48 Sermon Illustrations on United States

Author tried to go back to church but was turned off by humanistic sermon. God was left out of sermon. Boldt wants to have faith but is cynical and jaded. Writer Tom Wolfe in “The Me Decade” wrote about how mainstream Protestantism went in the wrong direction in the 1960s when trying to be relevant. “Today it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions ... that are finished, gasping, breathing their last.”

Problem with America is not in our systems, but in ourselves. Government has only so much power to force people to be good. What is needed is another revival such as what Wesley brought to England. At a Church of Christ service the pastor said too many Americans go about believing the next car they buy, the next job they get or the next lover they acquire will at last make life feel complete. But it won’t happen, he contended. What’s needed instead is a recognition of the spiritual fatherhood of God.

On July 4, 1776, George III wrote in his diary, “Nothing of importance happened today.” He, of course, had no way of knowing what had occurred that day 3,000 miles away in the colonies, in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in particular.

Other things have happened on July 4:

In 1567, Mary, Queen of Scots, abdicated.

In 1754, George Washington surrendered Fort Necessity to the French and Indians.

In 1802, the United States Military Academy opened at West Point.

In 1817, construction of the Erie Canal began.

In 1821, slavery was abolished in New York State.

In 1826, Stephen Foster was born and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, and in 1831 James Monroe died.

In 1845, Texas voted for annexation to the United States.

In 1848, the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid.

In 1862, on a historic (literally) cruise and picnic, Lewis Carroll made up the story of a little girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole and has wondrous adventures.

In 1863, Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to the Union army.

In 1866, half of Portland, Maine, was destroyed by fire.

In 1872, Calvin Coolidge was born.

In 1884, the Statue of Liberty was presented to the United States by France.

In 1946, the Philippines were granted their independence by the United States.

In 1954, meat rationing ended in England (after 15 years).

In 1976 the U. S. bicentennial was observed.

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In December, 1775, an American colonist (believed by many scholars to be Benjamin Franklin), noticed the increasing use of a symbol throughout the colonies, stamped onto barrels and other items, depicting a coiled rattlesnake with the words “Don't Tread On Me” written below the snake. And he wondered about how the symbol of a rattlesnake could be a symbol of the American desire for freedom?

He wrote the following words:

“...the Rattle-Snake is found in no other quarter of the world besides America. She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. ... she never wounds 'till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her.”

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Christian Voices, http://www.christianvoices.org

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[Original illustration at this number was added to HolwickID #2842]

Early in the nineteenth century the French statesman, Alexander de Tocqueville, made a study of democracy in our country and wrote:

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there.

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her fertile fields and boundless forests, and it was not there.

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there.

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her public school system and her institutions of learning, and it was not there.

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her democratic congress and her matchless constitution, and it was not there.

"Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.

"America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

-- The Greatness of America by Alexander de Tocqueville

*

The realities and challenges of America's religious landscape abound as Southern Baptists and other evangelicals review the mid-September 2002 release of a county-by-county, once-a-decade study of denominations and their members.

Robert E. Reccord, president of the North American Mission Board, noted that most Southern Baptist growth in the last few years has been among ethnic groups. "We cannot stay white and southern," Reccord added. "We have to look beyond our roots." Southern Baptists grew 5 percent during the 1990s nationally, according to the study, which was sponsored by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies; published by the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tennessee; and largely financed by the Lilly Endowment, Inc. "We have to turn the burners up even more," Reccord said of a Southern Baptist growth rate that did not keep pace with 13.1 percent rise in the nation's population.

In Tarrant County, Texas, encompassing Fort Worth and its metro area, Southern Baptist growth reached 13.1 percent during the decade, compared to the SBC 5 percent national average. In metro Atlanta, Southern Baptist growth surpassed 17 percent. In Nashville, Tenn., and surrounding counties, it was 12.5 percent.

"The denominations that start new congregations catch a vision and come alive," said Daniel Sanchez, professor of missions and director of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's Church Growth Institute in Fort Worth, Texas. "It can be in a new geographic location or around a new ethnic group. Also, [growth can occur when] there's a good balance between meeting both physical and spiritual needs."

The evangelistic challenge posed by Mormonism also is evident in the study: Latter-day Saints were among the nation's fastest-growing faiths during the 1990s, up 19.3 percent to 4.2 million adherents in 11,500 congregations. (As defined in the study, "adherents" includes youth age 14 and above as a way of balancing totals both from churches that do not baptize infants as well as churches that do.)

Roman Catholics, the nation's largest religious group, also posted an increase, 16.2 percent, for the decade, to 62 millions adherents in nearly 21,800 parishes.

Southern Baptists factored into numerous findings in the study, including:

-- They encompass the largest number of adherents in 10 states, all in the South. Catholics have the largest number of adherents in 37 states and the District of Columbia. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the most adherents in Utah and Idaho, while United Methodists have the most adherents in West Virginia.

-- Southern Baptists are among the four largest religious groups in 28 states and the District of Columbia, while Catholics are among the top four in all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia. United Methodists are in the top four in 38 states. The Latter-day Saints and Evangelical Lutheran Church of America join the top four groups in 13 states, while Jewish adherents are in the top four in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

-- Southern Baptists have a presence in 85 percent of the nation's 3,141 counties or county equivalents, topped by United Methodists, the most widespread religious group in the study, in 96 percent and Catholics, at 95 percent. Percentages for other denominations' presence by counties include Assemblies of God, 83 percent; Churches of Christ, 77 percent; Baha'i, 77 percent; and Presbyterian Church (USA), 76 percent.

-- Of the 48 metro areas in the United States with 1 million or more people, Southern Baptists are the largest religious group in 10 of the areas, all in the South, while Catholics are the largest group in 37 and the Latter-day Saints are the largest in the Salt Lake City area.

-- For all metropolitan areas in the study, Southern Baptists are largest in 32 percent, or 89 areas, while Catholics are the largest in 63 percent, or 173 areas.

Among other findings in the study:

-- The 149 religious bodies which provided data encompass 140 million adherents, or 50.2 percent of all Americans.

-- There is no significant difference between metro and non-metro areas in the percentage of religious adherents. In metro areas, the 149 religious bodies encompass 50 percent of the population and 51 percent in non-metro areas.

-- Utah and North Dakota have the largest percent of people claimed by the 149 groups, at 74 and 73 percent, respectively, while the District of Columbia also measured at 73 percent.

-- Oregon and Washington had the lowest percentage of people in the 149 groups, at 31 and 33 percent, respectively.

-- Nevada has the highest ration of population to congregations. That is, there are 2,130 people for each congregation in the state. North Dakota and West Virginia have the lowest ratio of population to congregations -- one for every 426 people in North Dakota and one for every 437 people in West Virginia. Surprisingly, West Virginia, with so many congregations, is one of the five least claimed states in the study, with only 36 percent of the population claimed by any of the 149 groups.

-- In number of congregations by city, New York and Los Angeles rank first and second, with 9,586 and 7,079, respectively, while Washington, D.C., at 4,806, edges out Chicago, at 4,459, for third place.

-- More than three-fourths of the population in six metro areas were claimed among the 149 groups: Provo, Utah, 90 percent; Lafayette, La., 80 percent; Bismarck, N.D., 79 percent; Dubuque, Iowa, 78 percent; Las Cruces, N.M., 77 percent; and Houma, La., 75 percent.

-- Four metro areas in the report tallied less than one-fourth of the population among the 149 groups: Medford, Ore., 22 percent; Corvallis, Ore., 23 percent; Redding, Calif., 24 percent; and Eugene, Ore., 24 percent.

The survey data can be accessed at the www.thearda.com website of the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies in the "Interactive Maps and Reports" section.

The study is separate from than another Lilly-supported study also released in mid-September titled, "U.S. Congregational Life Survey," which, concerning Southern Baptists, noted that compared with worshipers in other congregations nationwide, Southern Baptists generally are more involved in their congregations, spend more time in private devotional activities, are more likely to be tithers and much more likely to hold a strong view of biblical authority and interpretation. See Baptist Press from 9/23/02 at www.bpnews.net.

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Erin Curry contributed to this article.

*

Nicholas Kristof must be a very smart man -- but a very slow learner. A columnist for The New York Times, Kristof is a Harvard graduate and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. But when it comes to something as significant as the nature of Christianity, Kristof and his columns are dumb and dumber.

Back in March, Kristof wrote a very strange column suggesting that his liberal media colleagues ought to give evangelical Christians a closer look. Not that they would like what they saw, mind you, but that the rising public influence of the evangelicals demanded media attention.

His argument came down to this: Evangelicals are strange people with radical religious beliefs that will do great harm to the nation, but they mean well and so let's be nicer in opposing them to the death.

An exaggeration? Kristof acknowledged that he tends to disagree with evangelicals on almost everything. And he intends to oppose evangelical influence at every turn, because, “I see no problem with aggressively pointing out the dismal consequences of this increasing religious influence.”

On the other hand, Kristof called upon his liberal colleagues to drop their “sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself.” If only he had taken his own advice.

On Aug. 15, The New York Times ran another Kristof piece in its editorial section, and it's a wonder to behold: Perhaps the worst opinion piece to run in that paper in years -- and that's really saying something.

In his new column, Kristof points to “the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world: faith.” Unlike the rest of the industrialized world (with the exception of South Korea), America is resolutely religious. Europe is overwhelmingly secular, with low church attendance and very little Christian influence in public life or politics. In America, on the other hand, more persons attend church than public sporting events, and both major political parties court the religious vote -- just in different sectors.

This is not news, at least to anyone even moderately informed about the national character of the United States. One would have to been locked in a monastery for the last 30 years to miss the religious dynamic of America's culture war, and even the most casual visitor to western or northern Europe would note its secularity.

But the divide between Europe and America is not Kristof's real concern. It's the divide between “intellectual” and “religious” America.

Got that? Intellectual and religious are now opposing terms? What Kristof really means is a divide between secularist/liberal America and Americans who are conservative Christians. As “Exhibit A” for his case, Kristof chose the doctrine of the virgin Birth of Jesus.

“The faith in the virgin birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time,” Kristof wrote. More mystical? Less intellectual?

According to Kristof's reasoning, no intellectually credible person could believe that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin. As authorities on this, he cites the likes of Hans Kung, a German theologian barred by the Vatican from teaching Catholic theology. Kung is a notorious liberal, who has called the Gospel narratives a “collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary,” stories. Kristof is obviously unaware of the huge body of scholarship in support of the virgin birth. But, in all likelihood, he wouldn't care anyway. Quoting Hans Kung on the virgin birth is like identifying Hugh Hefner as a spokesman for chastity.

Kristof cannot believe that so many Christians [he cites 91 percent] take the virgin birth to be true, “despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence.” Is he demanding an ultrasound?

There are several important divides in American life today, and Kristof inadvertently pointed to one closer than he thinks: the divide between the secular media elites and believing Christians. The media elite is tenaciously committed to a worldview steeped in anti-supernaturalism. Miracles are out, along with the whole idea that modern people should be bound in any way by a 2,000-year-old book.

This is the most important American divide. On the one side are secularists who honestly cannot believe that intelligent people can believe Christianity to be true. On the other side are those who have staked their lives -- including their intellectual energies -- on the truthfulness and authority of the Bible.

It's too bad Nicholas Kristof didn't take his own advice. Instead, he offered up a caricature so ludicrous that it's hard to take it seriously. Have all the editors at The New York Times gone away on vacation? In the end, this sad column tells us all we need to know about the real worldview of the media elite. It's not like we didn't know already.

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When a USAToday & Gallup Poll found that 77 percent of Americans objected to the order to remove Judge Roy Moore's massive Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building, the overwhelming support for Judge Moore sent pundits everywhere scrambling to answer the question: How do we make sense of God in public life?

On one side of the question stands a group who believe that America was established to be a Christian nation, chosen by God like Old Testament Israel, as the divine representative on earth. On the other side are those such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State who want to sanitize even the memory of the Almighty from public life.

Who is right? Could both be wrong?

Those who point to America as a Christian nation may sometimes be guilty of overstating their claims. Over-eager believers may imply that all of America's founders were faithful, Bible-believing men who intended the United States to be a distinctly Christian country.

While it is true that many who signed the Constitution were men of such conviction, by no means were all. Advocates of this view rarely mention the fact that some of the founders on occasion seemed to question their faith. For example, Thomas Jefferson nonchalantly wrote, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god.” Both Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus and that the Bible is the special revelation of God.

Advocates for the second position, however, have an even harder time explaining how a secular America is so rich in appeals to God by the founders of her government.

The list of those appeals is long. For instance, the Declaration of Independence rooted human rights in the authority of the Creator. In Federalist no.37, James Madison remarked that it was impossible not to perceive the “finger of the Almighty hand” at work in the American Revolution and in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. Even Benjamin Franklin -- at a moment of crisis in that same great assembly -- called for a clergy-led time of prayer every morning and reminded his colleagues that “unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.”

The founders of the republic may not all have been thoroughgoing Christians, but they definitely were not secularists. They believed that the American experiment depended on the favor of divine providence, and they knew that both democracy and justice could not be sustained apart from a distinctly religious morality.

As George Washington observed, “Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?” The real world depends on Transcendence.

These words from the country's first president also are etched in stone on the monument that once stood in the now-vacant rotunda of the judicial building in Montgomery, Alabama. They are words which Judge Roy Moore asks the citizens of the United States to consider.

Whether or not one agrees with the way he pressed the issue does not excuse us from having to answer the question. Are certain laws true for all people in all times in all places? Is murder always wrong? Is child abuse evil?

If the answers to those questions are yes, then one has to come up with a reason why. And if that reason does not include an ultimate or transcendent source, then the law may be discarded as nothing more than a human invention; it is a “law” with a wink. The Declaration of Independence appropriately concludes that the “laws of nature” can only be explained by “nature's God.”

The founders held that all men are created equal but that all beliefs are not. They refused to favor one version of Christianity by establishing a state church, but did not blush at the divine basis of moral law. They supported robust public debate on issues and thus gave room for every person to worship as he or she pleased.

They accomplished this without demanding that the secular state avoid all references to God. They sought a church free from government interference, not a government free from religious truth.

_____________

Gregory Alan Thornbury is director of the Carl F.H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership at Union University. This column first appeared in The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.

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The American Civil Liberties Union is waging an aggressive campaign to expunge the American public square from all things religious, and specifically all things Christian. The most recent casualty in the group's crusade is a cross displayed on the official seal of Los Angeles County.

A tiny cross is one of several symbols displayed on the southern California county's seal. Its inclusion is intended to commemorate the role Christianity played in the founding of the area. But the most prominent figure on the seal is the goddess Pomona -- the Roman goddess of gardens and fruit trees –- which apparently is not offensive to the ACLU.

The ACLU maintained the presence of the small cross made non-Christians feel “unwelcome” and it threatened to bring a lawsuit against Los Angeles County if it was not removed. County commissioners caved, voting 3-2 to remove the Christian symbol.

What is most disturbing about the ACLU's scorched-earth policy against Christianity is that the group maintains it is carrying out the will of America's Founding Fathers. The group asserts that the First Amendment's clause pertaining to religion mandates a public square that is solely secular.

Is the ACLU correct? Did America's founders intend to have a nation in which religious references were not to be seen or heard? Their actions indicate otherwise.

In his book, “On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Novak highlights several events that took place during the formative years of the United States that “constitute mighty obstacles to a merely secular interpretation of the founding.”

One event took place at the opening of the First Continental Congress. As delegates arrived in Philadelphia they learned that Charlestown had been attacked by British soldiers. In response, they voted to begin their meeting with prayer.

A local clergyman prefaced his prayer by reading Psalm 35 aloud, Novak says. John Adams wrote to his wife and described the event. He indicated, “[I] had never heard a better prayer, or one so well pronounced. I never saw a greater affect upon an audience.”

Adams continued, “It seemed as if heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that morning. ... It was enough to melt a heart of stone. I saw tears gush into the eyes of the old, grave pacific Quakers of Philadelphia. ... I must beg you to read that Psalm.”

Also included in Novak's list of events indicating the religious nature of the founders is an incident that took place five months after the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

America was suffering under the effects of war as well as a devastating drought. In response, writes Novak, “Congress set aside December 11, 1776, and decreed that the separate States should organize a Day of Fasting and Repentance.”

Included in the decree was the admonition “to implore of Almighty God the forgiveness of the many sins prevailing among all ranks, and to beg the countenance as assistance of his Providence in the prosecution of the present just and necessary war.”

Novak also details George Washington's training of his troops for battle with the British. He indicates that the general “gave orders that each day begin with formal prayer, to be led by the officers of each unit.”

Washington believed that “the Continental Army must secure God's blessing on their efforts every day, by every means within their power.” Further the general maintained, “Nothing else could guarantee success. There was no other hope.”

The aforementioned events are only a sampling of many recounted by Novak in the book. They are but a small portion of a significant body of evidence that indicates the ALCU is dead wrong in its assertion the founders wanted religion absent from the public square.

The Founding Fathers would consider the removal of a tiny cross on a county or city seal preposterous. If America's founders were alive today, they likely would hold the ACLU in the same regard as they did King George III.

*

When working toward our “God and Country” badges, my childhood Boy Scout troop was shuttled over to the neighborhood United Methodist church for sessions with the pastor about being good Christians and good citizens. I remember my Southern Baptist sensibilities being shocked when the pastor said, in response to a question, that he didn't believe in angels or demons. The reigning cultural presence of mainline Protestantism served the same purpose as the “God and Country” badge. Give us enough Christianity to fight the communists and save the republic, they said, but let's remember not to take it all too seriously.

But that culture is coming to a close, according to a new study by the University of Chicago, which reports that the number of Americans who identify themselves as Protestants has declined from 63 percent in 1993 to 52 percent in 2002 and is continuing to plummet. Now, admittedly, the survey has some flaws, such as defining “Protestantism” as everything from the Episcopal Church USA to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nonetheless, the study shows a clear decline, no matter which way you read it.

We shouldn't panic about this.

Frankly, we should be more concerned about the loss of a Christian majority in the Protestant churches than the loss of a Protestant majority in the United States. Most of the old-line Protestant denominations are captive to every theological fad that has blown through their divinity schools in the past 30 years -- from crypto-Marxist liberation ideologies to sexual identity politics to a neo-pagan vision of God -- complete with gender-neutralized liturgies. Should we lament the fact that the Riverside Avenue Protestant establishment is now collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy?

What we should pay attention to instead may be the fresh wind of orthodox Christianity whistling through the leaves -- especially throughout the Third World and in some unlikely places in North America as well. Sometimes animists, Buddhists and body-pierced Starbucks employees are more fertile ground for the Gospel than the confirmed Episcopalian at the helm of the Rotary Club.

Accordingly, evangelicals will engage the culture much like the apostles did in the first-century -- not primarily to “baptized” pagans on someone's church roll but as those who are hearing something new for the first time. There may be fewer bureaucrats in denominational headquarters, but there might be more authentically Christian churches preaching an authentically Christian Gospel.

We will be pained to see idolatries springing up where churches once were, akin to the experience our brother Paul had two millennia ago in Athens (Acts 17:16). But, like him, sometimes it is easier to gain a hearing among people who know they are ignorant (Acts 17:17), than with those who think they know.

Paul listened to the pagan poetry about Zeus and showed the Athenian philosophers how not even they could live with the kind of god-concepts they said they believed. Around us we hear the father-hunger in the hip-hop lyrics blaring down the urban sidewalk. We see the fear of death in the plastic surgery clinics and health clubs springing up in the suburban strip malls. We hear the despondency of sin lamented in the words of a country music song on the sound system of a rural gas station.

Against all of that, we proclaim the only message that can answer these unconscious longings and these conscious resentments -- Jesus and the resurrection (Acts 17:18). The pagans won't always listen, but they will know that we are saying something new (Acts 17:32).

The American Protestant majority is faltering. I say, “Good riddance.” Now let's pray for something new -- like a global Christian majority, on earth as it is in heaven.

________

Russell D. Moore is dean of the school of theology and senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Retro, Metro. Retro, Metro.

If those words seem familiar, you may have seen an ad campaign talking about a “great divide” in America.

The themes of the campaign are echoed in a new book titled THE GREAT DIVIDE: RETRO VERSUS METRO AMERICA. It is written by entrepreneur John Sperling. Sperling argues that America has effectively become two nations. One nation that he labels Retro is traditional, religious, Southern and rural, opposed to abortion, taxes, and welfare. By contrast, Metros tend to be urban, tolerant, and secular, committed to excellence in the arts and sciences. According to Sperling, Metro-Americans produce the majority of the country's tax revenue. He laments, “some $200 billion a year in taxes flow from Metro states to Retro states.” If America is ever to be a true United States, he asserts, “it must embrace these Metro values of inclusion and respect.”

The Retro/Metro campaign exposes a great role reversal from the last fifty years of liberalism. Traditional liberalism said the wealthy should share their money with the poor. But the new liberal, represented by Sperling, resents poor, blue-collar Americans. And they resent the fact that so-called Retro states with their smaller populations enjoy the same number of senators as Metro states. And they resent their electoral votes.

In fact the Retro/Metro campaign appears to be a thinly veiled assault on the Electoral College. The danger of this trend is exposed by NEWSWEEK columnist George Will. Will points to a proposal on the ballot in Colorado to change the current winner-take-all system of allocating electoral votes. Instead, the state's electoral votes would be divided “according to each candidate's percentage of the popular vote.”

This is a bad idea, Will says, not only because of its partisan aims, but because it ignores how the electoral vote system “nurtures crucial political virtues.”

As Will explains, America's constitutional system “aims not merely for majority rule but for rule by certain kinds of majorities. It aims for majorities suited to moderate, consensual governance of a heterogeneous ... nation with myriad regional and other diversities. All 537 persons elected to national office” — the president, senators, and representatives — “are chosen by majorities that reflect the nation's federal nature. They are elected by majorities within states or within states' congressional districts.”

As political scientist Judith Best notes, the electoral-vote system, in combination with the winner-take-all allocation used by nearly every state, creates a “distribution condition.” Without it, politicians could win national office simply by obtaining the votes of Metro citizens — people in states like New York and California. Citizens in smaller states would lose any chance of real representation.

While the liberal Retro/Metro campaign thinks this is a great idea, our founders did not. They wanted to prevent various factions from being able to unite their votes across state lines to create a tyranny of the majority. The Retro/Metro campaign is, in effect, a power grab, an effort to disenfranchise the poor and those of faith. We need to warn our neighbors and explain why abandoning the Electoral College is a dangerous idea — one we should reject.

________

Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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America -- the first nation to begin as “a Christian nation” -- was colonized by people seeking to worship God freely, who established schools so everyone could read the Bible, founded universities to train ministers and wrote laws reflecting biblical truth.

America declares “In God We Trust” on every dime and dollar -- one nation under God, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created free and equal.

America’s first political document, the Mayflower Compact, said: “Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian Faith ... [we] covenant and combine ourselves together....

American shores afforded religious liberty just as missionary-minded Protestants were being harried out of Europe. Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Moravians ... all seeking freedom from persecution. Their ideals came from their Bibles. Every group brought the Scriptures in their own language -- English Baptists, Swedish Lutherans, French Huguenots, Scotch Covenanters and German Mennonites.

• The Eliot Bible

At 27, John Eliot fled England for the New World (1631) and organized a church near Boston. He learned the Algonquin language and began preaching to Native Americans near his church. When they began coming to Christ, he embarked on an eight-year effort to translate the Scriptures into Algonquin.

• The Aitken Bible

For over four generations, from the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1607 to the American Revolution in 1776, not a single English Bible was printed in America -- it was illegal.

The copyright to the Authorized Version rested with the British Crown, which turned down repeated requests for American printings of the Bible. And with the War of Independence, the importing of Bibles stopped.

Robert Aitken decided to do something. Aitken was the official publisher for the Congress of the States. In 1777, he produced an American “home-grown” edition of the New Testament. Ten thousand copies were printed, but by then cheaper imported Bibles were again available.

In a desperate attempt to recoup his investment, Aitken asked Congress to sanction and support his Bibles. For the first and last time in our nation’s history, a Bible was printed with the approval of Congress.

The resolution, adopted September 12, 1782, said: “WHEREUPON RESOLVED: That the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and ... they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorize him to publish this recommendation....”

In 1790, Mathew Carey printed 500 copies of the Catholic Douay Bible, and nearly lost his shirt. Later he printed the King James Version. It sold for a whopping six dollars.

• The Influential Bible

For two centuries, the Word of God has been the best-selling book in America. It has shaped our nation like no other book. George Washington said: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

John Quincy Adams: “The earlier my children begin to read it [the Bible], the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens ... and respectable members of society.”

President Andrew Jackson called the Bible “the rock on which our republic rests.”

Abraham Lincoln: “I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man.”

Woodrow Wilson: “I ask every man and woman in this audience that from this day on they will realize that part of the destiny of America lies in their daily perusal of this great Book.”

Dwight Eisenhower: “To read the Bible is to take a trip to the fair land where the spirit is strengthened and faith renewed.”

When he authorized 1983 as the “Year of the Bible,” Ronald Reagan said, “Within the covers of the Bible are all the answers to all the problems that face us today, if we’d only look.”

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12). Keep the Bible prominent in your home and church. Read it, heed it, hold it high and share its message. Its heritage is too great to be lost, its light too bright to keep hidden. Its future in America depends on you and me.

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Jean-Francois Revel, one of Europe's greatest defenders of human liberty, died Saturday in Paris, at age 82. As a younger man, Revel had been attracted to Marxism and socialism. Like a generation of his fellow French philosophers, Revel thought America to be decadent and repressive. Yet, when he actually visited the United States, he found a very different reality. He was never uncritical of the United States, but he saw America as the shape of the future, even as he saw Europe losing faith in democratic values.

Revel was one of the first to see the deep evil of the Soviet Union, and he called on the great democracies to defend liberty in an increasingly dangerous world. His death marks the passing of a generation of leading European intellectuals who had been shaped by the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. To mark his death, here is an article I wrote in Revel's honor in 2003:

“Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” With those words, French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel sounded an alarm as the ramparts of democratic conviction were under attack by the political left. Revel, one of the most important conservative thinkers in France, saw European intellectuals and the political left in America undermining the very foundations of democracy.

“Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them,” explained Revel. “It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high.”

To any insightful observer of the European scene in the early 1980s, Revel's analysis was prophetic. Leftist intellectuals were pointing to the United States as the source of all oppression in the world, while praising the Soviet Union as the liberator of human kind. In HOW DEMOCRACIES PERISH, Revel aimed his sights at the self-destructive hypocrisies of liberal thought. As he knew, the very intellectuals who should have been supporting the United States were instead hoping for its downfall. “What we end up with in what is conventionally called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in which those seeking to destroy democracy appear to be fighting for legitimate aims, while its defenders are pictured as repressive reactionaries.”

As Revel lamented, at times the democracies seemed to find strange comfort in calls for their own destruction. As he observed, “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another is power [?] is working to destroy it.” Were democracies doomed to self-destruct?

Jean-Francois Revel is well known as a shining light of reason in the French academy. Long a columnist, editor, and director of L'EXPRESS, Revel is also the author of a multi-volume history of philosophy. He sprang to Western attention with the publication of his controversial book, WITHOUT MARX OR JESUS. Revel's later volumes would include THE TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION and DEMOCRACY AGAINST ITSELF.

Throughout his career, Revel has been known as a stalwart defender of democracy. He does not take this matter lightly, for he understands all too well that the basic structure of government determines the achievement or loss of human freedom within a society. In DEMOCRACY AGAINST ITSELF, Revel argued that “every society which has worked more or less well, which achieved any sort of viability, and which produced civilizations men found tolerable, have been -- or are -- societies that in some sense are democratic.”

Of course, the alarm sounded by Revel in HOW DEMOCRACIES PERISH was overtaken by history with the fall of the Soviet Union and the remarkable events of 1989 and 1990. As Revel later reflected, the good news revealed in the fall of the Soviet Union was the fact that its internal weaknesses were even greater than the self-hatred of the secular left in Western democracies.

Now, twenty years after HOW DEMOCRACIES PERISH, Revel looks to the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks and asks the fundamental question: Why do so many Europeans hate America?

This is not a question of merely academic interest. Revel senses that something fundamental is revealed in the way the European Left has responded to America's status as the world's only super power.

Revel is blunt. The ascendancy of the United States, set over against the relative decline of Europe, has given birth to an intense hatred in some European corridors. Most particularly, Revel locates the root of this poisonous anti-Americanism in France. As he comments, “It is in France that this loss -- real or imaginary -- of great-power status engenders the most bitterness.”

The virulent anti-Americanism that erupted on the streets of Europe in the aftermath of America's military action in Afghanistan and Iraq did not emerge from a vacuum. Revel's interest in anti-Americanism is rooted in his own experience as an French intellectual who actually visited the United States. When Revel first visited America in 1969, he discovered a land very different from what he expected. Having planned to write a book on the problems of the United States, Revel instead wrote a treatise criticizing the irrational anti-Americanism of the European Left. Now, he has done it again -- and this new book may be even more important.

In ANTI-AMERICANISM, just released by Encounter Books, Revel considers this toxic pattern of European hatred towards the United States. He identifies one core issue as a sense of European loss. Revel cites Hubert Vedrine, the French minister of foreign affairs, who rejected the word “superpower”, and instead substituted a term of his own invention: “hyperpower.”

As Revel notes, since the Greek prefix “hyper” has exactly the same meaning as the Latin “super,” Mr. Vedrine is merely seeking to score political capital in his own nation and in the larger European neighborhood. As Vedrine stated, “We cannot except a politically unipolar and culturally homogenized world, any more than the unilateralism of the single hyperpower.” Exactly what Mr. Vedrine meant by this, no one seems to know. Nevertheless, it is an example of French hyperventilation posing as foreign policy.

Revel sees the problem as much worse than hyperbole. If America is dominant, Revel asks, then why is this so? He will not allow Europeans off the hook. “Europeans in particular should force themselves to examine how they have contributed to that preponderance. It was they, after all, who made the twenty century the darkest in history; it was they who brought about the two unprecedented cataclysms of the World Wars; and it was they who invented and put into place the two most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race -- pinnacles of evil and imbecility achieved in a space of less than thirty years.”

The United States is far from perfect, Revel acknowledges. Nevertheless, he suggests that any criticisms should be directed at real problems, and should not take the form of irrational rantings.

According to Revel, the European Left enjoys its fantasy of America as “the worst society that ever was.” According to this cartoon of reality, America is a society that is entirely under the control of money-grubbing plutocrats. Everything is for sale and the entire culture has been commodified. The problem is not just George W. Bush, for the European Left is convinced that every recent American president “has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby or the financial manipulators of Wall Street.” But, in the French view, George W. Bush is just the worst of the lot -- at least as yet.

The European Left is also convinced that America is primarily marked by poverty. As Revel describes the Leftist fantasy: “Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.” These same thinkers are convinced that violence reigns throughout the United States, and that gunshots commonly ring through even the most peaceable neighborhoods. As Revel acknowledges, European rants about America's lax gun laws would have more credibility if the same weapons were not easily available for purchase through the black market in virtually every European city.

If this picture of America is true, the pattern of immigration from Europe to the United States throughout the twentieth century was absolutely irrational. “If the picture of American society drawn everyday by the European press is accurate, then we must believe that those tens of millions of immigrants from all parts of the world, and especially those who came from Europe between 1850 and 1924, were all deluded fools. Otherwise, why did they insist on staying in the American capitalist jungle with all its evils and not return to the lands of peace, plenty, and liberty they came from? Lost in a hellish cultural wasteland, why at least didn't they write to their families and relations basking in the paradises of Ukraine, Calabria and Greece warning them not to come to America?” Clearly, Revel does not mince words.

This virulent anti-Americanism is not a matter of mere sociological interest. As Revel understands, this explains why the United Nations Security Council has become so ineffectual and why the United States has been forced to act unilaterally. As he explains, “Europeans' voluntary blindness with regard to these radical changes renders any American attempts at dialogue fruitless; as a result, America has no other option but to make unilateral decisions. How can you discuss a problem with people who deny its very existence?”

Jean-Francois Revel is a brave man who has lived through some of the most tumultuous decades of human history. Though a realist, he is not without hope. He has sounded the alarm more than once, only to have the Left ignore his cries. ANTI-AMERICANISM is Revel's latest attempt to call the trendsetting intellectuals of Europe back to sanity. Good luck, Professor Revel. This is no easy task.

Revel's prescient warning to the European Left should also serve to educate thoughtful Americans about the challenge we face in Europe, which may be as daunting a challenge as that posed by Islamic terrorism. Something sick lies at the heart of Western civilization. The democracies that will surely perish will be those who cannot tell the difference between good and evil, survival and ruin, freedom and tyranny. Or, perhaps more to the point, the greatest danger faced by democracy are those who deny that there is any real difference after all.

Writing in 1927, French observer Andre Siegfried described Protestantism as America's “only national religion.” To miss this, Siegfried advised, is “to view the country from a false angle.” Now, less than a century later, a major research report provides proof that Protestantism no longer represents a clear majority of Americans.

Researchers Tom W. Smith and Seokho Kim of the National Opinion Research Center [NORC] at the University of Chicago have released “The Vanishing Protestant Majority,” a report documenting the declining membership of Protestant churches in the nation.

The decline of American Protestantism will come as a shock to many observers, whose understanding of American religion was well summarized by sociologist Will Herberg in his classic 1955 study, Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Herberg characterized America at the midpoint of the twentieth century as a population settled into a tripartite religious identification made up of three great “denominations” -- Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. Celebrating this renegotiation of the American religious establishment, Herberg observed: “In net effect, Protestantism today no longer regards itself either as a religious movement sweeping the continent or as a national church representing the religious life of the people; Protestantism understands itself today primarily as one of the three religious communities in which twentieth century America has come to be divided. The 'denominational' system -- the word 'denomination' here referring both to the religious community and to the denomination in its more restricted sense -- has become part of the basic assumptions of Protestants about America, as it has become part of the basic assumptions of all Americans.”

According to the NORC study, Americans identifying themselves as “Protestant” fell from 63 percent to 52 percent between 1993 and 2002 -- a massive decline in less than one decade. According to the University of Chicago press release, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Protestant “has been falling and will likely fall below 50 percent by mid-decade and may be there already.”

The NORC study is based on a sizeable research sample, tested to be representative of the U.S. population. The study is not without methodological difficulties. For one thing, the definition of Protestantism used in the report includes “all post-Reformation Christian faiths.” Defining the issue sociologically rather than theologically, the analysts included members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints [Mormons] and other non-Christian groups in the Protestant sample. Some New Age devotees were also included under the Protestant classification.

Nevertheless, methodological issues aside, the group's extensive research is sufficient to prove the validity of its central thesis -- that Protestantism is declining relative to the total U.S. population.

The rapid decline of the nation's Protestant majority is an issue of significant sociological interest -- along with the percentage of Americans claiming no religious preference and the rise of non-traditional religions in American culture. The report offers interesting points of analysis, including the fundamental failure of most Protestant denominations to evangelize and assimilate their own youth and young adults, and the fact that the nation's immigrant groups have not followed the older pattern of eventual identification with the nation's Protestant majority. Denominations concerned about membership losses and evangelistic opportunity will note both developments with grave concern. Nevertheless, churches needing this report to awaken themselves to trends as obvious as these are probably beyond help already.

The loss of young adults is the trend with the most devastating long-term consequences. Researcher Tom W. Smith told THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES: “There is some evidence that a large portion of this problem is that a fair number of marginal Protestants are not really engaged in their faith and therefore didn't pass it on to their kids. The mom and dad would say, for example, 'Yeah, we're Methodists,' but they never went to church. They'd baptize their kids, and that's about it.”

That statement goes a long way towards explaining the entire pattern of Protestant decline. Though these researchers were primarily concerned about the sociological factors that produced Protestant losses, the larger and more important issues are essentially theological. Among mainline Protestant denominations, theological liberalism has eroded the entire system of Christian doctrine, leading to the evaporation of faith and the secularization of those churches. Once the churches have been thoroughly secularized, what value remains in church membership and denominational identification?

Theological liberalism became evident in the mainline Protestant denominations by the early 1920s. Historian William R. Hutchison of the Harvard Divinity School has traced the erosion of mainline Protestant denominations throughout the twentieth century. Hutchison notes that the denominations affiliated with the liberal National Council of Churches have all experienced steady decline. Accommodating themselves to the spirit of the age, these churches embrace theological and moral relativism in an effort to remain “relevant” to a pluralistic culture.

Several years ago, sociologists Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens described the result of this process as “lay liberalism” that constitutes the belief system held by Protestant baby boomers. This “lay liberalism” rejects orthodox Christian doctrines such as belief that faith in Christ is necessary for salvation, and renegotiates Christian moral principles in line with permissive sexuality.

In VANISHING BOUNDARIES: THE RELIGION OF MAINLINE PROTESTANT BABY BOOMERS, Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens explain that lay liberalism erases clear boundaries separating believers from unbelievers. Without a clear “faith boundary,” identification with Protestantism -- and Christianity itself -- becomes socially meaningless.

The VANISHING BOUNDARIES study, along with the NORC report, acknowledges the continued growth of conservative Protestant groups, commonly designated as evangelical. These evangelical denominations and churches continue to grow, even as they maintain clear boundaries between belief and unbelief. The existence of these boundaries explains the strong sense of membership and the high rate of participation commonly found in evangelical congregations. As Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens observed: “Our findings show that belief is the single best predictor of church participation, but it is orthodox Christian belief, and not the tenets of lay liberalism, that impels people to be involved in church.”

This is just common sense, of course. But it is precisely the kind of common sense that is commonly ignored or discarded by those who would rather believe otherwise. The churches that are most insistent on being relevant are those most willing to sacrifice biblical truth and the structure of Christian doctrine in order to prove their commitment to cultural expectations. Eventually, these churches become so identified with the culture that all distinctiveness disappears.

The sacrifice of truth for a constantly changing concept of relevance leads necessarily to the relativizing of the Gospel itself, and the undermining of biblical authority. Once these are sacrificed, authentic Christianity is abandoned and all motivation for membership disappears. If beliefs do not matter, the churches themselves do not matter.

The NORC study is wake-up call for Christianity in America. The trend-line is clear: Without a firm grasp of the Gospel, a bold commitment to biblical authority, and a clear vision for evangelism, churches and denominations are destined for decline and eventual dissipation. It shouldn't take a team of sociologists to teach us something we should already know.

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This article originally appeared on August 9, 2004.

The U.S. used more than 148 trillion gallons of water in 2000 according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That includes residential, commercial, agriculture, manufacturing and every other use - almost 500,000 gallons per person.

In February 2009 the Obama family was still searching for a church home. Except for the special invitations and the presidential-scale press coverage, the Obamas’ church search puts them in a situation a lot of American believers are well-acquainted with. One in seven adults changes churches each year, and another one in six attends a handful of churches on a rotating basis, according to the Barna Group, a marketing research firm that serves churches. Church shopping isn’t a matter of merely changing congregations: A survey by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life last year indicated that 44 percent of American adults have left their first religious affiliation for another. “Constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace,” a survey summary said.

Even if the American mania for shopping extends to our spiritual lives, church shopping still doesn’t get much respect. But while it may be frequently derided as an example of rampant spiritual consumerism, shopping around can be one of the good things about the way religion is practiced in America.

Part of the discomfort with church shopping has to do with the way growing churches attempt to attract spiritual shoppers. That simple marquee in front of a church with the cheerfully homely motto (“Prevent truth decay: Brush up on your Bible”) doesn’t suffice to recruit worshippers. Web sites stream audio and video of sermons and music to let prospective members shop from home, and consultants help congregations market themselves to the “unchurched” and the merely unsatisfied by deploying focus groups, surveys, product giveaways (free church-branded Frisbees, anyone?), and other tactics borrowed from the commercial realm. The WALL STREET JOURNAL reported recently on churches employing mystery worshippers, “a new breed of church consultant,” who covertly attend services and evaluate them (Were the bathrooms clean? Was the vibe friendly?) as if they were first-timers looking for a new church.

Marrying the sacred to the secular inevitably provokes criticism. In FIRST THINGS, Anthony Sacramone called church shopping “potentially spiritually corrupting” and warned against the “ecclesiological chaos” of the religious marketplace. The practice is particularly troublesome for the more established churches that find themselves in competition with growth-minded, nondenominational congregations. Pope Benedict XVI, speaking at a World Youth Day Mass in 2005, noted “a new explosion of religion” but warned that “if it’s pushed too far, religion becomes almost a consumer product. People choose what they like and some are even able to make a profit from it.” His concern is understandable: About 10 percent of American adults describe themselves as ex-Catholics — a figure that, if ex-Catholicism were its own religion, would make it one of the nation’s largest religious groups — and they are a huge target market for growing churches.

Church shopping, marketing, and the not-so-sanctified practices that go with them make easy targets for criticism. But competition among churches for worshippers has always been fierce in the United States, to the benefit of American religion and individual churchgoers. The prohibition against establishing an official state religion helped give us the shoppers’ paradise that is our religious marketplace. Disestablishment (Massachusetts was the last state to cut ties to its official church, in 1833) meant that preachers had to learn to get along without support from the state. It made the ability to recruit and keep a flock — and get them to give generously — crucial to a church’s survival. In 1992, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark argued in THE CHURCHING OF AMERICA, 1776-1990 that this produced a ministry modeled on capitalism, with pastors acting as the church’s sales force.

Salesmanship sometimes degenerates into telling people what they want to hear and, in the case of religion, into a faith that never comes down too hard on the faithful. But competition among churches should be considered a good thing, at least if you are a fan of religiosity. The sheer number and variety of churches that sprang up in the American free market in religion ended up increasing the consumption of religion. In 1776, Stark and Finke write, fewer than one in five Americans belonged to a local church. Today, the figure is more like 67 percent.

American faith comes in lots of flavors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that today’s church shoppers are buying into a superficial, strip-mall faith. When the Barna Group studied what believers look for in a new church, doctrine and belief ranked at the top of the list of the most important factors, while more mundane or aesthetic concerns (music, parking, comfortable seating) were less important. And the free market in faith has been good for America’s religious life. All that hopping across denominational lines likely helped produce a less rigid, better informed, more ecumenical religious culture.

Knowing that churchgoers have so many options should keep pastors and preachers on their toes. In that sense, church shopping transfers a bit of power from the pulpit to the pews. And keeping a check on the power of church leaders is never a bad idea.

So, the president shouldn’t feel any need to rush into committing to a new church. When you have so many options, it pays to shop around.

Evangelicals are a small proportion of the national population of the United States - just 7% of all adults. But they tend to capture the imagination and attention of the national media and political pundits. Evangelicals are strikingly different from the rest of the population - even from other born again Christians who are not evangelical.

Born again Christians make up about 43% of the adult population in the United States. “Born again Christians” are defined as people who said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. Respondents are not asked to describe themselves as “born again.”

Evangelicals, however, represent just one out of every six born again adults. The Barna polling organization, unlike other polling organizations, classifies a person as an evangelical based upon their answers to nine questions about their theological beliefs. Most national surveys simply ask people if they consider themselves to be evangelical, born again or a committed conservative Christian. As a result, evangelicals in Barna surveys are significantly different than the groups reported in other surveys. The self-identified evangelicals represented 41% of the adult population, although just 16% of them qualified as evangelicals under the Barna Group’s theological-based classification questions.

“Evangelicals” meet the born again criteria (described above) plus seven other conditions. Those include saying their faith is very important in their life today; believing they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; believing that Satan exists; believing that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; asserting that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today. Being classified as an evangelical is not dependent upon church attendance or the denominational affiliation of the church attended. Respondents are not asked to describe themselves as “evangelical.”

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© The Barna Group, Ltd, 2008.

Independence Day, that chaos of flags, fireworks and watermelon, will be a little tentative this unique year. Those who fidget at seeing an American flag in church or hearing the national anthem sung once a year in worship will perhaps be more numerous and fidgety this year.

But I still join those who celebrate America. There are reasons to do so.

First, I’m grateful. Those who founded our country and who kept it through very difficult days have delivered to us a nation that has blessed the world. We are recipients of a nation that many long to join and only a few silly celebrities speak of leaving. I’m grateful for the liberty built into our nation and guarded by its founding documents. We benefit from those liberties each day. I benefit from it in writing this column. Whoever else may not like it, I don’t have to worry about the opinion of those in political power. That’s not true everywhere.

I also admire my country, not because it lives up to its ideals but because it has them.

Those high-minded aspirations are not forgotten but rather arise every time someone believes we are neglecting them to the detriment of our people. Some nations would be worse places if they were all they desire to be. America becomes better when it hews closer to its expressed values.

America is a place of hope because our ideals were drawn out of a mostly Judeo-Christian culture. Where we have repeatedly fallen short of those principles it has been reformers with Bibles in their hands who have clamored loudly for change. Listen to the rhetoric of abolitionists and civil rights activists and hear the biblical references.

But love for America is like my belief in God. I can give rational reasons for it that seem compelling but ultimately I love America (and believe in God) because I do. Others who love other home places don’t convince me as they sing the praises of their own countries. Perhaps people abandon their homes for rational reasons, but we don’t usually embrace our homes because of logic. Having a place you call home -- a place, not just a homestead -- is a gift of God.

Think of Israel, of Jerusalem. I’ve seen it and wouldn’t fight you for the landscape. It’s a harsh place, desert, a place of extremes and turmoil. A casual reading of Psalm 137 leaves me wondering, “Why the passion?” But letting the Hebrew children wander for a generation made them want a home of their own; anyplace sounds better than circling the Sinai. And Jerusalem was much better than the Judean desert. Maybe it’s relative but it’s so much more than that. The Promised Land was given as an imperfect image of the Perfect Land to come. Jerusalem has not been a city of peace for much of its history, but at its best it gives a peek at the heavenly city we will see one day. At its worst it makes us long for New Jerusalem and the return of its King.

So I love America because it is my home. Something would have to compel me to leave rather than convince me to stay. I recognize the meaning of Jerusalem is unique in the world, but I also think the gift of a home place can serve a similar purpose in anyone’s life. I have seen the best side of 10 foreign countries and the worst side of several. I didn’t long to stay in any of them, but I found people there who were happily at home. When people think of heaven they think of a place where they will be perfectly safe, perfectly at rest and perfectly “at home.” They long for “a city not made with hands” (Hebrews 11:10) but the concept of that city starts with the place God gave them.

G.K. Chesterton explores this so well in an essay in his book “Heretics,” critiquing Rudyard Kipling. His contention is that Kipling, a cosmopolitan Englishman, loved England because of her qualities in a similar way that he loves other places because of their qualities. Kipling saw England in passing rather than as the farmer hoeing his potato field saw it. The farmer saw England as his world and the globetrotting writer saw it as an admirable place in the world. Kipling was to Chesterton “the philanderer of the nations,” a man who loved something about many countries with a “because of” love but who never knew that first love, the “regardless” love.

Maybe you see the deeper point. Our country is troubled, and troubling -- no matter how it compares to another place. But it is the place from which I see the whole world. It is the place that taught me to love a home place. And America teaches me, at its best and worst, to long for the perfect country that will be my home forever.

When he talks about the role of religion in the founding of the United States, historian Gregg Frazer does not attract eager audiences.

“Neither side really wants to hear what I say,” says Frazer, a professor of history and political studies at The Master’s University, a Christian school in Santa Clarita, California.

The founders, Frazer says, did not create a Christian republic. Several key founders either rejected core Christian doctrines or were vague enough to keep historians debating. For Frazer, that often disappoints audiences of his fellow Christians.

But, he says, nor were the founders a cluster of rationalist deists — believers in a God who set the universe in motion like a clockmaker and then left it alone — and anti-religious skeptics, as they are sometimes portrayed. That disappoints audiences who favor a high firewall between church and state. Most of the founders were religious in one form or another.

The long-running debate over the founders’ intentions about religion has been turbocharged with the approaching 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 [2026]. Amid the America 250 celebrations, some Christian activists and authors are redoubling claims that the U.S. had a Christian founding.

They have an ally in the White House.

President Donald Trump is promoting “ America Prays,” culminating in a May 17 gathering on the National Mall in Washington. Official participants include many Christian organizations and individuals, some who champion the idea of a Christian founding. Cabinet officials are issuing Christian messages in their official capacity. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed that “America was founded as a Christian nation ... in our DNA.”

In short: The long-standing debate — secular government on one hand, faith on another — rages and matters still.

Countering the Christian nation narrative

Critics and advocacy groups are pushing back.

“Most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical, or constitutional sense,” says the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It decries efforts “to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist disinformation and then reshape our law accordingly.”

Six in 10 U.S. adults surveyed say they believed the founders originally intended America to be a Christian nation, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.

Why do the founders’ beliefs and intentions matter?

“Everyone’s looking for what we historians call a usable past,” says John Fea, author of “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”

“We go into the past looking for what we want in order to advance a particular political or cultural agenda,” says Fea, a fellow at the Lumen Center, a Christian research institute and study center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Advocates often skirt history’s nuances. For example, public officials and others did indeed offer prayers on behalf of the new republic at important historical moments.

“But are those prayers the central part of the story of what happened when we, in the United States, declared independence?” Fea wonders. “Last time I checked, it was about taxation and representation and shutting down the port of Boston and all these more economic and political things.”

Church and state in the new nation

Historian Mark David Hall argues that Christianity did strongly impact the founding. While core founders did not hold traditional Christian beliefs, he contends many other founders did, and that this shaped their thinking about how to form the new republic.

“There’s plenty of evidence Christianity had an influence,” says Hall, author of “Did America Have a Christian Founding?”

He says founders’ attention to human dignity harmonizes with the Bible’s teaching of humanity created in God’s image. The system of checks and balances — to prevent the concentration of power — reflects teachings about human sin that would have permeated a largely Protestant culture, he says.

He also notes that some early presidents and Congresses issued proclamations for prayer and thanksgiving, though some drew opposition and controversy. Some states sponsored churches for decades after the country’s Constitution was ratified, indicating the founders did not believe religion should be absent from public life.

They believed that faith was important in forming moral, responsible citizens of the new republic. They promoted “toleration without eliminating the importance of real religious commitment on the part of differing adherents,” Frazer wrote in his book, “The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders.”

There is no reference to any specific religion in the Constitution beyond the date — “in the year of our Lord” 1787. It forbids religious tests for officeholders. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights guarantees religious freedom and forbids “establishment” of a national religion.

Twentieth-century Supreme Court rulings applied the First Amendment to the states on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying citizens’ rights. The court cited founder Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state.” Courts have since wrestled with how to apply that principle in areas such as school prayer, healthcare, labor law and crosses on public lands.

Frazer argues that the Bible is not cited as a source for any governing principles in the documented proceedings of the Constitutional Convention or in the influential Federalist Papers, which advocated for the Constitution. He says the founders drew on influences such as Enlightenment thinking on such concepts as human equality, accountable government and freedom of religion. Early critics of the Constitution faulted it for lacking religious content.

The Declaration of Independence does have religious language, declaring that rights come from the “Creator.” It appeals to “divine Providence” and to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

Thomas Jefferson and other founders — adroitly, Frazer says — used terms acceptable to Christians as well as followers of other religious and philosophical movements.

America’s complicated religious history

Even the seemingly straightforward question, “Did the founders intend America to be a Christian nation?” raises questions: Who were the founders? When was the actual “founding”?

Some see the founding as the original colonial settlements — a century and a half before 1776. Colonial charters for Massachusetts Bay and Virginia declared the spread of the Gospel as a fundamental purpose. Puritan Boston endeavored to be a Christian “city upon a hill.”

In practice, the religious nature of the colonies varied. They had economic and territorial ambitions alongside heavenly ones. State religious persecution of religious minorities in Virginia and Massachusetts drew pushback.

The religious values of a colonial system that decimated Native communities and imported enslaved Africans has also come under enduring scrutiny.

Decades before the American Revolution, an evangelical revival known as the Great Awakening reached many colonists. Church membership and attendance declined steadily throughout the 18th century, according to studies, even as the colonies remained mostly Protestant.

The Protestant label also covered a range of beliefs, as some churches shifted toward Unitarian views that esteemed Jesus as a prophet or sage, not divine.

By the Revolution, rationalistic approaches to religion strongly influenced many college-educated and propertied elite men, such as those who produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Frazer wrote. So did Freemasonry, a fraternal order based on beliefs in a universal God and morals.

Some founders were devout Christians such as John Jay, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry. Others believed in God but not in Jesus’ divinity, including key founders like Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The enigmatic Washington kept active in his Episcopal church but avoided sacraments and also was an active Freemason. He spoke about God in terms most people at that time could accept, such as “Providence” or “Supreme Ruler.”

Challenging misconceptions about deist founders

But contrary to popular belief, most founders were not deists.

Frazer instead describes many founders as “theistic rationalists.” George Washington believed that divine “Providence” saved his life in battle and intervened on America’s behalf. He was far from alone.

“They did believe in an active God,” Frazer says. “Therefore, prayer matters, because there’s someone listening.”

Even the skeptics thought religion was important in forming virtuous citizens. Franklin donated toward building projects for various churches and a synagogue in Philadelphia. Many scholars believe the First Amendment created a sort of religious free market in which Christianity and other faiths have flourished to this day.

At speaking engagements, Frazer hands out a flyer with 12 points on why the Christian America view is dangerous for both church and state.

“It’s mostly dangerous for Christianity,” Frazer contends. By claiming people or ideas as Christian if they aren’t, it “muddies the waters in terms of what Christianity is all about.”

________

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as a Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic, and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, though his kids consider themselves Jewish.

Wesley Clark’s father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood he converted to Catholicism, but he recently told Beliefnet.com, “I’m a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian church.”

What other country on earth would have three national political figures with such peripatetic religious backgrounds? In most of the world, faith-hopping of this sort is simply unheard of. Yet in the United States, we simply take it for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and we always have.

Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville was bewildered by the mixture of devout religiosity he found in the U.S. combined with the relative absence of denominational strife, at least among Protestants. Americans, he observed, don’t seem to care that their neighbors hold to false versions of the faith.

That’s because many Americans have tended to assume that all these differences are temporary. In the final days, the distinctions will fade away, and we will all be united in God’s embrace. This happy assumption has meant that millions feel free to try on different denominations at different points in their lives, and many Americans have had trouble taking religious doctrines altogether seriously. As the historian Henry Steele Commager once wrote, “During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt.”

This tendency to emphasize personal growth over any fixed creed has shaped our cultural and political life. First, it’s meant that Americans are reasonably tolerant, generally believing that all people of good will are basically on the same side. In London recently, President Bush said that Christians and Muslims both pray to the same God. That was theologically controversial, but it was faithful to the national creed.

Second, it has meant that we relax severity. American faiths, as many scholars note, have tended to be optimistic and easygoing, experiential rather than intellectual.

Churches compete for congregants. To fill the pews, they often emphasize the upbeat and the encouraging and play down the business about God’s wrath. In today’s megachurches, the technology is cutting-edge, the music is modern, the language is therapeutic, and the dress is casual. These churches are seeker-sensitive, not authoritarian.

The small groups movement, from which President Bush emerges, emphasizes intimate companionship and encouragement. Members of these groups study the Bible in search of guidance and help with personal challenges. They do not preach at one another, but partner with each other.

The third effect of our dominant religious style is that we have trouble sustaining culture wars. For some European intellectuals, and even some of our own commentators, the Scopes trial never ended. For them, the forces of enlightened progress are always battling against the rigid, Bible-thumping forces of religion, whether represented by William Jennings Bryan or Jerry Falwell.

But that’s a cartoon version of reality. In fact, real-life belief, especially these days, is mobile, elusive and flexible. Falwell doesn’t represent evangelicals today. The old culture war organizations like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition are either dead or husks of their former selves.

As the sociologist Alan Wolfe demonstrates in his book, “The Transformation of American Religion,” evangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.

So we have this paradox. These days political parties grow more orthodox, while religions grow more fluid. In the political sphere, there is conflict and rigid partisanship. In the religious sphere, there is mobility, ecumenical understanding and blurry boundaries.

If George Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they’d probably embrace.

________

David Brooks, "The National Creed," The New York Times, December 30, 2003.

The August 13, 2012, “New Yorker” magazine had an interesting article by Adam Gropnik.

He says America has been influenced by two foundational movements. One is the Enlightenment, and the other the Second Great Awakening, an Evangelical religious movement. You might say we have always been torn between the Rationalists and the Revivalists.

The Revivalists are the ones who challenged America on the evils of slavery. They won. They later took on alcohol, which didn’t fare as well.

But morality is more than one or two issues in society. It is about the values you are going to live by. And where those values are going to come from. The Bible has some clear statements on this. What will we do with them?

________

Adapted from the article "I, Nephi: Mormonism and its meanings," by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker magazine, August 13, 2012.

“And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?”

Benjamin Franklin made the remark at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to argue that because something as small as a sparrow's death comes to God's attention, clearly God has a voice in the affairs of men. Therefore, Franklin argued, a prayer should open the daily sessions held to write the founding document of the United States. (Franklin lost the argument, but his passage won a place in history.)

America -- the first nation to begin as “a Christian nation” -- was colonized by people seeking to worship God freely, who established schools so everyone could read the Bible, founded universities to train ministers and wrote laws reflecting biblical truth.

America declares “In God We Trust” on every dime and dollar -- one nation under God, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created free and equal.

America’s first political document, the Mayflower Compact, said: “Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian Faith ... [we] covenant and combine ourselves together....

American shores afforded religious liberty just as missionary-minded Protestants were being harried out of Europe. Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Moravians ... all seeking freedom from persecution. Their ideals came from their Bibles. Every group brought the Scriptures in their own language -- English Baptists, Swedish Lutherans, French Huguenots, Scotch Covenanters and German Mennonites.

• The Eliot Bible

At 27, John Eliot fled England for the New World (1631) and organized a church near Boston. He learned the Algonquin language and began preaching to Native Americans near his church. When they began coming to Christ, he embarked on an eight-year effort to translate the Scriptures into Algonquin.

• The Aitken Bible

For over four generations, from the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1607 to the American Revolution in 1776, not a single English Bible was printed in America -- it was illegal.

The copyright to the Authorized Version rested with the British Crown, which turned down repeated requests for American printings of the Bible. And with the War of Independence, the importing of Bibles stopped.

Robert Aitken decided to do something. Aitken was the official publisher for the Congress of the States. In 1777, he produced an American “home-grown” edition of the New Testament. Ten thousand copies were printed, but by then cheaper imported Bibles were again available.

In a desperate attempt to recoup his investment, Aitken asked Congress to sanction and support his Bibles. For the first and last time in our nation’s history, a Bible was printed with the approval of Congress.

The resolution, adopted September 12, 1782, said: “WHEREUPON RESOLVED: That the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and ... they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorize him to publish this recommendation....”

In 1790, Mathew Carey printed 500 copies of the Catholic Douay Bible, and nearly lost his shirt. Later he printed the King James Version. It sold for a whopping six dollars.

• The Influential Bible

For two centuries, the Word of God has been the best-selling book in America. It has shaped our nation like no other book. George Washington said: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

John Quincy Adams: “The earlier my children begin to read it [the Bible], the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens ... and respectable members of society.”

President Andrew Jackson called the Bible “the rock on which our republic rests.”

Abraham Lincoln: “I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man.”

Woodrow Wilson: “I ask every man and woman in this audience that from this day on they will realize that part of the destiny of America lies in their daily perusal of this great Book.”

Dwight Eisenhower: “To read the Bible is to take a trip to the fair land where the spirit is strengthened and faith renewed.”

When he authorized 1983 as the “Year of the Bible,” Ronald Reagan said, “Within the covers of the Bible are all the answers to all the problems that face us today, if we’d only look.”

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12). Keep the Bible prominent in your home and church. Read it, heed it, hold it high and share its message. Its heritage is too great to be lost, its light too bright to keep hidden. Its future in America depends on you and me.

*

George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as a Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic, and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, though his kids consider themselves Jewish.

Wesley Clark’s father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood he converted to Catholicism, but he recently told Beliefnet.com, “I’m a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian church.”

What other country on earth would have three national political figures with such peripatetic religious backgrounds? In most of the world, faith-hopping of this sort is simply unheard of. Yet in the United States, we simply take it for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and we always have.

Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville was bewildered by the mixture of devout religiosity he found in the U.S. combined with the relative absence of denominational strife, at least among Protestants. Americans, he observed, don’t seem to care that their neighbors hold to false versions of the faith.

That’s because many Americans have tended to assume that all these differences are temporary. In the final days, the distinctions will fade away, and we will all be united in God’s embrace. This happy assumption has meant that millions feel free to try on different denominations at different points in their lives, and many Americans have had trouble taking religious doctrines altogether seriously. As the historian Henry Steele Commager once wrote, “During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt.”

This tendency to emphasize personal growth over any fixed creed has shaped our cultural and political life. First, it’s meant that Americans are reasonably tolerant, generally believing that all people of good will are basically on the same side. In London recently, President Bush said that Christians and Muslims both pray to the same God. That was theologically controversial, but it was faithful to the national creed.

Second, it has meant that we relax severity. American faiths, as many scholars note, have tended to be optimistic and easygoing, experiential rather than intellectual.

Churches compete for congregants. To fill the pews, they often emphasize the upbeat and the encouraging and play down the business about God’s wrath. In today’s megachurches, the technology is cutting-edge, the music is modern, the language is therapeutic, and the dress is casual. These churches are seeker-sensitive, not authoritarian.

The small groups movement, from which President Bush emerges, emphasizes intimate companionship and encouragement. Members of these groups study the Bible in search of guidance and help with personal challenges. They do not preach at one another, but partner with each other.

The third effect of our dominant religious style is that we have trouble sustaining culture wars. For some European intellectuals, and even some of our own commentators, the Scopes trial never ended. For them, the forces of enlightened progress are always battling against the rigid, Bible-thumping forces of religion, whether represented by William Jennings Bryan or Jerry Falwell.

But that’s a cartoon version of reality. In fact, real-life belief, especially these days, is mobile, elusive and flexible. Falwell doesn’t represent evangelicals today. The old culture war organizations like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition are either dead or husks of their former selves.

As the sociologist Alan Wolfe demonstrates in his book, “The Transformation of American Religion,” evangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.

So we have this paradox. These days political parties grow more orthodox, while religions grow more fluid. In the political sphere, there is conflict and rigid partisanship. In the religious sphere, there is mobility, ecumenical understanding and blurry boundaries.

If George Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they’d probably embrace.

________

David Brooks, "The National Creed," The New York Times, December 30, 2003.

When he talks about the role of religion in the founding of the United States, historian Gregg Frazer does not attract eager audiences.

“Neither side really wants to hear what I say,” says Frazer, a professor of history and political studies at The Master’s University, a Christian school in Santa Clarita, California.

The founders, Frazer says, did not create a Christian republic. Several key founders either rejected core Christian doctrines or were vague enough to keep historians debating. For Frazer, that often disappoints audiences of his fellow Christians.

But, he says, nor were the founders a cluster of rationalist deists — believers in a God who set the universe in motion like a clockmaker and then left it alone — and anti-religious skeptics, as they are sometimes portrayed. That disappoints audiences who favor a high firewall between church and state. Most of the founders were religious in one form or another.

The long-running debate over the founders’ intentions about religion has been turbocharged with the approaching 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 [2026]. Amid the America 250 celebrations, some Christian activists and authors are redoubling claims that the U.S. had a Christian founding.

They have an ally in the White House.

President Donald Trump is promoting “ America Prays,” culminating in a May 17 gathering on the National Mall in Washington. Official participants include many Christian organizations and individuals, some who champion the idea of a Christian founding. Cabinet officials are issuing Christian messages in their official capacity. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed that “America was founded as a Christian nation ... in our DNA.”

In short: The long-standing debate — secular government on one hand, faith on another — rages and matters still.

Countering the Christian nation narrative

Critics and advocacy groups are pushing back.

“Most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical, or constitutional sense,” says the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It decries efforts “to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist disinformation and then reshape our law accordingly.”

Six in 10 U.S. adults surveyed say they believed the founders originally intended America to be a Christian nation, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.

Why do the founders’ beliefs and intentions matter?

“Everyone’s looking for what we historians call a usable past,” says John Fea, author of “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”

“We go into the past looking for what we want in order to advance a particular political or cultural agenda,” says Fea, a fellow at the Lumen Center, a Christian research institute and study center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Advocates often skirt history’s nuances. For example, public officials and others did indeed offer prayers on behalf of the new republic at important historical moments.

“But are those prayers the central part of the story of what happened when we, in the United States, declared independence?” Fea wonders. “Last time I checked, it was about taxation and representation and shutting down the port of Boston and all these more economic and political things.”

Church and state in the new nation

Historian Mark David Hall argues that Christianity did strongly impact the founding. While core founders did not hold traditional Christian beliefs, he contends many other founders did, and that this shaped their thinking about how to form the new republic.

“There’s plenty of evidence Christianity had an influence,” says Hall, author of “Did America Have a Christian Founding?”

He says founders’ attention to human dignity harmonizes with the Bible’s teaching of humanity created in God’s image. The system of checks and balances — to prevent the concentration of power — reflects teachings about human sin that would have permeated a largely Protestant culture, he says.

He also notes that some early presidents and Congresses issued proclamations for prayer and thanksgiving, though some drew opposition and controversy. Some states sponsored churches for decades after the country’s Constitution was ratified, indicating the founders did not believe religion should be absent from public life.

They believed that faith was important in forming moral, responsible citizens of the new republic. They promoted “toleration without eliminating the importance of real religious commitment on the part of differing adherents,” Frazer wrote in his book, “The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders.”

There is no reference to any specific religion in the Constitution beyond the date — “in the year of our Lord” 1787. It forbids religious tests for officeholders. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights guarantees religious freedom and forbids “establishment” of a national religion.

Twentieth-century Supreme Court rulings applied the First Amendment to the states on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying citizens’ rights. The court cited founder Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state.” Courts have since wrestled with how to apply that principle in areas such as school prayer, healthcare, labor law and crosses on public lands.

Frazer argues that the Bible is not cited as a source for any governing principles in the documented proceedings of the Constitutional Convention or in the influential Federalist Papers, which advocated for the Constitution. He says the founders drew on influences such as Enlightenment thinking on such concepts as human equality, accountable government and freedom of religion. Early critics of the Constitution faulted it for lacking religious content.

The Declaration of Independence does have religious language, declaring that rights come from the “Creator.” It appeals to “divine Providence” and to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

Thomas Jefferson and other founders — adroitly, Frazer says — used terms acceptable to Christians as well as followers of other religious and philosophical movements.

America’s complicated religious history

Even the seemingly straightforward question, “Did the founders intend America to be a Christian nation?” raises questions: Who were the founders? When was the actual “founding”?

Some see the founding as the original colonial settlements — a century and a half before 1776. Colonial charters for Massachusetts Bay and Virginia declared the spread of the Gospel as a fundamental purpose. Puritan Boston endeavored to be a Christian “city upon a hill.”

In practice, the religious nature of the colonies varied. They had economic and territorial ambitions alongside heavenly ones. State religious persecution of religious minorities in Virginia and Massachusetts drew pushback.

The religious values of a colonial system that decimated Native communities and imported enslaved Africans has also come under enduring scrutiny.

Decades before the American Revolution, an evangelical revival known as the Great Awakening reached many colonists. Church membership and attendance declined steadily throughout the 18th century, according to studies, even as the colonies remained mostly Protestant.

The Protestant label also covered a range of beliefs, as some churches shifted toward Unitarian views that esteemed Jesus as a prophet or sage, not divine.

By the Revolution, rationalistic approaches to religion strongly influenced many college-educated and propertied elite men, such as those who produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Frazer wrote. So did Freemasonry, a fraternal order based on beliefs in a universal God and morals.

Some founders were devout Christians such as John Jay, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry. Others believed in God but not in Jesus’ divinity, including key founders like Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The enigmatic Washington kept active in his Episcopal church but avoided sacraments and also was an active Freemason. He spoke about God in terms most people at that time could accept, such as “Providence” or “Supreme Ruler.”

Challenging misconceptions about deist founders

But contrary to popular belief, most founders were not deists.

Frazer instead describes many founders as “theistic rationalists.” George Washington believed that divine “Providence” saved his life in battle and intervened on America’s behalf. He was far from alone.

“They did believe in an active God,” Frazer says. “Therefore, prayer matters, because there’s someone listening.”

Even the skeptics thought religion was important in forming virtuous citizens. Franklin donated toward building projects for various churches and a synagogue in Philadelphia. Many scholars believe the First Amendment created a sort of religious free market in which Christianity and other faiths have flourished to this day.

At speaking engagements, Frazer hands out a flyer with 12 points on why the Christian America view is dangerous for both church and state.

“It’s mostly dangerous for Christianity,” Frazer contends. By claiming people or ideas as Christian if they aren’t, it “muddies the waters in terms of what Christianity is all about.”

________

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.