Preparing Students to Respond to Revisionist Claims
- Aimee Line
- Nov 25
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 26
How can “fifty-one percent of young voters believe the Constitution should be mostly or entirely discarded”1, if, according to the Pew Research Center, most Americans haven’t even read it?
That’s the question I recently posed to my Worldview English class. Then I assigned the reading of the Constitution and the writing of a lengthy research paper. (My students wished me a Happy Thanksgiving anyway!)
To set the stage for their reading and writing, I first asked them to look up and summarize the Divine Right of Kings, the Magna Carta, and John Locke’s “natural law” and to read the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, and Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech.
Teaching literature of the American Revolution in this way was an experiment. My goal was to equip them to handle revisionist claims such as the one below by Ayn Rand, an Objectivist writer and dissenter of the 60s and 70s. Rand passed away in 1982, but the circulation of her ideas is stronger than ever. She wrote,
The claim that America was founded on Christianity is a myth. Many of the Founding Fathers and Revolutionary War leaders were deists and upheld a firm separation of church and state.”
How can students (and adults) think through such claims?
Discernment guides us to confront convoluted statements methodically and with patience, employing three guiding principles. They are:
1. Define the terms. We can’t address what we don’t understand.
2. Break down the claim into phrases. Most of the time the slimmest element of truth imbedded in a claim serves to direct the audience’s attention away from the claim’s bolder deceptions.
3. Lay down any agenda we may have other than prayerfully asking God to reveal truth. That means that we lay down idolatries, and we concede to any parts of a claim that are true rather than stating flatly, “That’s all wrong.”
Handling the Rand claim in this manner, students found out that deists believe that God is not present, accessible, or even remotely interested in human affairs. Their research revealed that only three of the fifty-five Founding Fathers were actually deists; the others belonged to church denominations that were undisputedly Christian2.
With that part of Rand claim soundly debunked, students then conceded that the Founders did in fact uphold a firm separation of church and state, but not for the reason the Rand quote would lead us to believe. The Founders made sure the Constitution would ensure that our government would never be able to tell us where or how to worship God. However, the Founders also cautioned that the Constitution, clearly founded on Christian moral principles, would only work for a populace who upheld Christian moral principles.
I was delighted with the maturity of the writing in the research papers that students produced from this “experiment” and even happier with their commitment to working through the claim on their own. (I’ll link some of their papers to my website next month.) In the meanwhile, here is some of their feedback regarding my classroom “experiment”:
“I had never thought about what separation of church and state really meant. The Founding Fathers were right to worry that one day, if a tyrant should appear, the church would be much better off not controlled by the government.”
“I think all high school students should study the founding documents so they know exactly what their rights are, how bad things could be, and how much worse things they could get if we are ignorant of our nation’s history and documents.”
“Studying the founding documents should not only be important in American education but should also be a focus of self-study for adults. When politicians and rule breakers alike twist the intentions of our Founders or the essential foundations of our democratic government, a well-studied citizen can defend their individual and national rights."
“I learned that I have ‘natural rights’ because I am a human being created in God’s image. I think studying the founding documents should be a part of any high school experience.”
As for me, I’m sold on teaching literature of the Revolutionary Era in this way from now on!
Sources
1Talgo, Chris. 2022. “Why Do Democrats and Young Americans Despise the Constitution?” Human Events. July 15, 2022. https://humanevents.com/2022/07/15/why-do-democrats-and-young-americans-despise-the-constitution/.
2Koukl, Greg. 2025. “Faith of Our Fathers Greg Koukl at DuckDuckGo.” Duckduckgo.com.
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