As some of you have no doubt heard, the only American currently on the list of important modern political thinkers in our standard world history textbooks is about to be cut from it, replaced by a Frenchman no less. This snub is not the work of some America-bashing academics from Marin County. Au contraire, it’s the Texas State Board of Education that’s handing Thomas Jefferson his walking papers.

The 10-5 vote is presumed to be due to Mr. Jefferson’s advocacy of “a wall of separation between church and state” and other Enlightenment ideas, considering that the phrase “Enlightenment ideas” is also being stricken from the standards. Jefferson’s replacement is the conservative French theologian Jean Cauvin, a.k.a. John Calvin, whose backers argue that the change was not ideologically driven, but merely predestined.

The Board also added Thomas Aquinas to the list, who lived in the 13^th century. As definitions of modernity go, this places the current SBOE firmly in the company of nostalgia buffs like the Knights Templar and the Taliban.

The layers of irony here are as thick as the decision itself. First, Jefferson was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, which stands alone among  America’s trinity of founding texts for its references to both God and the Creator. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are conspicuous for their absence of any such language.

Second, Mr. Jefferson’s wall of separation has greatly benefited the religious fervor that is now being turned against him. In a clear testament to the framer’s approach to religious freedom, the United States consistently has the highest percentage of regular churchgoers of any nation in the free world. The country with the most longstanding official church, Thomas Aquinas’s Italy, has the lowest.

Jefferson’s demotion, accompanied by a width swath of revisionism cutting through the Board’s new American history standards, has sparked outrage among educators and historians in Texas and beyond. But their insistence that curricula remain connected to the best scholarship is lost on Don McLeroy, the Bryan, Texas dentist and board member leading this backwards charge, who last year summarized the majority’s disdain for all such criticism from qualified professionals in a sentence admirable only for its clarity: “Somebody’s got to stand up to these experts.”

Fortunately, with their sights set on Jefferson the Board let Voltaire slide by, meaning students may still encounter his maxim that ”prejudices are what fools use for reason”. Too bad it’s as apt a description of the Texas textbook police in 2010 as it was of Paris, circa 1750.