REMEMBER THE ALAMO

There's this Texas history textbook for 7th-grade students which includes the following 16 words as a unit title: "The siege of the Alamo and all of the heroic defenders who gave their lives there."

The unit title is a reference to Travis, Bowie, and Crockett who are included in the approximately 200 heroes who knew they were going to die and did die to free Texas from the despotic rule of Mexico's Santa Anna. It was their defense of the mission Alamo which gave Sam Houston the time he needed to raise the troops and win the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. Because of what the defenders of the Alamo did, Santa Anna's victory that March day in 1836 was a pyrrhic one.

HISTORY DOWN ORWELL'S MEMORY HOLE

But that title has upset working groups of educators and historians, tasked with streamlining social studies standards. They were so upset that they've advised the Texas Board of Education to remove  “heroic” from the title to describe the acts at the Alamo, because the word is “value-loaded,” according to a draft of their recommendations.

Walter L. Buenger, a professor of history at the University of Texas called the popular depiction of the Alamo “exceptionally simplistic," saying, "In some minds, [the defenders] were not heroic but vainglorious, foolish, and counterproductive."

All one has to do is to read Walter Lord's book, A Time to Stand and the reader will learn that "heroic" isn't a strong enough word to describe what those men did in their sacrifice. 

WHAT'S HAPPENING?

What's happening is that when a culture rejects the Bible and its Author, it pays the high price of losing moral categories. It becomes a society in which there's no objective, absolute right or wrong. It becomes a society in which a committee of bureaucrats must censor "heroic," because writing that such men were "heroic" is a value judgment and just who are you to make such a judgment, anyway? How dare you!

In 1970, Ray Stephens sang a song, which, although he probably didn't realize it, propagated the idea that moral categories are gone. The song was "Everything is Beautiful." But if everything is beautiful, then nothing--sin, human trafficking, genocide, Satan--is ugly, and the moral categories, including "heroic," are gone. 

Under divine inspiration, Solomon saw this clearly when he wrote in Proverbs, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; Fools despise wisdom and instruction." "The fear of the Lord" a positive response to God and His Word. Once that positive response is gone, moral understanding is gone.

And to say that their actions were "vainglorious," is that not a "value-charged" word as well? Once the moral categories are down the memory hole, how do you get off this merry-go-round?

Moral understanding has therefore vanished to the extent that we lose the category of "hero." That means that there are no heroes. In swamp of moral relativism, who's to say who is and who isn't? To say the 200 men at the Alamo were heroes is to make a value judgment and such an assessment is o-u-t, out, in a culture without the Bible.

Sad, isn't it. We're getting the culture we want. So said Paul in Romans 1:24: "Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts . . ."