I was born in the South. I grew up nursed on the stories of the Lost Cause (one of my forebears was a high-ranking officer in the Army of Northern Virginia) and taught that the Bible was literally true and inerrant.
How did I escape this indoctrination? And what might that mean for where we are as a country right now?
I think there are several important factors that helped me slowly to overcome what I had been taught for my whole life.
First, I was blessed with an innate curiosity. When I saw something historical on TV, even as an elementary school student, I wanted to read everything about it that I could get my hands on. The Prince and the Pauper? Deep dive into Edward VI (and, boy, was THAT disappointing). My curiosity and thirst for knowledge only deepened as I aged.
Second (and I don’t know where I got this—it certainly wasn’t from my parents), I questioned. Everything. Constantly. Perhaps it was because I came of age after the “question authority” generation, and I was late to the party. Perhaps it was because I had teachers (okay, two) who stressed the importance of critical thinking skills (how they got jobs in the South, I’ll never know). But what this left me with was, when confronted by anything new, I wanted to learn all I could before I made up my mind.
And this got me into trouble in college. When a professor would announce as a fact something that was a matter of opinion (and, trust me, I know the difference), I would challenge him (the women professors in courses I took seemed to also have a grasp on the difference between facts and opinions, hence the masculine pronoun). While waiting to meet with my faculty advisor one day, I heard one professor say to another, “I can’t fail him because he has logical reasons for his questions, but it’s really embarrassing,” and then walk around the corner to see me sitting there and spluttering out my name while blushing furiously.
I went to university in the South, and the Lost Cause was still popular among older history professors. As a history major, I took a class on the Civil War, and it was then that I began to read more primary sources on the Confederacy and its history. I read the Articles of Secession (which should be required reading in every history class). I read school textbooks that were geysers of propaganda (if one Confederate soldier can kill 15 Yankees in 45 minutes, how many Yankees can 20 Confederate soldiers kill in an hour and a half?). I read letters that set forth the writers’ belief that their enslaved people were inferior and that slavery was the best condition in which they could live.
I was horrified. This was not what I was taught in high school! This was not what my family said when exalting my ancestor and the “great General Lee” he served! This couldn’t be true, could it?
Well, lots more reading convinced me that everything I had been taught was not only wrong but an intentionally gross re-writing of history to support white supremacy. I should have known. I remember how horrified one of my uncles was when he found out that there was a black child in my class. I remembered all the talk about how “those people” don’t know their place. There were times I wondered if I were a foundling, I was so different from these people—I felt like I came from another planet.
And, really, all of this was truly insane on the part of my family. Because, on one side, I was not “all white” which meant that, legally, I was not white at all.
And so, I had a long, slow breakup with the Lost Cause. It is difficult to overcome an entire social structure that is telling you something that is false. But when facts show you the way, you can find your way to the truth. Even if your family hates you for it.
My breakup with Evangelicalism was much faster. By the time I began seriously to question the faith in which I had been raised, I was in college. I got into arguments with my roommate (soon to become an anti-LGBTQ+ fundamentalist preacher) about things that made no sense to me. He insisted that being LGBTQ+ (that abbreviation was unknown then, but you get my drift) was a choice, which made me ask all those impertinent questions like: given how society looked down on them, why would anyone make that choice? and, BTW, when did you sit down and write up a list of pros and cons and decide to be straight? Then he’d go off on women in the clergy, and I’d ask, why would God give women gifts for ministry and then tell them they couldn’t use them? Like my professors, he hated my questions. I have left the church of my childhood—MUCH to the chagrin of my family—and become an Episcopalian, who believes that the whole of Christianity is summed up in “God is love, and those who love are being servants of God.” (This belief that has caused a lot of cognitive dissonance in the Trump era, with all the people who are impossible to love.)
So, it was a combination of curiosity, education, being taught the importance of critical thinking, and the willingness to question opinions, even when they were couched as facts, that enabled me to escape the tragically-wrong lessons I was taught.
So where does this leave us? I’d say we’re in deeper trouble than some would like to admit.
In my experience, children are naturally curious. But parents who discourage their curiosity are seriously handicapping their children. (Happy note: my grandson is every bit as curious and as voracious a reader as I was. His parents value that, so he’ll be fine.) So, while perhaps not every child is as obsessively curious as I was, what curiosity there is must be encouraged. And MAGA parents are not going to do that. Their “facts” are what is true and there are no others. To them, curiosity is anathema.
In addition, there is little, if any, stress on critical thinking skills in an educational environment where the mastery of memorized facts is all-important, and where the success or failure of a school or a teacher is measured by scores on multiple-choice tests, which are the antithesis of reasoning. Students who are the children of MAGA parents are not going to learn critical thinking skills at home, and they’re not going to get it at school, so they grow into adults whose thinking is rigid and inflexible. This is why reasoning generally does not work. It’s like we have a key to unlock the door, but they bricked up the doorway. Too many can’t deal with facts that are outside their worldview, much less figure out how those facts should affect their worldview.
So saving our democracy is going to be long and difficult. We must work to change our educational system so that it encourages curiosity and critical thinking skills. Students should not just memorize facts, but be encouraged to think about why those facts are important. Students must learn to assess historical events. For example, the historical fact that Andrew Jackson removed indigenous people from their homes to the west should raise questions about how the white population viewed the indigenous population, why the white population thought it was entitled to take land that others were already living on, and why the government then and thereafter thought that its treaties with native peoples were entirely one-sided and could be changed however and whenever the white majority wanted. We also need to work to see that educators are paid more so that there can be more good teachers in public schools.
We must work for the election of officials who are willing to ask tough questions, and to take tough positions, to do what is right because it needs objectively to be done.
In short (ha! like I can ever be brief), we need to stress the importance of clear-eyed, rational thinking as being the most profoundly important quality a citizen can have. The Founders certainly thought so. It is a must for our democracy that we have a thinking, informed electorate. To those of a different political stripe, we must ask questions about the foundations of their beliefs—like: when has trickle-down economics worked? how does cutting taxes and increasing spending balance the budget? how does giving someone equal rights take away your rights—other than your “right” to impose your way of thinking on others? what factual evidence is there that the 2020 election was stolen?—and continue asking follow-up questions for as long as possible. Will it work with everyone? Nope, not a chance. But if it places nagging questions in the mind of one person that cause them to reconsider some things, that will be a good result.
And, yes, it would help to get Fox News off the air, but, alas . . .
Into the breach, my friends.
