By Lesley Barker When teaching the Christian history of Kentucky to public school students, it is important to note that Christianity has not always been a positive experience here. Its earliest representation was anything but full of love and mercy. Students should understand that Christianity is a religion whose adherents are regular people who default, as we all do to some extent, to behaviors that tend to be self-serving. Since the first century of the Christian era throughout the world, great atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of the Christian God by people who use Christianity to sanitize their personal or national ambition and avarice. This does not discredit or endorse the Christian religion or its message. Severn’s Valley Baptist Church in Elizabethtown may be the oldest church to have been established in Kentucky but these worshippers were not the first Christians to pass through Kentucky. Severn’s Valley Baptist Church met for the first time on June 18, 1...

By Lesley Barker The Kentucky Faith and Public History Education Project exists to provide educational resources about the Christian history of Kentucky for K-12 public school students and to create an appropriate vocabulary for discussing this history in the public schools. This post introduces four important facts about the Christian religion. Christianity is the largest religion in the world Students should understand that Christianity is the largest religion in the world. In fact, there are more than two-billion people alive today who affiliate as Christians. Christians live on every continent.   The word, Christian, comes from the Greek word, “Christos”. Christ is one of the titles for Jesus. At first everyone who believed the Christian message was Jewish.   Once non-Jewish people started believing the Christian message, they were nicknamed Christians and the name stuck. There are many different Christian groups  Just like many different families live in a ...

By Lesley Barker The Kentucky Faith and Public History Education Project is intentionally aligning our resources with the Kentucky Academic Standards for Social Studies for grades K-12 (HKH1, CKGO1, GHI1, HCH1, HCH2, CKGO2, EMA1). We are producing a series of high-interest easy-reader chapter books that model the four phases of inquiry practice at the core of the State Standards for Social Studies: questioning, investigating, using evidence and communicating conclusions. Each of the Famous Kentucky Christian Club (FKCC) books is designed to be read independently by 7-10 year-old students or by students reading at the second through fourth grade reading levels. Each book is a historically accurate, values-driven book that makes no attempt to proselytize. Instead, using clear, objective and secular language, each book tells the story of a famous Kentuckian whose life was impacted by the Christian message, or the story of a Christian event that changed Kentucky’s history. Each book ha...

By Lesley Barker PhD There is no law that prohibits a public school teacher from teaching about religion. In fact, in 1963, Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark wrote this opinion: “A person cannot be fully educated without understanding the role of religion in history,   culture   and politics…The law, constitutional or otherwise, is no impediment to the realization   of that aim. [1] ” The confusion comes because of the First Amendment and what has been come to be called the “Establishment Clause”:   “ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the   free   exercise thereof [2] ”. Because the public schools are government funded, municipal institutions, this American freedom and right to worship whom, when and, indeed, whether cannot be controlled, required or manipulated by the school or by the teachers. There have been many over-reaches that have attempted to remove all mention of religion, and many would say...

 By Lesley Barker PhD There are more than 2,400 historical markers erected on the roads in Kentucky. Each marker celebrates a place, person or event that members of the community consider to be important to Kentucky’s history. A searchable data-base is available online by county or by keyword here [i] .   This is useful to identify what aspects of the Christian religion and which of its practitioners the Kentucky Historical Society already acknowledges as significant. Using the keyword “church” returns more than 100 markers throughout the commonwealth that add emphasis to our claim that to do justice to the history of Kentucky, students must be educated about the vocabulary and ideas of the Christian religion. This survey of Kentucky’s historical markers that mention “church” show that we can specifically connect the history of Christianity in Kentucky to these aspects of the K-12 public school curriculum: ·          Famous Kentuck...