I love the United States of America. Every summer, our family enjoys celebrating the 4th of July with decorations, fireworks, food, and PBS’ A Capital Fourth. I enjoy patriotic music almost as much as Christmas music, adding two new CD’s to my patriotic collection this year: American Jubilee by the Cincinnati Pops and For God and Countryby Dolly Parton.
Last summer
my family toured our beloved capital, Washington, D.C. We proudly toured the monuments, museums, and
hallowed landmarks. We witnessed one reality
chiseled on stone - the majority of our
Founding Fathers had deep respect for the God of the Bible. Though revisionists work meticulously to
rewrite our history, the American experiment was one rooted in a Christian
worldview.
John Adams,
our second President, said, “The highest glory of the American Revolution was
this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government
with the principles of Christianity.”
These
Fathers did not want a state-sponsored religion because they did not want the
state to interfere with the religion of the people. Instead, they expected and wanted the
religion of the people to influence the state.
These Founders would not recognize the obsession in America today to
“separate church and state.”
Benjamin
Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, believed that the
only way to preserve the new nation was to train the next generation in
Christian teaching:
We profess to be republicans [not
governed by a king], and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and
perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal
education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by the means of the
Bible. For this Divine Book, above all others, favors that equality among
mankind, that respect for just laws, and those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute
the soul of republicanism.
Many years
later, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, shares in his book A Nation Like No Other, “The Founders’
distinctively Christian faith is well documented, as is their conviction that
government must be infused with Christian principles.”
Today, we
see America tearing apart at the seams.
We have ignored her recipe for success.
We unashamedly need God in America again.
John Adams
had it right: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious
people. It is wholly inadequate to the
government of any other.”
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