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The United States is officially 250 years old, and as we conclude our series of looking to the past to understand our future, we wanted to take this final week to look forward. To this point, we’ve examined the various ways in which God explains the criterion by which he will judge nations, as well as how America fares in comparison with his standards. To be honest, the news has not always been great. However, just because our culture falls short now doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.
The brilliant cultural commentator Os Guinness has noted that Americans have two revolutions from which to choose. We are obviously celebrating the 1776 revolution that led to our independence and birthed the nation whose 250th anniversary we commemorate this year. It was conceived and fulfilled within the context of a consensual biblical morality that the Founding Fathers explicitly acknowledged.
For example:
- “You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are.” (George Washington).
- “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” (John Adams).
- “Christianity is the only true and perfect religion . . . in proportion as mankind adopt its principles and obey its precepts, they will be wise and happy” (Benjamin Rush).
- “The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and his apostles. . . . This is genuine Christianity and to this we owe our free constitutions of government” (Noah Webster).
I do not mean to suggest that the Founding Fathers were all Bible-believing Christians. But I do mean that they agreed with President Washington’s assertion in his 1796 Farewell Address:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . . 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.
However, there was another revolution around the same time, the 1789 French Revolution.
The human path to flourishing
Unlike the American Revolution, the French was, as Guinness noted, “expressly anti-biblical, anti-Christian, anti-religious, and anti-clerical.” He adds, “That hostility to religion, and certainly to the Christian faith and the Church, has been a characteristic of the French and the Russian and the Chinese [Revolutions] ever since.”
Tragically, the French version of human flourishing has largely come to dominate our secularized society. To connect the chronological and philosophical dots as briefly as possible:
- Charles Darwin convinced us that we are the products of random evolution rather than divine providence.
- Friedrich Nietzsche denied objective meaning in language and encouraged us to overcome the power motives of others.
- Charles Sanders Peirce popularized pragmatism, the view that truth is what works for the most people.
- Karl Marx claimed that we are materialistically determined by economic factors.
- Freud asserted that we are sexual beings at our core and that sexual freedom and authenticity are vital to flourishing for individuals and society.
- His protégé Wilhelm Reich argued that sexual expression is natural and that the control of sexual energies by the family, institutionalized sexual morality, and the state is destructive. In his view, sexual repression profoundly distorts psychological development.
- Postmodern theorists built on Nietzsche’s denial of objective language by claiming that all truth claims are personal, individual, and subjective.
- Pornography producers began normalizing unbiblical sexual morality, aided by the legalization of birth control in 1960, and helped catalyze the “sexual revolution” of that decade and beyond.
- The Stonewall Inn Riots of 1969 became a galvanizing event in the movement for LGBTQ rights. Over the decades, advocates have sought to normalize LGBTQ behavior, legalize it, stigmatize those who disagree, and then criminalize disagreement.
- The Supreme Court legalized elective abortion in 1973.
- Critical theory, an application of Marxism that divides society into the oppressed and the oppressors, became ascendent in elite universities. In the context of race, it asserts that the West is systemically racist and that the oppressed must be privileged to oppress their oppressors.
- The US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.
This journey from consensual biblical morality to a post-Christian, post-truth secularism has continued apace in recent years. For the first time, church membership has fallen below 50 percent in our country. The religiously unaffiliated are now the largest cohort in America, ranking ahead of Catholics or Protestants.
What will such secularism mean to our future?
God’s path to flourishing
I have often said that God deals with us as gently as he can or as harshly as he must. His first response to those who reject him is to allow them the consequences of their rejection. In the context of national flourishing, we should not therefore be surprised by the rise in crime, depression, and “deaths of despair” that correspond directly with the rise in secularism.
If a people will not respond to the loss of God’s favor, they must inevitably face his justice. We have seen this theme illustrated across this book and across the various nations and cultures of biblical history. It is presumptuous for us to believe that it is not relevant to our nation as well.
If we want God to bless America, we must be a nation he is able to bless. If we are to experience another 250 years of history and flourishing, it is therefore imperative that we embrace and advance the values that position us to experience his best.
In an April 1863 proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln stated:
It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God . . . and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
Will we embrace this duty with renewed devotion and passion?
Will you?
Faith of the Founders
Samuel Adams and the Urgency of Biblical Morality
Samuel Adams (1722–1803) has been called the Father of the American Revolution for his role in championing independence long before it became a popular goal. He founded the Sons of Liberty, a grassroots political organization that fought British taxation and tyranny, and organized the Boston Tea Party and other protests. Adams served in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1781 and was instrumental in securing the passage of the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.
He was a second cousin to his fellow Founding Father, John Adams.
On the day of his birth, Adams was baptized in Boston’s “new” South Congregational Church. His father was known as Deacon Adams because of his long association with the church; his mother was highly devout, rocking her children to sleep with hymns and helping them memorize the Lord’s Prayer at an early age.
While a student at Harvard, Adams was influenced by the Great Awakening. He led morning and evening devotions in his household, led his family in grace before meals, and walked to church with his family every Sunday. He was convinced that “Religion in a Family is at once its brightest Ornament & its best Security.”
However, Adams was adamant about the importance of biblical faith and morality not just for his family but for his new nation as well. When he signed the Declaration of Independence, he proclaimed:
We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven and from the rising to the setting of the sun, let his Kingdom come.
That same year, he warned: “Liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.” He lamented to his wife that he wished “we were a more religious People” and believed that the people of Boston would “be free no longer than while they remain virtuous.”
In his will, he declared, “I resign my soul to the Almighty Being who gave it and my body I commit to the dust, relying on the merits of Jesus Christ for the pardon of my sins.”
Samuel Adams believed that democracy requires morality if a free people are to govern themselves and each other. And he believed that morality requires faith in Christ, since only he can change our fallen hearts and guide our fallen minds.
In a 1779 letter, as America fought for her independence, Adams prophesied:
A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader. . . .
If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.
By this measure, how secure is our nation today? How secure will it be in the future?
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