As we’ve noted previously, our 10th-grade Christianist textbook, World History and Cultures In Christian Perspective, is a weird patchwork of preaching and history as filtered through late-Reagan-era rightwing politics. This is especially noticeable in the chapter “20th Century Liberalism: Retreat from Responsibility and Authority” which we wrap up this week. The God Stuff in this chapter is concentrated in sections we’ve already covered, starting with attacks on science, then moving on to the pernicious secular humanist agenda of philosophy and education and eventually finding good guys and bad guys in the arts. By the time we get to the economic boom and crash of the 1920s and 30s, the editors almost seem to have run out of preaching — at least about God.
The preaching in this section is about economics, of course. We learn that the prosperity of the 1920s was due to the wise hands-off economic policies of American leaders, helped along by an economic landscape in which
American industry and agriculture, unlike Europe’s, had gone untouched by the destruction of war, leaving them free to reap the profits from the increased wartime production.