A Legacy Lost

We 21st century American Christians are, on the whole, woefully ill-equipped when it comes to understanding things like inalienable/unalienable rights. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that we have not been trained in these areas at all, or at least if we have, such training has not come from our churches. There is a clear explanation for this. It is because our seminaries, as a rule, don’t teach these kinds of things anymore. In my view, this is part of the reason why our country is in such dire straights.

Benjamin Franklin admonished us that we had a responsibility to "keep" our republic in good working order. And we did so for a short while. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, American pulpits unabashedly rang out with the Biblical principles of political liberty. And then, after it became clear that our new system of government was very well designed, and that tyranny had indeed been "held at bay," the focus on the Biblical principles of civil government from our pulpits began to dim. For the last 175-200 years, our pulpits have been relatively silent regarding our responsibilities as Christians to understand these principles and to engage in civil government.

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“They … who are decrying the Christian religion … are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security, for the duration of free governments.”

—Charles Carroll of Carrolton (1737-1832), Signer of the Declaration of Independence 

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Until the late 1970’s, the trend for Christian engagement in both culture and civil government had been moving in the wrong direction. When abortion became the law of the land in 1973, some of the Church began to awaken from a slumber. Others, a small handful, had already been like watchmen on the walls, sounding alarms to which few were paying attention. All of those Christians engaged in the fight since Roe v. Wade are reactionaries. I count myself among them. We are reactionaries because by the time we woke up, the damage had already been done. We are now trying desperately to put out fires – all the time!

Today, most Christians would agree that our culture has degenerated, and that our civil government—at least at the national level—has fallen under the control of professional politicians, career bureaucrats, and elite policy makers and lobbyists who care less about good government and more about lining their pockets and consolidating their power. But, despite the widespread agreement among believers regarding this cultural and governmental decay, few actually step up to do anything about the problem except cast their occasional vote. Otherwise their activity mostly involves a wagging of the head and a complaint now and then.

Our two-century retreat from engagement represents the atrophy in our thinking precipitated largely by a neglect to teach a comprehensive "Biblical world and life view" from America’s pulpits. We have replaced a "Biblical world and life view" with a "me and Jesus" focus that brings us the message of salvation and all kinds of resources about working out our own personal issues in Christ (a great start). From there the focus extends a bit beyond ourselves and aids us in strengthening our spousal relationships, becoming good parents and neighbors, and generally being a good witness by our lifestyles (nothing wrong with this at all). Our goal in all of this has been to promote healthy, vibrant relationships with Jesus (good), and to hopefully win our friends and family members to Christ (good) by our good behavior (partially good, but sometimes people need to have things explained to them). And it is there, at this arbitrary, almost capricious point, that a line has been drawn as if to say “God’s Word takes us to this point, but no further.”

Meanwhile, Rome burns!

As you know, I have been studying the Puritans of the colonial era and also the preachers and pastors of the Revolutionary era. I have been reading some of their writings and am discovering that what I had been told was true, actually is true. These guys understood civil government from a Biblical perspective far more clearly than any of us. They could explain things like unalienable/inalienable rights. And, for the 150 years between the Pilgrims’ arrival and The Declaration of Independence, it was largely the Christian leaders who formed and shaped and set up their local town and city governments with compacts, articles of confederation, and covenantally-based systems for ordering their community life under God. The churches took the lead role in this process. And, in so doing, they in essence discipled the nation and laid in the seedbed from which our Constitution grew. I always believed this to be true, but now, reading many original source materials, I am more convinced than ever that what Thomas Jefferson referred to in a personal letter in 1825 as "the American mind," was indeed a Judeo-Christian mind. Yes, he and others did draw some of their thinking from the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but the more I study this subject, the clearer it becomes to me that the Bible played a massive role in shaping our system of government.

Our founders understood Biblical principles. And they could also explain, very cogently, the link between things like unalienable/inalienable rights and Judeo-Christian thought. Who among us today are familiar with names like Rutherford, Blackstone, and Locke? These were the thinkers who fed our founders’ minds. Locke was not an orthodox Christian in his beliefs, but nonetheless drew much from the Scriptures. Rutherford and Blackstone were deeply devoted Christian men who held up God’s Word as the standard for all of life. How come we are no longer taught about these men anymore, and about their ideas?

Our founders understood the concept of General Revelation and Special Revelation. They labeled it "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God" and that wording appears in our nation’s charter document, The Declaration of Independence. James Madison, the chief architect of our nation’s constitution, was mentored by John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton).  Witherspoon was a Scots-Presbyterian minister who also signed the Declaration of Independence. Volumes of similar stories are written if only we would take the time to read them.

For years, I have listened to some in the Body of Christ dismiss men like David Barton, founder of Wallbuilders, claiming that his accounts of and conclusions about America’s Christian history are not accurate, that his research is wanting. In the last three years I have read through enough original documents from America’s past to come to my own conclusion that our history is indeed richly Christian in nature and that our founders were influenced greatly by the Bible and the Judeo-Christian framework of thinking.

I am also convinced that because tyranny was no longer a threat to Americans in the early-to-mid 1800’s, our nation’s pulpiteers slowly moved away from teaching the Biblical principles that would keep our republic free. Their pulpit themes gradually shifted from a cosmic focus down to a very personalized focus, and today our pulpit messages, as noted above, are largely “me and Jesus” messages.

Don’t get me wrong. We certainly need “me and Jesus” messages. The redeemed and sanctified individual is the primary building block of Christian self-government. But if the redeemed and sanctified individual is not taught, from the pulpit, of his responsibility and role in Christian self-government, then civil government will fall into the hands of the wicked. And for the last 100 years or so, it has, increasingly, slipped more and more into their hands.

The Puritans, the Founders, and their countless Christian predecessors from even before the first Englishman set foot on American soil, left us with a rich legacy of liberty. And we have, on the whole, not only failed to keep it, but, for the most part, are not even aware that such a legacy exists.