A reader ((January 19) says he gets tired of pointing out
that the United States is not a Christian nation. And I think he means as well that the United
States never was a Christian nation and that it was never intended to be
one. He didn’t say, however, just what
kind of nation we are or were supposed to be.
I think he meant to say secular.
Nations have a worldview, just like people do, an underlying
set of beliefs about life that direct its policies and actions: what is right,
what is wrong, what is true, what is false, what is good, what is not, what are
the rules, are there any rules?
When our country was founded, all the countries from which
our people came were Christian countries with state churches. All Christian but different denominations. The Founders wanted religion free from government
control, but they did not separate religion from public life.
To do that would say that religion had nothing to do with
reality or truth but was just people’s personal feelings and preferences, like
their taste in books or music.
A good place to start with determining the worldview of early
America is to look at the schools in our country from before our country’s
founding up to modern times.
Education is now a function of the federal government, but
that was not the case at the beginning.
The New England Primer was the first textbook printed in the
United States (1690) and was for the next hundred years the beginning textbook
for everybody and was in widespread
use in public and private schools until well into the 20th
century. Forget Dick and Jane. Children learning to read from this were well
beyond that in a very short time. But
they learned their ABCs with such rhymes as:
In Adam’s fall we sinned all
Heaven to find, the Bible mind.
Christ crucified for
sinners died.
The McGuffey Readers came in the early 1800s and were the
dominant readers used in public and private schools for at least the next
century. Not only did they teach reading
at a much higher level from the earliest stages, but the series includes passages
like this from the First Reader:
“Who is it that gives us food to eat, and clothes to make us
warm?
It is God, my child; He makes the sun to shine and sends the
rain upon the earth, that we may have food.”
And, of course, the Bible was taught as a main
textbook. Schools were meant to teach
morals as well as facts, and there was no other book for that like the Bible.
For a country to have limited government, such as the
Federalist Papers described it, it needs a moral, independent, and caring
citizenry.
Moral in that they don’t require an ever expanding
government to keep making more rules, regulations, and laws that require more
police and courts and prisons to keep everybody in line, safe, and compliant.
Independent in that they don’t require government assistance,
financial or otherwise, people who believe in hard work and self-reliance.
And caring in that the people willingly and eagerly sought
to provide for the needs of others, eliminating the need for government
programs, and since these are all at the grass roots level, eliminating waste
and fraud.
There used to be hundreds of Christian
societies devoted to every kind of social problem in the land, all run without
public money.
Christians are taught to love their neighbors and not merely
to tolerate (put up with, ignore) them.
As John Adams said: “[W]e have no government armed with
power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and
religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest
cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was
made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the
government of any other.”
But now our country has officially become secular through
fiats from the Supreme Court and the rise of political correctness, multiculturalism,
and an immigration policy that currently favors those most unlike the majority of
us in culture and religion. Our schools
have been stripped of everything remotely religious, and the newer generations
have been taught a version of American history cleansed from anything
religious.
With this secularization, our government has expanded,
because it has now assumed responsibility for the welfare of all its citizens. They can no longer take care of themselves or
act honestly and humanely with each other.
They now require the government to monitor and control all areas of
their lives to ensure the right outcomes.
For those who can see history from the broader perspective,
our county changed radically starting in the 1960s (though earlier signs were
present, like the 1930s with the New Deal) with a new view of government that
replaced the kind of government you could have with a religious and moral
people. The country is now living on
borrowed money. It’s the largest debtor nation in the world. Our schools are average at best, where they
used to be the best in the world. We
lead the world in almost no positive categories where we used to lead the world
in everything. The standard of living has
been in decline for decades
There is so much debate about whether our country was or is
a Christian nation, but no one seems to be asking whether our country is going
forward or backward. Are we going in the
right direction? What is the right direction?
Where will we be in 10, 20 years if we continue on this same path? I contend that we have lost our way as a
nation, and we won’t like a lot of the things that we will meet on our current
course.
