Standard response for why we no longer carry:
We closely consider, and reconsider, each title we include in our programs in an effort to bring you the best products. We felt that this title was no longer the "best of the best" and therefore opted to make a change. In this case, the main reason we dropped the books is because they primarily cover "early" American history and we wanted something with more balanced coverage.
We strive to always listen to our customers, so if you have suggestions regarding this book, or others you might suggest, please pass those along. (3.3.08)
Light and the Glory/From Sea to Shining Sea
On the one hand, the books in question went way overboard in attempting to "Christianize" American history. (I'll give you some clues below.) I think American evangelical Christians should feel embarrassed enough on their own by such extreme commentaries such as those that Marshall & Manuel provide. But as a company that deals with an audience far broader than Americans alone, I have to confess that the embarrassment was even more intense.
Now. We could--and for many years we did--provide counterbalancing perspectives on the most egregious issues. But it is the second point that finally tipped the balance against The Light and the Glory and From Sea to Shining Sea: we found Boorstin's wonderful volume and felt it provided a much more appropriate, more fulsome, and certainly much more up-to-date (i.e., it went about 100 years further into our history than Marshall & Manuel's books do!) introduction to American history for elementary-age children (and parents!).
Marshall and Manuel problematic?!? Yes. Some of the issues I dealt with in the pages of notes I wrote concerning the books:
On page 28 of The Light and the Glory [please recognize, this and all other page references are to the paperback editions that were in print 10 years ago; I have no idea if there are new editions with different paginations!], we read that “Columbus . . . made the Indians pay a tax in gold. If they could not pay, the Spanish punished them and treated them like slaves.”
Sounds bad; certainly not kind. But the authors' description is not nearly as bad as the reality.
According to Beverly Slapin and Doris Seale (“The Bloody Trail of Columbus Day,” in Beverly Slapin and Doris Seale, Through Indian Eyes: The Native Experience in Books for Children (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1992), p. 7), "Arawaks over 14 years of age were forced to pay enough gold to fill a hawk’s bell measure every three months—or be killed by having their hands cut off. In despair, with no gold left, the people fled their homes for the mountains, leaving their crops unplanted, preferring to starve to death. Most of those trying to get to the mountains were hunted down with dogs and killed, as an example to the others. One by one, all of the indigenous leaders were tortured, impaled, hanged, burned at the stake."
On page 68 Marshall & Manuel suggest that, “Unlike the settlers at Jamestown, the Pilgrims did not make trouble [for the Indians]. They treated Massasoit and his warriors with respect. They showed them the love of Christ.” But then, suddenly, some fifty years later (The Light & the Glory Chapter 9), we are told that Massasoit’s son Metacomet, also called Philip, was an angry, even hateful man, bent on murdering the Puritans and all Indians who had chosen to follow Christ. “To him, they [those Indians who converted to Christianity] were traitors.”
We are left with the impression that Metacomet/Philip, for no good reason, decided to vent his wrath on the righteous, fun-loving Puritans. “Before long, almost every Indian tribe in New England was wearing war paint and taking scalps.”
What?!! Why?
Fascinating and disturbing story! And it has something to do with the Puritans enslaving the Pequods and shipping them off in slave ships to Bermuda. But, of course, in preparation for the morality tale they intend to tell when they finally get around to the (failed) Southern War for Independence (otherwise known as the American Civil War), Marshall & Manuel don't mention any of those details.
On page 114 we read, “After the founding of Plymouth, English settlers had flocked to the New World. Unlike the French and Spanish, they did not come to seek riches. They came to begin a new life.” —Ah, yes! Those godly English! Wholly unlike any other people on earth!
NOT!
There were godly French and Spanish (as Marshall and Manuel themselves clearly teach back in chapter 3), and there were ungodly, money-hungry English settlers, too. . . .
On page 118 we read that George III was “a selfish, conceited monarch who wanted to ruin the colonies. He was not paying for troops in America. He was raising money to pay for England’s adventures around the world!” Perhaps. But why, then, were the taxes in America so much lighter than they were in England? And was it inappropriate for him to raise whatever revenue he thought necessary to cover the costs of the colonial police (i.e., the British soldiers)? Marshall and Manuel are giving us a strongly pro-American Revolutionary perspective of things with no (what I believe would be a godly) counter-balancing perspective.
One last item from Chapter 11.
Marshall and Manuel, for all their God-talk, never point out that the so-called Boston Tea Party was an act of vandalism and theft. The “Indians” caused someone—some merchant, some trader—great harm. These Boston “Patriots” destroyed someone else’s property . . . and all to “make a statement.” Was this a godly act? They never even ask the question.
Marshall and Manuel begin chapter 12 with a series of statements and two questions: “The Bible teaches that God honors obedience with His blessing. He does not honor disobedience. Did He honor the colonists who sought independence? Did He favor their cause? The answer lies hidden in the battles just ahead.”
The implication? We can determine who God favors based on the outcome of battles. Put in more graphic terms: might makes right; or, no one had the right to question the communist overlords of the Soviet Union as long as they remained in power. . . .
I’m sorry. The answer to Marshall and Manuel’s questions does not and never did “lie hidden in the battles.”
In the final chapter of The Light and the Glory, Marshall and Manuel may overstep all bounds of propriety.
"God had been establishing a nation which could live in obedience to His Son, the Lord Jesus,” they say (p. 153). “He was creating a fellowship of believers that could become a beacon of light in a world of spiritual darkness.”
I must confess. I hold hopes that one day, indeed, the peoples of the United States will be “one nation under God.” To be honest, I believe that one day all the peoples of the world will, in a sense, be “one nation under God.”
I take my faith from the Bible. Jesus, the Bible tells us, will “[hand] over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:24-25). The Prophet Daniel says that “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven . . . was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed” (Daniel 7:13-14). Jesus, I am convinced, is the head of the “kingdom that will never be destroyed, . . . [that] will crush all [the world’s] kingdoms and bring them to an end, but . . . will itself endure forever” (Daniel 2:44). There will come a day when there will be loud voices in heaven declaring, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will rei gn for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
The United States has a part in this, God’s plan. But God’s plan for “a nation which could live in obedience to His Son, the Lord Jesus,” did not begin “[f]rom Columbus through the War of Independence.” It began long before. . . .
On pages 155-156, Marshall and Manuel quote Benjamin Franklin’s famous (in Christian circles) proposal for prayer. What they fail to tell you is that only three or four delegates voted in favor of his proposal; the prayers were never offered! Therefore, while Franklin’s speech may have “marked the turning point,” and while nearly all of the delegates may have been “Christians of one kind or another” (similar to the way certain people who deny the virgin birth and the deity of Christ are “Christians of one kind or another”!!!), Franklin’s words did not “force them to set their priorities right.”
On p. 156, Marshall and Manuel say the U.S. Constitution “was divinely inspired” and that “it was the completion of nearly two hundred years of Puritan political thought.”
Really?!?
I am sure they don’t mean that the U.S. Constitution is on a par with Scripture. (If that is what they mean, then, clearly, the statement is untrue and blasphemous.) My guess is that they mean merely to say that the U.S. Constitution includes certain clauses and characteristics that are more biblical or godly than those found in most other countries’ founding documents. If this latter interpretation is correct, then I want, at least, to register my strong objection to their unusual use of the phrase divinely inspired. But I am willing to be convinced.
HOWEVER, while I am open to people’s suggestions that the U.S. Constitution has several characteristics that are of a godly nature, I would like to point out that there are a number of features in the U.S. Constitution that, far from being “the completion of nearly two hundred years of Puritan political thought,” are truly sinister and of a very ungodly character.
I don't want to reproduce my entire "argument" here, but let me merely note one minor point.
The Constitution says the purpose of government is “to . . . establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Good sentiments, certainly. Certainly not anti-Biblical.
But compare them to the purpose expressed in the “laws of Pennsylvania and the territories thereof . . . enacted by William Penn, Proprietary and Governor, by and with the advice and consent of the deputies of the freemen of this province and counties . . .” on December 7, 1682—almost 105 years earlier.
Penn and associates declared that “the glory of almighty God and the good of mankind is the reason and end of government.”
In terms of its purpose, its reason for being, is the U.S. Constitution a Christian document? Is it (was it) more "divinely inspired" than the laws of Pennsylvania as enacted in 1682? Were the framers of the U.S. Constitution seeking godly ends? Is the U.S. Constitution more Christian than all other nations' constitutions?
My sense (in response to all those questions): No.
Moving on to From Sea to Shining Sea.
- Chapter 1. In the North, we are told, the “Puritans staked out their towns and villages with faith and hard work . . . on the biblical principle that all men are equal in God’s sight” (pp. 14-15). By contrast, the “Cavaliers and Huguenots” took their ease “in the gentle climate” of the South. The lazy “Southerners reproduced the aristocratic heritage of their European ancestors. And the South developed into a class-ordered society. . . . Already, the seed of slavery was rooting its way deep into southern soil” (pg. 15).
We have already seen, in The Light and the Glory, that the Puritans were involved in the slave trade. Slavery was not an institution only of the South. Indeed, we quoted Governor Winthrop’s brother-in-law when he said, “I do not see how we can thrive until we get into a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.”
“The seed of slavery was rooting its way deep into southern [as opposed to northern] soil”? That is an unfair statement. As late as 1858 there were twenty-four American [i.e., Northern] ships in the Zanzibar harbor as against three British. So many of the ships hailed from Salem [Massachusetts: the North!] that the Zanzibarians thought all white men came from this one New England town. English officers discovered to their indignation that Great Britain was considered to be a suburb of Salem. The Americans traded for slaves and ivory with a cheap calico turned out in vast quantities by the New England cotton mills. W.E.B. DuBois points out that “in the decade 1850-1860, . . . the fitting out of slavers became a flourishing business in the United States and centred at New York City. ‘Few of our readers,’ writes a periodical of the day, ‘are aware of the extent to which this infernal trade is carried on, by vessels clearing from New York, and in close alliance wit h our legitimate trade.’“
Wonderful and good as the Puritans may have been, they were not without fault.
But Marshall and Manuel are bound and determined to create a twisted view of history. . . .
*****
The problems with the two books go far beyond what I have written here, but I will stop my commentary at this point. HTH! John