Editor's note: Doug Phillips is writing a series of columns for WND about the quadricentennial of the settlement of Jamestown, Va., being celebrated in June. See his previous commentaries.

The results are in, and Americans have failed the test. When it comes to our history, we are probably the most ignorant generation of Americans ever to be born. Despite unprecedented access to media and information, our families have little idea where they came from, let alone who they are.

Consider the results of a Virginia Tourism Corp. poll recently published in the Virginia Gazette. Of the 1,000 people polled, only 7 percent knew that the first permanent English settlement in America occurred in 1607; only 31 percent knew that the settlement was located in Virginia; and only 26 percent knew its name was Jamestown. A mere eight out of 1,000 respondents knew the name of the ships that brought the settlers to the New World.

The sad truth is most parents and their children know more about Hollywood celebrities than they do about Christian heroes like John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, William Bradford, Cotton Mather, Samuel Davies, Patrick Henry and George Washington, and the pantheon of remarkable men and women who were used of God to give Americans a legacy of law and liberty under Christ.

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Also lost on many Americans is the fact that this year marks our 400th birthday through the first permanent English settlement in the continent – a settlement that was expressly founded on the Great Commission, which gave us our first conversion of American Indians from the horrors of paganism to the Gospel, which introduced republican representative government, and which established the Bible as the defining influence on the institutions of what would become a free and independent people.

And the reason for the historical amnesia of many Americans is clear. First, we have set aside the biblical commands, like those found in the 78th Psalm, for fathers to teach their children the mighty deeds of God in history. Second, we have surrendered our history – without so much as a whimper of a fight – to philosophically motivated revisionists.

Examples of such revisionism are legion. One can download, for example, the "Official Curriculum of America's 400th Anniversary Sponsored by the Federal Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission" to study the "ethnocentrism" of the Jamestown settlers and compare it to "gay rights" issues. One can use the story of the Jamestown settlers to discover how "belief in one's superiority over another has to lead to conflict" like those committed through "ethnic cleansing in Rwanda" and "Nazi Germany."

Consider also the recent propaganda presented to the children of America care of the friendly evolutionists at National Geographic.

Their May 2007 cover story that just hit the stands is entitled: "Jamestown: The Real Story: How settlers destroyed a native Empire and changed the landscape from the ground up."

National Geographic assures us that: "Much of what we learned in grade school about the New World encountered by the colonists at Jamestown is wrong. Four hundred years later, historians are piecing together the real story."

Away with the undisputed histories we have heard and celebrated for close to 400 years! Away with the historical academic record! It's time for a new history for a better tomorrow.

So just what is the "real story" of Jamestown? Answer: environmental injustice.

Here is what kids can learn from the new history: Christian settlers were "environmental imperialists." They not only brought a host of nasty destructive bugs to the near utopian ecological world of the Native Americans, but they "unsettl[ed] the landscape" and "unleashed what would become a multi-level ecological assault on North America."

What is the proof of these assertions?

I think that is a reasonable question given the fact that such comments are becoming ubiquitous in much of the literature and events associated with the official Jamestown commemoration, as well as articles like this month's National Geographic piece.

The proof? Not much.

True, there are many novel, highly speculative theories presented by academics seeking to distinguish themselves with a new concept. Also true, there appears to be a fair amount of reliance on the modern, so-called "oral tradition" of small groups of sometimes embittered and politically motivated individuals. But that is pretty much it.

Both the quest for scientific novelty and the ever-present environmental agenda of these academics appears to have left them incapable of, well, seeing the forest for the trees.

Is there an environmental message of Jamestown? Actually, yes.

Prior to the arrival of Christian culture in North America, approximately 1 million people, none of whom were united under a single banner, were sparsely distributed on a vast land mass that was in excess of 3 million square miles. These cultures constantly warred against each other, had no written language, worshipped demons and animal spirits, practiced cannibalism and child sacrifice, had no biblical concept of property ownership, and because of insufficient cultivation of the land, sometimes starved, despite access to vast resources.

For all of their shortcomings and errors, it was the Jamestown settlers who first planted the distinctively Christian vision for dominion over the land through careful stewardship of land resources. This vision was a distinctive of Christian culture and found its origins in the express commands of Scripture.

In the end, America, more than any nation on the earth, would take the dominion mandate to cultivate the earth and turn our nation into the breadbasket of plenty for the world. It was the so-called "environmental imperialism" of our Founding Fathers that allowed this nation to bless an impoverished and needy world.

Americans will continue to get an "F" as long as we focus on novelty, speculation and self-loathing. On the other hand, what great things can happen if we give our children their history – the real stuff. And in so doing we will "shew to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done" (Psalm 78:4).

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Related special offer:

"To Have and to Hold: A Tale of Providence and Perseverance in Colonial Jamestown"