In my last article, I put the enemies of liberty and democracy on notice and identified the left as the greatest threat to Western civilization. Now, I’ll expound on the list of accusations that I leveled at the Democrats by addressing the specific threats that their party poses to free and independent people. Let’s begin, as all sociopolitical examinations of America must, with a proper understanding of religion.
Separation of Church and State Introduced
In 1644, a Baptist minister named Roger Williams wrote to John Cotton of a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world” to guard the religious against the secular.1 2 In 1802, Thomas Jefferson echoed this metaphor in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, when he wrote of a “wall of separation between church and state.”3 Some have taken this to mean that there’s no place for religion in politics or that countries shouldn’t be governed by religious principles. I have no idea where they got such a preposterous notion, particularly in the United States.
The phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, or our Bill of Rights. Our First Amendment simply states, “Congress shall make no law respecting [regarding] an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise [practice] thereof.” This means that the government will not establish a national religion or a state-run church, nor will any church be accountable to the government for its teachings. Citizens will not be fined for missing church, as they were in Elizabethan England; the Bible will not be outlawed as “hate speech,” as they’re attempting to do in Canada; and Christians will not be penalized for refusing to participate in LGBTQIA+ marriages that violate their religious beliefs and moral convictions.
Thus, Williams’s and Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was meant to protect the religious from the secular, not the secular from the religious, which would’ve been of utmost importance to the descendants of religious refugees who’d sought asylum in a distant land.
Catholics and Protestants
The first American colonists willingly chose cultural exile from Great Britain over adherence to its politics for the purpose of establishing more religious societies. And not just any religious societies. Christian societies. Strict Protestant societies that believed that the Christian Church was too Catholic.
Remember, the Christian/Protestant Church split from the Roman Catholic (“Universal”) Church in 1534 because that old Bluebeard, Henry VIII, wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon. His Act of Supremacy made him head of the Anglican Church of England instead of the pope, who’d (rightfully) denied his request to annul his marriage.
While the king’s primary motivation was personal and political, it was facilitated by the Protestant Reformation, which was famously sparked by Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, or protests, against the Catholic Church in 1517. Before that, Catholicism was the only option for those who embraced Jesus as the Jews long-awaited Messiah. As such, the Roman Catholic Church was the direct descendent and heir of the early Christian Church, which itself was an offshoot of Judaism and the Hebrew covenant.
According to Judeo-Christian Scripture, God chose one pagan, Abram/Abraham, to be the progenitor of His chosen people, the Hebrews/Israelites, and established a covenant with them at Mount Sinai (Gen. 12:1–9; Ex. 19–24). He gave them His law through His servant Moses, so that they could understand His character and enjoy communion with Him through belief in Him and obedience to His commandments (Ex. 20–23; Lev. 1–Num. 10; Deut. 1–34). He brought His people out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land of Canaan (Ex. 12–15; Josh. 1:1–Judg. 3:6). A millennia and a half later, after a pattern of disobedience led them into spiritual idolatry and then left them politically vassaled to Rome, God sent His only begotten Son to reenact their earthly deliverance in a spiritual capacity, so that anyone who believed in and obeyed Him could spend eternity with Him in paradise (Judg. 3:7–21:25; Matt. 1–John 21).
But His people rejected Him and accused His Son of being a traitor to Rome, a political fabrication that intentionally misrepresented Jesus’s stated objective, as well as their own, which Matthew 27:18 and Mark 15:10 reveal was motivated by nothing more than personal envy and the kind of malice that always accompanies it. Thus, the covenantal promises passed to a small number of Jews through the Apostle Peter and a large number of gentiles through the Apostle Paul; and over time, the Greco-Roman branch of the Judeo-Christian Church became as burdened with ecclesiastical interpretations as the Mosaic law had been before the death and resurrection of Christ (Matt. 23; Luke 11:37–54; Gal. 2:7–9).
Fast forward to 1517, when Martin Luther unwittingly sparked the Protestant Reformation by nailing his Theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg; the Protestant Christians splintered from the Catholic Christians; and the Pilgrims and Puritans finally grew weary of the enmity between these two religious rivals and decided to take their chances with the arduous transatlantic crossing, the deadly Massachusetts winters, and the hostile Native Americans.
One hundred and fifty years later, the descendants of this younger Christian faction founded the United States of America on the same Protestant principles, continuing God’s tradition of choosing younger sons over firstborn sons to contrast His love of character with humanity’s obsession with hierarchies. Other biblical examples of this principle include Isaac (Jews) and Ishmael (Arabs), Jacob and Esau, Ephraim and Manasseh, Moses and his siblings, and David and his brothers. Even Jesus, the firstborn child of Joseph and Mary, could trace His human lineage back through King David to Judah, the fourth son of Jacob and Leah.
Leah is often remembered as Jacob’s less attractive, unwanted wife, but she also had the distinction of being the matriarch of eight of the twelve tribes of Israel, as well as the wife who was buried by Jacob’s side instead of by the wayside (Gen. 35:16–20; 49:29–33; 50:12–14). Thus, Rachel had her portion in life and Leah had her portion in death, again emphasizing the eternal over the temporal and God’s heart for the meek and the lowly, to whom humankind is not kind (Prov. 3:34; Matt. 5:3–10; Luke 6:20–26; Jas. 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5–7).
Thus, it could be said that history (or His Story, as some Christians like to put it) is just one, big, family drama, writ large, and performed upon the world stage. Our forefathers understood this in a way that modern Americans have forgotten. Unlike us, they saw the founding of the American Colonies and the United States as a continuation of the Mosaic covenant established at Mount Sinai. This isn’t an opinion; it’s a fact based on historical records.
Pilgrims and Puritans
Pilgrims
According to the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims undertook their transatlantic voyage “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith and honor of our king and country.” Like the Puritans, they believed that the Anglican Church was corrupt and that true Christianity was based solely on Scripture (sola scriptura), but they sought to separate from the Church of England instead of trying to reform it from within. They arrived in present-day Massachusetts in 1620 and founded Plymouth Colony. Their foremost governor, William Bradford, likened the colonists to the pilgrims in Hebrews 11:13–16 of the Geneva Bible. In his journal, Of Plimoth Plantation, he paraphrased the final verse: “They desired a better country, a heavenly one, wherefore God was not ashamed to be called their God.” Their congregations were voluntary, democratic covenants rather than established, state-run churches, which laid the foundation for sovereign nation-states and civil self-government.
Puritans
The Puritans founded Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 as a model of Christian charity, the famous “city upon a hill,” to serve as an extension of ancient Israel and an example to the world.4 They were called Puritans because they sought to purify the Church of England from Catholic influences by rejecting Anglican ceremonies, liturgies, iconography, and vestments. They believed that God has a specific calling for every individual, that all honest labor is equal in dignity, and that civil societies have a covenantal responsibility to prevent tyranny and uphold God’s laws. They highly valued literacy for both sexes as a means of reading and comprehending the Bible for oneself and founded America’s first public schools and higher institutions, including Harvard University. Their Great Migration brought tens of thousands of Puritans from Old England to New England in the 1630s.
A Note on Slavery
The American colonists weren’t the first or the last people to practice slavery, which still exists—illegally and systematically—in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Africa is by far the worst offender with Mauritania, Sudan, Libya, and Eritrea leading the way. Other countries include Russia, South Korea, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
All three points of the transatlantic triangle were complicit in the slave trade and none of them can be said to have invented it. A limited number of enslaved people had been passing through European ports before Charles I of Spain expanded chattel slavery in the Caribbean in 1518. A century later, twenty to thirty of these captives were traded for food and supplies in what was then Point Comfort, Virginia, and subjected to indentured servitude. In 1660, Charles II of England founded the Company of Royal Adventurers/Royal African Company to secure a state-sponsored monopoly on the West African trade by trafficking enslaved people to its English colonies in the Caribbean and North America, allowing England to circumvent common-law traditions that forbad the practice on its own soil.
New England was the first to legalize chattel slavery (Massachusetts, 1641) and the first to abolish it (Vermont, 1777). When the practice began to fall out of favor in the 1700s, Britain repeatedly thwarted Virginia’s attempts to abolish it, which became one of the prominent grievances that Thomas Jefferson leveled against George III in his original draft of our Declaration of Independence. This paragraph was later stricken from the Declaration because we needed the South’s affluence to win the war, which was the first step toward creating our own laws, and it was obviously hypocritical for slave-holding Virginians like Jefferson to be self-righteous about slavery.
The Society of Friends, or Quakers, were the first to create an anti-slavery resolution in 1688; in 1776, they formally voted to disown church members who participated in the slave trade; and in 1790, they officially petitioned the newly established Congress to abolish it. Puritans who actively opposed the practice included Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803), and Jonathan Edwards the Younger (1745–1801).
The Puritans’ and Quakers’ nonreligious and irreligious neighbors, who’d largely identify as liberals today, were conspicuously absent from the ranks of abolitionism. That’s why New England, which was founded by Puritans, had significantly fewer slaves than southern colonies like Virginia and South Carolina, whose inhabitants tended to be secular Anglicans with closer ties to the British gentry. In other words, the colonies that were Loyalist during our fight for independence became states that were Confederate during our fight for abolition, and the fissures that led to our Civil War were evident during our Revolution. Had the Old South’s attempt at succession and disunion succeeded, the American Experiment would’ve ended eighty-nine years after it began, making us a laughingstock among the nations who were waiting for it to fail—all so that the offspring of would-be aristocrats could keep playing Lord of the Manor with an unpaid labor force.
Thus, while America’s religious antecedents are even worse than the Democrats give us credit for, it should comfort them to know that they’re completely free from the taint of Puritanism. No one could accuse them of doing half as much for the United States as our Puritan forebears. In this, at least, they’re entirely innocent.
Every age has its prophetic voices, crying in the wilderness of apathy and oppression, and those voices have more often been Christian (Isa. 40:3; Luke 3:3–4; John 1:23).
Our forefathers’ archaic, non-standard spelling and punctuation, while charming, have been sacrificed to clarity.
Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical references are from the New King James Version (NKJV).
