Addicted to the History Channel

The famous quote is that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

A brief, say 15 seconds, search of the Internet shows that quoted credited to Winston Churchill, with the original version, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, belonging to George Santayana.

People utter that quote often to support a wide variety of opinions they believe have roots in history.

The problem: We really don't know history and have little desire to learn it, much less take the time after learning it to understand how it really applies to a current situation.

I don't know what it's like in the public schools today, but I know that in the stone ages, most of my history teachers were coaches assigned to teach history, and their credentials for teaching the subject tended to be iffy.

The only teacher I had who had actually been a history major in college taught my 9th grade world history class and managed to make it interesting. We spent less time studying dates and names to be regurgitated on multiple-choice tests and more time studying the flow of events and how they related to each other.

Of course, that history was mostly Euro-centric, as though nothing of consequence happened in Asia, Africa or any of the Americas outside the United States.

In seminary, I had another wonderful history teacher who helped understand the context of religious history in relation to the events happening in the world at the time and who enjoyed taking class time to discuss the similarities of current events to the events we covered in class.

I read much more widely in history these days than I did as a kid, though I'm not sure I could be called a history buff. My wife and I often visit historical sites, where I learn stuff I was never taught in school.

All this has made me impatient with much of the discussion I hear going on these days. Two phrases tend to turn up with regular frequency: "Never in our history ..." and "The [fill in whatever group from history you're trying to use to support your point] never intended ..."

The latter phrase, of course, is usually filled in with "the Founding Fathers."

These phrases, and the arguments that ensue from the premises they introduce, suffer from two problems.

The first is our woeful ignorance of history. Almost every time someone utters the phrase "never in history," I either immediately think of a time in history when virtually the same circumstances occurred, or within a week or so, I will hear a historian discuss virtually the same situation that happened during the period he or she studies.

While watching Ken Burns' epic documentary on the Civil War right after Christmas, for example, I heard echoes of many current debates.

Then I heard and read stories about celebrations connected with the anniversary of the war's onset, which brings me to the second problem. We know or learn just enough history to support our point of view and ignore the rest.

Many of the interviews I heard and read tried to support current political movements based on reasoning that helped trigger the war. Historians asked to comment in response generally framed a "well, yes, but that doesn't take into account these other factors occurring at the time" kind of answer.

We cherry-pick events and quotes from the past to support our positions so often that we end up believing that the version of history we're constructing is the whole story.

The Founding Fathers debate is a great example. The Founding Fathers intended [fill in the blank] when they wrote the Constitution. Or my personal favorite, the Founding Fathers intended America to be a Christian nation.

Quotes are pulled out of context, both the context of the passage being cited and the context of the era in which it was written or uttered, and used to bolster a debater's favorite point.

But the broader scope is ignored. Quoting Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson in support of the Christian nation theory, which I've heard some folks do, is ludicrous. Even broadening the concept to use them to support the 21st century propositions about God's relationship to the nation fails utterly because we fail to take into account what they meant in the context of their 18th century Deist and Enlightenment understandings.

That you can find pastors religious figures among the delegates to the various conventions that eventually produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution doesn't necessarily prove the point either.

All it really proves, in fact, is that a number of different people with different ideas came together and hammered out a grand compromise that has worked for all these years.

And perhaps it has worked for all these years because it was a compromise between those competing points of view. Maybe that's the real lesson of our history.

Maybe Santayana's quote should be something less poetic, along the lines of: Those who cannot remember their past, or deliberately choose to ignore parts of it, are dumb, so they will repeat it.

Nah. Better stick with the original.