The Great Experiment
Nations come and nations go. Like wind erasing footprints in the sands of time they disappear into the graveyard of ancient history. According to historian Arnold Toynbee 28 major civilizations have done so. Many great Empires like the Babylonian, Medes-Persians, Greek, Roman, Dutch, Spanish, French, and British committed suicide by slowly sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
The American experiment is now 235 years old – at least the way we count it. We date ourselves as a nation to July 4, 1776, even though the Declaration of Independence was actually signed the day before. No matter, it was announced on the fourth of July.
Those who signed that historic statement of liberty were putting their lives on the line. They knew that Britain would see them as traitors, even though they saw themselves as patriots.
What so many fail to understand now is that the Declaration was an argument that had to be defended. That argument has now been defended over and over again, as each successive generation of Americans has to make the cause of freedom its own.
But America is not an exception to the rule. She too will disappear like the colossal statute of Vero that stood at the entrance of the Coliseum in Rome, if in her exalted position she forget s the God who made her great. It was the powerful Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar who looking over his capital from his ivory balcony boasted; “Is this not great Babylon that I have built,” (Daniel 4:30) That was a Titanic statement he regretted he ever made.
Fifty-four of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were Christians, 27 held theology degrees. Many went on to form Bible societies. These signers intended the document to officiate the separation between America and Great Britain. However, they based the Declaration which has served as a foundation to the beginnings of the American nation upon a greater foundational belief that God, or as written in the Declaration “Creator”, was the source for men’s irrevocable rights. The danger is that we know have so many politicians and university professors and a secular media that would like to tell us that like Nebuchadnezzar we did it all on our own. “Glory be to me!”
John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States (whom secularist historians like to tar and feather as an out of touch religionist) who signed the historic document wrote, “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: that it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration, also believed “God who gave us life gave us liberty.”
Two of the Continental Congress’ first actions were to hire military chaplains and to purchase 20,000 Bibles to remedy a national shortage.
Although America was already a free nation during the presidency of George Washington, the first president of the United States, he suggested that only religion could uphold its morality. During his farewell address he said, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
America’s roots can be traced back to the marriage relationship between the early inhabitants of the land and Christianity. The Pilgrims clearly stated the purpose for their voyage even before stepping off the Mayflower: “…undertaken for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith…”
The U.S. Supreme Court also identified America as a Christian nation in 1892, after 10 years of examining hundreds of documents on the foundation of the country. The justices came to the unanimous conclusion that the documents undeniably “add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a religious people, a Christian nation.”
Many of us as Christians are become more and more alarmed as we see our present judges, politicians and intellectuals playing God by chipping away from the Judeo-Christian construct of America the very bedrock of our heritage.
According to the late Ronald W. Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, “Without God there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience….without God there is a coarsening of the society; without God democracy will not and cannot long endure….If we ever forget that we are one Nation Under God, then we will be a Nation gone under.”
Of course there is much that is good about America; she is still the greatest nation on earth. But even so we have much to be concerned about regarding moral issues such as abortion, gay marriage, public education, big-brother control of our lives, as well as irresponsible national debt etc….
You can take it to the mountain top that the influence of Christianity upon the founding of our great nation is what made it the greatest nation ever; a fact so evident that only a fool would deny it.
Think of it this way: Where did faith in Judeo-Christianity take us in a little over 200 years? Where would denial of all that has made us great take us if we allow it to be ripped away by those who now want to promote a nation independent of God.?
Unlike other great nations in the past, it behooves us to return and to remain with that which made us great in the first place.
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord!”
Happy Independence Day!
Pastor Bob