Teach Religion's Role in American History

SB1238 requires that Missouri public school curricula include instruction on the positive impacts religion has had on American history. This is not a mandate to promote any faith or conduct devotional exercises. It is a straightforward requirement that students encounter an accurate and complete account of how religious conviction shaped the founding era, abolitionist movements, civil rights advocacy, and the broader moral architecture of American public life.

For decades, secular drift in curriculum development has produced textbooks and lesson plans that treat religion as peripheral or irrelevant to the American story. The result is graduates who cannot explain why the Founders appealed to a Creator, why Frederick Douglass preached as he organized, or why the language of the civil rights movement was saturated with Scripture. That is not neutral education. It is incomplete education, and it does a disservice to students of every background.

Faith communities have built hospitals, schools, and charities; mobilized conscience against slavery and Jim Crow; and given ordinary citizens the moral vocabulary to demand that their government live up to its own founding promises. Omitting these contributions from the classroom sends an implicit message that religious motivation is something to be embarrassed about rather than honestly examined. SB1238 corrects that imbalance without compelling students to adopt any particular belief.

The American Council supports this bill because truthful history education is foundational to a self-governing people. Citizens who understand the role of faith in shaping their country are better equipped to reason about its present challenges and to appreciate the full range of forces that built its institutions. Missouri legislators have an opportunity to restore that completeness to their state's classrooms, and we encourage them to do so.