When you set out to write a devotional based on our nation’s history, there’s a temptation to try and word things in a way that’s similar to the style you might use when you’re trying to make a point…
When I first sat down with my buddy who would go on to encourge me to write “The American Devotional Series,” he gave me some good counsel by saying, “Don’t argue. Just let the content speak for itself.”
In the end, it’s so much more than just the debate surrounding the Separation of Church and State. The amount of content and documentation that exists which points definitively to a population that understood, not only what was at stake, but how important it was to be basing their stance on something more than a political philosophy…
It’s overwhelming and utterly compelling.
You don’t commit High Treason nor take up arms against your sovereign based on a mere complaint. Our cause was preached from behind pulpits and not just proclaimed in the public square.
However critics and academics want to dismiss the Revolutionary War as a secular enterprise, vaguely supported with no real principle or ideal behind it apart from a collective disdain for King George, the documents and the commentary coming from that time period from the people who lived it, tell a much different story.
Here’s a list of some “Inconvenient Realities” that reveal those who insist on a humanistic foundation for the Revolutionary War and the United States in general as people who don’t have a point as much as they have a resolve to ignore what’s true in order to validate a world where they are their own Absolute.
Enjoy!
The Separation of Church and State is a phrase often used by people who want to insist that Christianity had no real role in our nation’s founding – cerntainly nothing that had any significant influence on those that articulated our cause, created our Constitution and fought the battles that culminated in the surrender of Great Britain.
You see this in comments like what you see below from the “Freedom From Religion” website:
The Christian Right is trying to rewrite the history of the United States, as part of their campaign to force their religion on others who ask merely to be left alone. According to this Orwellian revision, the Founding Fathers of this country were pious Christians who wanted the United States to be a Christian nation, with laws that favored Christians and Christianity.
Not true! The early presidents and patriots were generally Deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the absurdities of the Old and New Testaments.
You have to be very selective in the information you use to validate such a statement. At the same time, you have to be willfully oblivious to the specific references to God and Christ that punctuate the relevant events and documentation that established the United States.
Below is a brief yet potent list:
Read more: Twenty Five Inconvenient Realities | Part IWhat qualified our statement to King George as a legitimate cause as opposed to a mere complaint is the way in which our Founders showed how his monarchy violated Divine Absolutes. However unjust or belligerent his adminstration may have been, it was the manner in which his rule restricted rights that were not his to dispense as much as they were God’s to guarantee – that is what gave our cause the Substance it needed to resonate as something that was True and not just preferred.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.1
That is the starting point. The rights we have are God-given and the governments that are established by men to ensure those rights, but…
…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.2
We are founded on a Biblical Absolute and not a legal argument.
During the seven years we were at war with Great Britain, Congress proclaimed a National Day of Fasting, Prayer and Humiliation 16 different times. You can view an image of those proclamations as they are preserved in the Library of Congress as well as a readable transcription by clicking here.
The verbiage of these proclamations is not conducive to an all-inclusive dynamic as far as it being something that accommodates all faiths. Rather, it specifies Christ and a need to seek His Forgiveness and Direction.
For example, a portion of the Proclamation from March 20, 1781 reads as follows:
The United States in Congress assembled, therefore do earnestly recommend, that Thursday the third of May next, may be observed as a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer, that we may, with united hearts, confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and by sincere repentance and amendment of life, appease his righteous displeasure, and through the merits of our blessed Savior, obtain pardon and forgiveness:
There’s a couple of things that are worth noticing: First, the commitee that was tasked with drafting this proclamation included James Madison who many want to believe to be a Deist. Someone with that kind of spiritual temperment would not be advocating Christ as “our blessed Savior.”
Secondly, to characterize Congress as a humanistic enterprise that placed no priority on the Reality and the Necessity of Divine Intervention requires a willful disregard for the repeated directives that came from their collective pen that recommended an intentional timeframe dedictated to an intensely focused and humble posturing before Jesus Christ.
In 1854, James Meacham, the Representative from Vermont, delivered a report pertaining to an issue involving the First Amendment. At one point, he said this:
Down to the Revolution, every colony did sustain [the Christian] religion in some form. It was deemed peculiarly proper that the religion of liberty should be upheld by a free people. Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have strangled in its cradle. At the time of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, not any one sect. Any attempt to level and discard all religion would have been viewed with universal indignation.3
In the same report, Meacham concluded by saying:
In this age there can be no substitute for Christianity; that, in its general principles, is the great conservative element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of free institutions. That was the religion of the founders of the Republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.4
The first words of the Treaty that represented Great Britain’s surrender to America in 1783 were:
In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.5
The Liberty Bell was used to summon delegates to Pennslyvania Hall to discuss the matters of the day. Benjamin Franklin wrote to Catherine Ray in 1755, “Adieu, the Bell rings, and I must go among the Grave ones and talk Politicks.”6
It’s most famous tolling, however, was on July 8, 1776 when it was used to summon the townspeople to hear the public reading of the Declaration of Independence.7
Yet, up until that point, the bell wasn’t seen as an icon as much as it is today because of the way the text that’s inscribed on the bell was applied to the issue of slavery in 1844.
The inscription is Leviticus 25:10:
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. (Lev 25:10 [KJV])
William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator, reprinted a poem written by H.R.H. Moore which represented the first documented use of the name, “The Liberty Bell.” Garrison saw it as an appropriate and effective way to combine the Biblical substance of the verse inscribed on the bell with the poetry of Moore which included the line, “Ring it, till the slave is free” and let the collective meaning serve as a rebuke against those who supported slavery.
In an article printed in Time Magazine, Dr Ben Carson tells of how when the body of Abraham Lincoln was laid in Independence Hall, he was placed in a manner where the Liberty Bell and the inscription was directly overhead. During the 20 hour public viewing, over 150,000 people paid their respects to the Great Emancipator.
In the article penned by Dr Carson, he concludes by saying:
Whether you’re black or white, Democrat or Republican, The Liberty Bell’s true story reminds Americans of all stripes that our nation’s history—and future—belongs to us all. It challenges us to tear down systems that hold us captive and honor the price great men and women have paid to cast and re-cast the American mold to form a more perfect union.8
The story of the Liberty Bell and the nation it represents possesses the profound and essential content that it does because of how it points to a Divine Absolute and not just a desired political climate.
On May 2, 1778, General Washington issued the following General Orders:
The Commander in Chief directs that divine Service be performed every Sunday at 11 o’clock in those Brigades to which there are Chaplains—those which have none to attend the places of worship nearest to them—It is expected that Officers of all Ranks will by their attendance set an Example to their men.
While we are zealously performing the duties of good Citizens and soldiers we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of Religion—To the distinguished Character of Patriot, it should be our highest Glory to add the more distinguished Character of Christian—The signal Instances of providential Goodness which we have experienced and which have now almost crowned our labors with complete Success, demand from us in a peculiar manner the warmest returns of Gratitude & Piety to the Supreme Author of all Good.9
George Washington made frequent references to the Power and Goodness of God throughout his career as the Commanding General of the Continental Army as well as his time as Commander in Chief.
The fact that he made a point of ensuring that Christian worship services were held throughout the army he commanded and made it clear that he expected his officers to lead by example by being both present and engaged reveals the priority he placed on the acknowledgement of the “Supreme Author of all Good.”
While enduring the hardship and lethal challenges of the winter spent at Valley Forge, Washington directed his troops to set aside a day for thanksgiving and fasting. On December 18, 1777, Reverend Israel Evans delivered one of the sermons and Washington later wrote him to thank him. In that letter, he said:
…it will ever be the first wish of my heart to aid your pious endeavours to inculcate a due sense of the dependence we ought to place in that all-wise and powerful Being, on whom alone our success depends.10
1) “Declaration of Independence”, America’s Founding Documents, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript, accessed June 27, 2022
2) Ibid
3) “H. Rept. 33-124 – Chaplains in Congress and in the Army and Navy. March 27, 1854. Ordered to be printed, Committee on the Judiciary. March 27, 1854”, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-00743_00_00-004-0124-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-00743_00_00-004-0124-0000.pdf, accessed April 1, 2023
4) Ibid (you can also see this report referenced on the online copy of the Congressional Record of the Proceedings and Debates of the 87th Congress in Volume 108 – Part 13 that covers the activity from August 20, 1962 to August 30, 1962. It’s on page 17597 and can be accessed by heading out to https://www.google.com/books/edition/Congressional_Record/dKHcR9moGwkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=1854
5) “Treaty of Paris (1783)”, “Milestone Documents”, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-paris, accessed April 1, 2023
6) “National Park Service”, “The Liberty Bell”, https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories-libertybell.htm, accessed April 1, 2023
7) “Liberty Bell Tolls to Announce Declaration of Independence”, “History”, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/liberty-bell-tolls-to-announce-declaration-of-independence, accessed April 1, 2023
8) “Ben Carson: What You Don’t Know About The Liberty Bell”, Time Magazine, Dr. Ben Carson, August 24, 2016, https://time.com/4464934/ben-carson-liberty-bell-history/, accessed April 2, 2023
9) “General Orders, 2 May 1778, George Washington, “Founders Online”, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-15-02-0016, accessed March 7, 2023
10) “The Writings of George Washington, Volume V”, Jared Sparks, Russell, Odiorne and Metcalf & Hilliard, Gray and Company, Boston, 1834, https://books.google.com/books?id=UatV3YPhGVAC&pg=PA276&lpg=PA276&dq, accessed April 2, 2023