? Will you not let the truth speak?

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