Recently, we received another question from a parent considering our courses for her children. After sharing a belief that God stands at the forefront of the historical events that have shaped the United States, the question was roughly as follows: Do your courses center God?

Here’s Nate Noorlander’s reply on behalf of The Nomadic Professor:

There are long and short answers to your question. For a longer answer that gets at point of view more broadly, I’ll refer you to a blog post from a few years ago. Feel free to peruse more blog titles to see if there are others that touch on parts of this question I don’t touch on here.

 

The short answer is that we teach history in a pretty traditionally academic way—i.e., we utilize the standards of evidence that you’d see in a good high school or college classroom, emphasizing evidence-based reasoning, good sources, attention to counterarguments, rigorous questioning, strong writing, sound methodology, comprehensive coverage, and the like. This approach doesn’t necessarily contradict the approach you’re looking for, but it also doesn’t explicitly do that work for you—e.g., it won’t explain the Revolution, or the Civil War, or the outcome of of any other major event in American history in religious terms; you’d have to supplement the account we offer with that point of view on your own. 

 

In that sense our curriculum is secular, though I use that word cautiously, because in some circles that means it is “anti-religious,” and in others it just means that it is “not religious.” We’re in the latter camp. I actually prefer the term “non-partisan,” since it brings in the question of politics too. Our goals are not partisan in the sense that we don’t have a particular “conclusion” we’re championing, religious or political. Those conclusions are probably better discussed and reached elsewhere anyway. We’re championing a love of good, engaging, history, and an honest and rigorous approach to complicated historical questions. 

 

Cheers,

Nate Noorlander