Get Yourself Educated

Gary interacts with a recent clip from Charlie Kirk where a questioner asks Kirk about “common law” and America’s founding.

When modern-day critics of America’s Christian heritage argue that America was founded by deists on Enlightenment principles and call into evidence Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson and for good measure James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Paine, they fail to acknowledge that even deists could not escape America’s Christian heritage. Historian C. Gregg Singer explains why:

A Christian world and life view furnished the basis for this early political thought which guided the American people for nearly two centuries and whose crowning [achievement] lay in the writing of the Constitution of 1787. This Christian theism had so permeated the colonial mind that it continued to guide even those who had come to regard the Gospel with indifference or even hostility. The currents of this orthodoxy were too strong to be easily set aside by those who in their own thinking had come to a different conception of religion and hence government too.

For example, the following words appear on Panel Three of the Jefferson Memorial: “God who gave us life gave us liberty.” Thomas Jefferson then asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” This is hardly a deist belief, and to a certain degree, it does not square with an Enlightenment philosophy.

In an address to the military on October 11, 1798, John Adams stated that “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

George Washington warned the American people in his Farewell Address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…. Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without Religion…. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Physician and Christian Benjamin Rush affirmed Washington’s assessment that religion is the prerequisite for morality, virtue, and liberty: “The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments…. All [of Christianity’s] doctrines and precepts are calculated to promote the happiness of society, and the safety and well being of civil government.”

The Case for America’s Christian Heritage

America’s Christian heritage is writ large in its state Constitutions, charters, laws, symbols, and repeated stated reliance on the overruling providence of God. It’s not enough, however, to relive history. There’s much work before us to reset the foundation stones of a firm reliance on Divine Providence. We need to heed the words of Benjamin Franklin who quoted Psalm 127:1 during the drafting process of the Constitution: “except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it,” and “that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel.”

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After giving a quick reminder about the historical reality of hurricanes and flooding (not making them proof of either Bible prophecy or climate change), Gary interacts with a recent clip from Charlie Kirk. A questioner asks Kirk about “common law” and America’s founding, and Charlie’s response is impressive and very much in line with what Gary and American Vision has taught for decades.

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources