Teaching history means teaching sin - and redemption

Catholic schools are in crisis. Across the country, enrollments are falling and many graduates from Catholic schools become “nones,” neither professing nor practicing any religion. My own wife refers to the Catholic high school she attended as “an atheist factory.”

As a Catholic, an academic historian, and a high school teacher, I have grappled with how to resolve the current crisis, which I believe largely stems from attempts at teaching all subjects “neutrally,” following public school models.

But there is no such thing as neutrality, especially in history.

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To the secular academic, history is largely the study of money and power. When they focus on religion, they sidestep spiritual truths and describe it in terms of one group controlling another. When religions spread, it is often framed as a byproduct of trade, sometimes conquest.

This view of history rejects the basic mandate of our Catholic faith to proclaim the Gospel, but it also reduces humans and human history to just the material dimension. In this sense, attempting to teach history “neutrally” actually undermines theology teachers’ attempts to catechize students in the faith.

As a Catholic school teacher, I have found a way to transcend the secular view of history by taking first principles from theology, showing the inherent unity of truth.

First, since history deals with humans we need to understand what humans are. Our faith teaches that fundamentally, we are a union of body and soul.

History therefore is shaped not just by our physical needs, but by our thoughts and beliefs. To see how the historian might use this truth, look at the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road to China. People were traveling to China in order to trade and satisfy their bodily needs. Along this same road, Buddhist monks established monasteries to serve the needs of the soul.

The Chinese listened, and came to develop one of the world’s oldest and largest Buddhist communities.

The Age of Exploration provides another example. The Portuguese sought “God, Glory, and Gold.” One of the artifacts from this period is a carved ivory showing the baby Jesus sailing with the Portuguese to India where they were going to trade and evangelize.

Their sincerity reveals itself in the Kingdom of Kongo, where Portuguese explorers established contact with the king and sent missionaries. Eventually, it became a staunchly Catholic kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, the Kingdom of Kongo became enmeshed in the triangular slave trade through its connections with Europe. European demand for slaves led to the kingdom exporting large parts of its population — reducing social cohesion, which ultimately led to its control by Portugal. This ties in to my next point.

Not only are we a union of body and soul; we also sin. Furthermore, sin is a causative agent in history.

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