The Need for Religious Literacy about Christianity in the K-12 Public School Classroom By Lesley Barker PhD When we teachers introduce American holidays to primary school students our curriculum uses Thanksgiving as a way to introduce the Pilgrims and their debt to the Native Americans. To whom did the Pilgrims direct their thanks? To the Christian God.   When we introduce elementary students to the explorers and navigators who mapped and opened the way for the Catholic and Christian European nations to colonize the “New World”, we explain their motives in terms of “God, gold and glory”. When middle school students first encounter the Declaration of Independence or the Mayflower Compact , they need to understand what our nation’s founders meant by references to the creator and what the earliest colonial communities meant by dedicating themselves to “the glory of God and to the advancement of the Christian faith”. When high school students encounter Shakespeare for the first tim