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I usually begin my social justice education workshops the same way: "Raise your hand if you believe the United States was founded on Christian principles."
Without fail and regardless of audience, the response is the same. Virtually everybody in the room affirms the perseverance of this misperception.
Some misunderstandings are remedied easily. But when new information collides with old prejudices-when new truths battle established beliefs for space in our consciousnesses-we tend to respond with all manner of defense mechanisms. We employ these defenses in response to the psychological stressors that emerge from such inner-battles (Elliot & Devine, 1994). This is especially true when our current beliefs place us in a privileged bubble, as the belief that "the United States was founded on Christian ideals and principles" does for White people, Christians, and White Christians in particular. It is in these moments, often described as cognitive dissonance (a term popularized in Leon Festinger's [1957] study of a doomsday cult's stubborn belief persistence), when a learner-any one of us-finds her- or himself grappling with new information in light of old understandings.
I have come to learn that these moments form the critical crossroads of learning, the educational moments of truth, in my social justice teaching. It is the moment when a White teacher first hears the term "White privilege"; when a high school student learns that the U.S. never has named English its "official" language; when a U.S. Christian's sense of history is shaken by the idea that the U.S., in fact, was not founded on Christian principles. These are the moments Kincheloe (2005) describes as "untidiness," as part of a process in which we construct "new relationships in the interaction of cultural understandings, the influences of the information environment, familiar stories, idiosyncratic ways of making meaning, and schooling" (p. 115). As an educator, it is my work to create a context in which these new relationships will, indeed, be constructed, rather than one in which students hide or flee from the dissonance that underlies these golden opportunities for learning.
Continuing with the activity, then, I might ask, "What if I told you that most of the land-owning White men we call 'Founding Fathers' were not Christians at all? Or that many of these men, including Thomas...