AMERICA AWAKENS
Almost every middle school student receives at least a tacit introduction to American history, often beginning with the Revolutionary War. But few students are taught to appreciate the religious convictions that motivated those first Americans to risk everything, and often to pay the ultimate price, to secure that freedom. And fewer still are taught the actual origins of so many of the ideas that produced the American Revolution.
Beginning in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, more than four decades before the Revolution, a moral, spiritual, and cultural renewal spread throughout America. Like small brushfires flaring up throughout a vast, parched land, sparks of renewed religious fervency began to catch fire in the minds of first hundreds, then thousands of colonial settlers. Galvanized by the fiery sermons of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and others, these revivals—which held no name or label at the time—tended to begin not in a church or city center, but in the open air of the countryside, eventually evolving into the camp-meetings that were a prominent feature of American frontier life for the following two centuries.
As touched upon in chapter one, the Great Awakening democratized and personalized religion. Such open-aired meetings were accessible not only to the wealthier, long-established patrons of traditional churches, but also to the most humble laborers, farmers, and pioneers, many of whom had no other opportunity to access spiritual teaching. Itinerant preachers recited a Gospel that was deeply individualized, centered on a personal knowledge of truth and a personal relationship with God. Crucially, they encouraged individuals to read the Bible and discern these principles for themselves.
Though occasionally referring to worldly affairs, the preachers’ message was not inherently political. Yet their declaration of personal salvation, personal knowledge and study of Scripture, and man’s equality before God had enormous political ramifications that are still evident in the American character today, especially in the commitment to personal responsibility over every aspect of one’s religious, family, and social life—that is, to self-government.
It was this notion, not merely indignation at the price of tea, that was at the core of the Revolutionaries’ cry for liberty. The Great Awakening had cemented a deep and immoveable belief that ultimate authority rested with God alone, that God—not government—gave man his rights, and that a government that usurped the sovereign authority of God or the right of man to govern himself had lost its legitimacy.
It was through a renewed commitment to these religious truths that Americans gleaned the moral strength to endure a long, costly, but ultimately victorious war for their independence.
SLAVERY AND THE CIVIL WAR
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, America was swept by the Second Great Awakening—another movement of profound spiritual renewal that emphasized God’s accessibility to every person. Though historians often fail to make the connection, this deeply religious movement, and its emphasis on the equal dignity of all men, strongly impacted prevailing beliefs about the issue of slavery, as witnessed in the writings and speeches of America’s foremost opponent of human bondage.
Years before the Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln argued that the practice of degrading and abusing human beings made in the image of God was incompatible with America’s foundational principles. He described the inescapable conflict between the forces of freedom and slavery in a speech in 1854: “Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’”7
Lincoln repeatedly appealed to the conscience of America to reject slavery, not on pragmatic or economic grounds, but by reasserting the moral and religious truths that animated the Founders and the eighteenth-century revivalists. In a speech on August 17, 1858, in Lewistown, Illinois, he declared,These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: “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.” This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.8
The belief that the “Divine image” had been stamped upon every person, slave or free, sustained Lincoln through the dark and horrible crucible of a civil war that cost the lives of more than 600,000 Americans. It was by reminding Americans of this truth that Lincoln continually rekindled the moral will of a free people. It was the knowledge that they fought for a cause not merely political, but deeply spiritual and eternally significant, that inspired the Union to press on to victory despite the devastating cost.
THE EUGENICS MOVEMENT AND THE REPUDIATION OF LIBERTY
Charles Davenport, one of the first American eugenicists, called eugenics the science of “the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”9 Essentially, eugenicists believed in advancing society by selectively breeding the most talented or beautiful or intelligent people, while preventing the reproduction of the disabled, the poor, or the so-called “feebleminded.” Eugenicists drew widespread attention with their warnings that “defective” people were reproducing at a much higher rate than were “normal” people, threatening all of society.
These repugnant theories took root in American academia in the early twentieth century and from there began to permeate the wider American culture.
Eugenics was especially aimed against immigrants. When immigrant populations were given IQ tests that were largely vocabulary-based, eugenicist Henry Goddard unsurprisingly discovered that over 80 percent of immigrant test-takers—whether Hungarian, Polish, Italian, or Russian—were mentally defective.10 He then concluded that feeblemindedness was inherited through genetic traits, a standard argument among a large group of eugenicists who believed certain races or ethnicities were more likely to be “defective,” and were therefore less useful to society, than other races.
Odious ideas have consequences. Elected leaders looked to science for solutions to social ills, and eugenicists offered a seemingly scientific answer to what was deemed a scientific problem.
By 1940, more than thirty states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, and by 1941, tens of thousands—at least 60,000 according to one source—of eugenic sterilizations had been performed in the United States.11
This brief history should be seen as a stark warning against diminishing or ending an innocent human life simply because “society” deems that life to be burdensome; in doing so, we compromise every ideal and belief in human dignity that has made America great, and we tear at the very fabric that holds our exceptional society together. The history of the eugenics movement in America will always blight the nation’s soul, demonstrating the danger of straying from our foundational principles. But this history also shows that when we renew our commitment to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, even the largest ship of state can be righted and set on course again.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Like the issue of slavery, the 1960s-era struggle for civil rights forced America to confront deep, long-standing injustices.
The most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., was a Baptist minister who believed that the effort to end racial discrimination and segregation was premised on the same religious truths that our Founders had proclaimed. Indeed, he understood that no objective claim can be made to civil or legal rights without the assumption that there are God-given moral rights and principles of justice. It was only by appealing to these unchangeable laws of justice—especially the natural law that all men are equal
and endowed with dignity from their Creator—that King believed the case for civil rights could retain its moral legitimacy. King clearly articulated these beliefs in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:An unjust law is a human law this is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.…Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.12
Moreover, King knew that by reasserting these core truths, civil rights activists were, in his words, “standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”13
REAGAN SHINES A LIGHT
In autumn 1989, the most potent symbol of totalitarian evil, the Berlin Wall, was ripped apart by the people it had imprisoned for nearly thirty years. Two years later, the Soviet Union officially dissolved, on Christmas Day 1991. The fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union transpired in relative calm, but they followed decades of repression, cruelty, and murder by the Soviet regime and its satellite governments.
The Wall fell due to a mix of political, economic, diplomatic, and military events. But spiritual factors were decisive, as President Ronald Reagan did his part to rally the West to defend religious freedom and human dignity. Most people know of Reagan’s demand, issued in June 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate, next to the Berlin Wall, that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” Unfortunately, this iconic statement has overshadowed the rest of his speech, in which Reagan described the “fundamental distinction between East and West.” Said Reagan, “The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.”14
Reagan then ridiculed how the “totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront.” He pointed to the frantic attempts by the Communist East German government to correct with paints and chemicals what they found to be a major flaw in the glass sphere of the massive communications tower they built in 1969. Reagan noted that their attempted fixes had failed, since “even today when the sun strikes that sphere—that sphere that towers over all Berlin—the light makes the sign of the cross.”15
This theme was nothing new to Reagan; he had been stressing the primacy of the spiritual struggle against Communism since he had taken office. In his 1981 Notre Dame commencement address, four months into his presidency, Reagan issued this rallying cry: “For the West, for America, the time has come to dare to show to the world that our civilized ideas, our traditions, our values, are not—like the ideology and war machine of totalitarian societies—just a facade of strength. It is time for the world to know our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all strength, a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.”16
Similarly, in his “Evil Empire” speech in 1983, Reagan declared, “The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.”17
When human freedom and dignity were under assault during the Cold War, Reagan knew that the spiritual nature of man and the freedom to know God were central to defining humanity and decisive in defeating tyranny.
THE WAR ON FAITH
In his dissenting opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist stated, “The ‘wall of separation between church and state’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”18
His declaration was a blunt reminder that no attack on American culture is more historically dishonest or socially destructive than the relentless effort of radical secularists to drive God out of America’s public square.
While radical secularists claim to support religious neutrality in the public realm, in fact they focus almost exclusively on attacking expressions of Judeo-Christian morality, revealing that their real agenda is to banish our Judeo-Christian heritage from public life altogether. Their campaign is waged on two main fronts: the classroom and the courtroom. Additionally, they have recently extended their attacks to the family, and to the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.
In June 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals shocked Americans nationwide by ruling the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional. The ruling brazenly trampled upon centuries of American religious heritage, disregarded countless judicial precedents, and flouted the explicit will of the American people as asserted by Congress and President Eisenhower when they formally adopted the phrase in 1954.
With that ruling, many Americans realized just how hostile our elites have become to the public expression of our traditional religious precepts. But in fact, the Pledge of Allegiance decision was only the latest effort in a decades-long campaign to eliminate not only the words but the very concept that America is “under God.” Consider the following Supreme Court decisions:• In 1962, the Court banned prayer from public schools.19
• In 1963, the Court found that reading the Bible in public schools was unconstitutional.20
• In 1980, the Court invalidated a state law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms.21
• In 1985, the Court struck down a state law requiring a moment of silence for private prayer or meditation in public schools.22
• In 1989, the Court found the display of a nativity scene at a county courthouse to be unconstitutional.23
• In 1992, religious figures were prohibited from offering prayer during public school graduation ceremonies .24
• In 1993, the Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for a Christian club to meet on the campus of a public school.25
• In 2004, a student who earned a state scholarship to college was denied the right to use the funding to pursue a degree in theology.26
• In 2005, a display of the Ten Commandments in two Kentucky county courthouses was ruled unconstitutional.27
The campaign against public prayer and the display of religious symbols is only the tip of the iceberg.28 Consider the following examples:• In New Jersey, a second-grade public school student was prohibited from singing “Awesome God” in an after-school talent show.29
• In January 2004, in Balch Spring, Texas, senior citizens meeting at a community senior center were prohibited from praying over their meals.30
• In October 2004, in St. Louis, Missouri, an elementary student caught praying over his lunch by a school official was lifted from his seat, reprimanded in front of the other students, and taken to the principal, who ordered him to stop praying.31
• In October 2006, the president of William and Mary College removed a cross from the historic Wren Chapel, implying it was an unwelcoming religious symbol.32
• In November 2006, a student at Missouri State University studying to be a social worker was interrogated by school faculty and subsequently threatened with expulsion when, after being required to lobby state legislators in favor of same-sex couple adoptions, she asked for an alternative assignment that did not violate her Christian beliefs.33
• In May 2009, a pro-life nurse at a New York hospital was forced to participate in a late-term abortion, even though the hospital had agreed in writing to honor her religious convictions.34
• In October 2009, Congress passed a “hate speech” law subjecting pastors and other faith leaders to prosecution for preaching aspects of their faith that the state decides are “hate spe
ech.”35
• In January 2010, a Baptist minister was sentenced to thirty days in jail for peacefully protesting outside a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Oakland, California.36
• In February 2010, five men were threatened with arrest for preaching Christianity on a public sidewalk in Virginia. 37
• A Methodist camp meeting association in New Jersey now faces civil rights charges after refusing a request to host a same-sex couple’s “civil union ceremony” in its worship space.38
• A young Christian photographer was fined nearly $7,000 in attorneys’ fees after she refused to photograph the “commitment ceremony” of a same-sex couple.39
• A student at Tomah High School in Wisconsin received a grade of zero, a formal reprimand, and two days of detention after drawing a picture containing a cross and Scripture reference in art class.40
• Members of a Christian club in an Arizona high school were disallowed from sharing information during morning announcements simply because their announcement contained the word “prayer.”41
The Founders would have regarded such efforts to remove God from public life as a fundamental threat to liberty. They saw no contradiction between the First Amendment, which was designed to protect religious liberty, and the need for a free people to remember that their liberties come from God. Indeed, when George Washington spoke of the “sacred fire of liberty,” he implored the people to safeguard liberty by acknowledging God’s providence and seeking His blessing on behalf of the nation.42
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