The setting was a July 4th celebration back in 1837. The sixth President of the U.S., John Quincy Adams, son of the second President of the U.S., the Founder and Patriot John Adams, asked the following question during his celebratory oration: “Why is it that next to the birthday of the Savior of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day?” Adams then answered his own question: Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the Gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity?”
I dare say that not many Americans have ever read those words from J.Q. Adams, because obviously those truths have been purged out of our national consciousness by those among us with “superior” intelligence and the “purest of intentions”. Try saying those same words today among various groups of p/c “intellectuals” or “Supreme Wokeness Practitioners ” and you’ll quickly discover how far America has strayed from its bedrock foundations back in 1837.
Nor was John Quincy Adams the only early leader of America who proclaimed those same sentiments. Long before Adam’s words were uttered were the words of the great Puritan leader—John Winthrop—who founded the Colony of Massachusetts Bay back in 1630, and was its first Governor. Way back in 1645 Winthrop said: “…the other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.”
Despite the protestations of modern “know-nothings” to the contrary, the preponderance of our early Founders and leaders did draw their various political philosophies from God’s Word, our Holy Bible which, praise God, culminated in a moral tradition and surely a very common understanding, among the population regarding liberty and law, all of which coalesced on July 4, 1776 when those 56 brave yet cautious (and yes—fearful)—men put their lives on the line—and potentially their necks in a British hangman’s noose—and agreed upon that noble and world-changing document that ended all formal ties with their mother country, Great Britain. In that Declaration, they explicitly acknowledged God four times, as those of us who have read those words know. These brave men, almost ALL of whom were Christians—not “Deists” as their modern lying detractors would have us believe—told us that all men “are endowed by their Creator” with certain God-ordained NATURAL RIGHTS. They also cited “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”, and then appealed to Him as “the Supreme judge of the world.” They concluded with the immortal words that they were putting “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence”. Those words became the foundations of their, and eventually OUR, heritage. That they didn’t apply to all Americans of that time when they were initially written did not negate the truthfulness of their revelations!
WHAT IS HERITAGE?
HERITAGE: What exactly does that word mean, and what does it imply? Dictionary.com defines “heritage” as follows”
- Something that is handed down from the past, as a tradition: e.g. “a national heritage of honor, pride, and courage”;
- Something that comes or belongs to one by reason of birth; an inherited lot or portion; e.g. “a heritage of poverty and suffering”;
- Something reserved for one; e.g. “the heritage of the righteous”;
- In Law: Something that has been or may be inherited by legal descent or succession.
Those definitions seem fairly straightforward. So why is it that when people of seeming intelligence and good will discuss whether or not the United States of America was founded as a “Christian Oriented Nation”, and more pointedly, were most of our Founding Fathers “Christians”, a great cloud comes over their minds, and the darkness of false teachings, closed-mindedness, and deliberate mendacity begins to reign supreme?
As I see it, the problem with most Americans today is that they have little or no sense of true history. What little history they think they know has been spoon fed to them by biased government pseudo-schools, those “institutes of induced ignorance”, by a liberal/progressive-oriented educational bureaucracy who despise our Declaration of Independence and our 1787 Constitution, and who have an “agenda” of dumbing down America’s young people to make them “generic world citizens” generally, and unthinking and “reliable” Democrat-voting Socialist robots specifically, and by a “main stream media” intent on rewriting history in the “politically correct” and “woke” modes of the present which have little or no relationship with the true history of our “American experiment”, and which encourage disdain for our country—imperfect as it always has been and probably always will be.
THE BEGINNING ROOTS OF AMERICA WERE BIBLICAL AND “REVIVALIST”
Let’s talk about “revival”. The word means: “To return to consciousness or life--- to become ACTIVE or flourishing again.” So how did America actually begin, and were there any spiritual “revivals” in our past? I’ve written often in these pages about the brave and stalwart people known as “The Mayflower Pilgrims” (including three who were my wife’s ancestors), that intrepid band of mostly English adults and children, about a third of whom were a part of a separated (from the Church of England) English church in Leiden, Holland, (where they had fled from their English homeland in 1608 to escape the severe religious and political persecution they experienced there) and who believed that “obedience to God” was more important than obedience to the false teachings of the “man-corrupted” established Church of England. After several “false starts”, they finally arrived in frigid New England (actually the tip of Cape Cod), on November 6, 1620, on a decrepit 90 foot converted freighter named “Mayflower”, to start the second English colony in the “New World” (the Jamestown colony being the first), a colony devoted to honoring God’s Word, and living by its precepts as “Christians” to the best of their abilities.
We’ve all been taught, or at least we should have been, that these 102 (some say 104) English colonists, not all of whom were separated Christians, barely survived that first harsh winter and spring of 1620/21, and that about half of them didn’t. But those who did survive lived under their written “Compact” of civil government, the “Mayflower Compact”, that began—“IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN”—signed by all of the adult male Pilgrims while Mayflower was first anchored off what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod (I’ve been there). Was this Plymouth Colony, which survived from 1620 to 1691 (when it was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony) a “Christian” colony with a mostly Christian population and a government run to a large extent by “Christians” using Biblical principles? Except for their initially agreed upon “communal” form of government, (which only lasted a little over two years and which almost destroyed the colony) I believe it was. So did they.
So why did the people of New England believe that they needed a “revival” within 40 years or so of Plymouth Colony’s end? Apparently they did so believe, for the period from 1731 to 1755 has been historically named, The First Great Awakening, and it was led by faithful men of God such as George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards. This first “great awakening”, dominated by these strong CHRISTIAN pastors with their sermons based on God’s Word, is said to have changed the future of the country we today call the U.S.A. Several decades later, The Second Great Awakening of 1790 TO 1840 occurred, championed by the indomitable Rev. Charles Finney, and it was claimed at the time that the souls of the American people were so stirred by Finney’s preaching that they turned their hearts toward the God of the Bible.
Apparently our American ancestors heeded God’s Word, found in Psalm 85:6, as they prayed-----“Oh God, will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” These “awakenings”, or “REVIVALS”, based on preaching and hearing God’s Word, sound pretty “Christian” to me. Not secular—not politically correct—not “woke”, not “inclusive” of all other religious beliefs, but CHRISTIAN, which was what society was in those days, for the most part. That truth is something that our modern society, dominated by the strong “religion of secular humanism” and its apologists, want modern-day Americans to forget or preferably to never know, for our present-day mostly anti-Christian opinion makers and shakers are masters of deceit!
I’ve always believed that God’s Word teaches that the way any people view history (“His Story”) will pretty much affect the way that those people behave within their respective societies. In other hoary words, “those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes”. The violent history of mankind in general, and of the 20th Century in particular, bears ample evidence of man’s propensity to do evil, to prey upon, enslave, and murder his fellow man, and to proclaim that “there is no God except for man himself”! Fortunately, the wise men and women who founded the United States of America believed otherwise, for as afflicted by their sinful natures as all human beings have been, are today, and will forever be—they were “People of the Book”—they were Christians for the most part, or if they weren’t they were at least “God-fearing”, and no amount of progressive and Marxist mendacity and main stream media perfidy and university/seminary miseducation will ever change that fact.
The Christians who founded this nation knew, and indeed all Christians alive today need to know, that the country we call America started out DIFFERENTLY, was “theologically unique”, and despite tremendous anti-Christian influences and pressures by the “movers and shakers” of our society, virtually from the earliest days of our Republic, still today remains somewhat “different” from most other countries because the Bible, God’s unchanging and inerrant Word, was honored and followed by faithful Christians long before there ever was an “America” to be different, and is still honored and followed by perhaps half of the American population (although recent “polls” suggest that it is even less than that).
Next time in Part 2 we’ll begin to explore more evidences that not only were most of our Founders Christians, but that they did establish the United States as a Christian-oriented nation of “religious people”, a fact that was long recognized by the U.S. government itself, including our Supreme Court in a decision from 1892. More on that in Part 3 of this series.