Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the American founders positioned Scripture as the bedrock of society, overlaying the nation’s foundation with the fundamental principles from Old Testament wisdom literature and the Good News of eternal life found in Jesus Christ.
The grand evangelistic mission by America’s Founders materialized on May 13, 1607, as approximately 144 settlers and sailors arrived on America’s shores aboard the English ships the Godspeed, the Susan Constant and the Discovery. As they disembarked they erected a cross, took communion and pledged “to reach the People within these shores with the gospel of Jesus Christ and raise up Godly generations after us.”
Some 13 years later, on Nov. 11, 1620, the Mayflower anchored at what is now Provincetown Harbor, Cape Cod. Before going ashore, the passengers established a set of rules for self-governance, pledging their mission “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith.”
Puritan passion for Biblical education began then to underpin the nation’s culture with 106 of 108 of the first colleges established in America as distinctly Christian. Christian character and values sat the standard for the “fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty and just systems of civil government,” as historian Benjamin Morris noted in his magnum opus from 1864, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States.
For 250 years, the greatest export of America was Jesus Christ, not democratic capitalism. For the glory of a nation lies in its righteousness, as Proverbs 14:34 declares, rather than in its GDP or military prowess. The nation’s rights, as per the Founders, come from God, not from the government, and the purpose of government is to protect the liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Then, in the late 18th century, devotees of the French Revolution and its anti-God ideology began infiltrating America’s halls of higher education with their secular creed of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité [liberty, equality, fraternity], undermining the biblical foundation laid down by the American Founders to secure sustainable freedom.
American Christendom, inopportunely, relinquished its fundamental role in the public square early in the 20th century, thereby enabling the State to take on godlike proportions … as prayer, the Bible and the Ten Commandments were banned from public education and government buildings in the mid-20th century.
After the banishment of the Word from culture, the denial of the existence of evil, and thus that God actually has enemies, resulted in an alarmingly increasing biblical illiteracy among the general population. From a spiritual perspective, the whole secular plot and maneuvering over the last 200 years was nothing but an attempt to eliminate God’s Sword from the public square and drive the “stinging salt” of the Word out of the cultural centre into the periphery of the church building.
How true this is, as shown by contemporary public education’s denunciation and censure of such declarations as “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’ (Gen. 8:21), “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9), and “in my flesh dwelleth no good thing” (Rom. 7:18). Biblical truth is highly objectionable to human pride and contemporary secular education theories.
This brings us to left-leaning Politico’s report on NYC Democrat Mayor Eric Adam’s remarks at the interfaith breakfast he hosted. The mayor “seemed to regret the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned school-sponsored prayer in 1962.
“When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” Adams said to applause from hundreds of religious leaders gathered at an annual event in Manhattan.
“Don’t tell me about separation of church and state. State is the body; church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.'”
New York Civil Liberties Union blasted Mayor Adam’s speech. “We are a nation and a city of many faiths and no faith,” pontificated NYCLU’s Donna Lieberman. “In order for our government to truly represent us,” she added deceptively, “it must not favor any belief over another, including non-belief.”
Ms. Lieberman merely joins the modern priests, priestesses and administrators in the holy sacraments of syncretism. Syncretism is the combining of different, often contradictory beliefs, melding together practices of various schools of thought and religion. The Old and New Testaments strictly forbid the practice as an abomination. The mingling of biblical and pagan religions is a violation of the First Commandment, resulting in anarchy and judgment on a nation.
Dutch pastor M.B. van’t Veer (1904-1944) brilliantly explains that “In the broken altar of Yahweh, syncretism is unmasked as a vain illusion. Anyone who wishes to mix the service of the true God with the service of an idol will have nothing left but idolatry. Baal was granted the right to have altars erected to him, but the altars of Yahweh were torn down.
“Whenever the church and the world mingle, it is not the church that sets its stamp on the world but the world that sets its stamp on the church, until only the world is left. The service of the true God is then allowed a place under the sun only to the extent that it allows itself to be determined by the service of idols.”
Secularists expelled God Jehovah from the culture, using secularized Supreme Court Justices to elevate the State to divine status and sanction secularism as the official religion of America. With that, blind dependence on government was substituted for trust in God for our daily bread.
To make it through, for one, senior pastors should re-establish prayer in America’s churches,. And second, American Christendom should become conversant in the acquisition and use of the larger denominations of political currency. Pastors and pews ought to engage the culture and play the long game in obedience to Jesus’ ekklesia Kingdom assignment in Matthew 16:18.
Every church in America would do well to have a pastor, deacon, elder or congregant run for local office in 2024, 2026, 2028 and thereafter. Jesse Kelly, the conservative commentator, and podcaster tweeted recently what reawakening will look like:
“We’re not playing offense yet. We’re in the early stages of playing real defense. But no offense yet. It will take time to learn.
“You’ll know we’re playing offense when we’re pushing our values in schools. Not just stopping theirs. When we’re building our statues [of the giants that led the spiritual restoration of America in the early/mid 21st century] …”
Praise be to God that Gideon’s and Rehabs are now beginning to stand. {eoa}
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David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.
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