Covenant Presbyterian Church

To opposing shouts of "thou shalt have no other gods before me" from the gallery and a prayer for God’s forgiveness, a Hindu officiated the opening religious gestures of the United States Senate this past Thursday. The righteous anger felt by many American Christians is justified. Yet insofar as it is based upon halcyon views of this nation’s history rather than as another in a long line of insults against its only Sovereign, Jesus Christ, it is also misguided. Though I fear being misunderstood, I must dissent from Christians that see this prayer as an attack upon "Christian America." There is no such entity. If there ever was, it was short-lived and quickly side-tracked.

Christians from the Old War migrated, settled, and established our original colonies. The faith and courage of the original European settlers of this nation are incontrovertible. Their original documents, compacts, and confessions testify to their sincere faith in the triune God, their gospel motivations for settlement, and their desire to live by the Bible - as individuals, families, churches, and societies. The earliest colonial law codes were explicitly Christian. The Body of Liberties of 1648, Massachusetts’s earliest civil code quoted profusely from the Bible, citing all the death penalty laws from the Pentateuch. The New Haven Laws of Connecticut took a similar view. Most colonial legal codes and constitutions were explicitly Christian in their tone, content, and tendency. But then something happened.

The Calvinism of New England gave way to Unitarianism, which denies the deity of Jesus Christ, the supernatural element in Scripture, and its all-sufficiency. Human reason, inner light, and personal experience became the new standard of religion and life for its adherents. This was the first assault against the Puritan vision of a "City Set on a Hill," and it was devastating, likely the death blow to the Puritan commitment to a nation ruled by the Bible. But God was not finished with the colonies. Prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution, two critical events transpired. First, through the preaching of Whitefield, Davies, the Tennant brothers, and other lesser-known preachers, a "Great Awakening" swept through the colonies in the 1750’s. Tens of thousands were undoubtedly converted. It is estimated by some that George Whitefield, the fiery, Calvinist-evangelist, was heard by eighty percent of the colonists - to this day a record in terms of the proportion of the population that heard a single preacher. As monumental as this awakening was, it did not signal a return to the Puritan vision, the comprehensive authority of Scripture, or the earlier theological depth and Bible-centered piety. It was often more in line with the enthusiasm of a modern religious crusade, with all its attendant emotional excesses, personality cults, and theological fragmentation. The Great Awakening permanently weakened and divided the former religious majority, American Presbyterianism, into New Lights, who tended to support the lower-demand, non-doctrinal, experienced oriented preaching of the revivalists, from the Old Lights, who held to the older and purer faith of the Reformation.

The second event was the migration of a significant number of Scots Presbyterians to the New World. These men and women, many of them fresh from religious persecution in Scotland and Ireland, brought with them the older faith, the Calvinism of the Protestant Reformation, and a commitment to Scripture as the infallible, all-sufficient Word of God. Many of these men made up the troops that would fight British tyranny again in the American War for Independence. In Parliament, this conflict was sometimes called "The Presbyterian War," because it was fought largely by the same tenacious group that had been resisting persecution in Scotland under the Stuarts and later English kings. Their arrival in the United States was a boon to the effort to gain independence from England; it also exposed the shallowness of "Great Awakening" Christianity, how far it had fallen from the faith of the original settlers. This religious conflict was never resolved; it has not been resolved. The Baptist culture of the "Great Awakening" triumphed over the Presbyterian culture of the Protestant Reformation, and more specifically, of Calvin, Knox, and the Puritans. This loss was felt in more ways than the denominational struggles of American Presbyterianism to adapt and respond to the new evangelistic methods espoused by the revivalists. It resulted in the equally tragic loss of the Puritan vision for society - a nation ruled by God’s word alone for his glory and the expansion of the gospel of his Son.

Early "America," then, is hardly the homogenous utopia envisioned in much Christian revisionist history. Yes, many Christians today are guilty of historical revisionism. They want the past to be simpler than it was, purer than it in fact was. The pre- and post-Revolution colonies and states, however, struggled with more than English tyranny. They had an identity crisis. What sort of people were they? What role would the Christian religion play? What was the Christian faith? Unitarian? Revivalistic and Baptist? Presbyterian and Reformed?

After the Revolution, when it came time to meet the present needs and determine the future destiny of the nation, these factions came into conflict, along with a fourth. It is difficult to give this group a name, but they are represented by men like Hamilton, who placed the needs of the economy before the claims of liberty, who had tasted the power of centralized government in the Old World and sought to cast the New World into the forms suggested by Enlightenment political theory. Perhaps the usual designation "Federalist" is as a good as any. These men were committed to a strong central government and strongly depreciated the existence and abilities of thirteen independent states. Some even suggested that Washington be made king, a suggestion he repudiated to his credit and in line with his Virginian feudalistic tendencies.

Before Washington, however, we must briefly consider the Constitutional Convention. Our Constitution is hyperbolically portrayed by some Christians as if it were simply a modern application of the Ten Commandments. Books are written purporting to show the Christian origins of this document. While it is true that the Constitution manifests imbedded, generally Christian assumptions about man and government, several lines of argumentation should at least give us slight pause before lavishing too many laudations upon this document. By the time we arrived at the Constitutional Convention, America was much divided religiously, most within the Christian camp to be sure, but with significant, very significant theological differences. Some were in the non-Christian camp. Many of the leading men, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, were not Christians. True, they spoke of providence, and God, and liberty. This does not make them Christians. In assessing these men, it is often forgotten that Unitarianism was very friendly to Socianism, a heretical sect that retained much Christian language but denied the deity of Jesus Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, and the necessity of blood atonement. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were decidedly Socinian in their views. They were not Deists, however, and this is where the confusion arises. Deism denied providence; these men did not. Hence, some conclude, they must have been Christians. This is a dangerously false conclusion. They were far, far preferable to today’s leaders, especially Jefferson, but the Bible held no formal or practical sway over their thinking, other than general morality and personal goodness in imitation of Jesus’ ethic of love. Hence, even though they desired liberty and just laws, they lacked a foundation for them other than the Enlightenment commitment to human reason and the social contract theory of Locke. Even the presence of the older faith at the Constitutional Convention in men like John Witherspoon, the great-great grandson of John Knox, could only produce a compromise document, nothing like the older colonial and state charters and law codes in which the authority of God and even Jesus Christ were specifically referenced. Their self-consciously biblical worldview had given way to a more "rights of man" orientation, based upon John Locke’s empirical views of social contracts between a sovereign people and their leaders. The older faith was there, haunting and trying to influence, but its foundations had cracked in the colonies, giving us a different document with a different vision.

The primary influence at the Convention was the Federalist. Though many of these men were Christians and loved liberty, they supported the consolidation of power into a centralized government - not as centralized as what we now have, but the foundations for a secular empire were laid. Patrick Henry, the sometimes forgotten hero of American liberty, explained his absence from the Convention with these memorable words: "I smell a rat in Philadelphia." The rat he smelled was the loss of liberty through the centralization of power, the diminished local authority of country and state governments, and the influence of European Enlightenment ideas of civil power. The rats took over. Or perhaps more justly, the rodent of European centralization won over. Perhaps it was the fear of a second British invasion. In some like Hamilton and his cronies, it was the desire for empire, power, and commercial prestige. Whatever the motivations, the Constitution, because it sought to provide for liberty upon the foundation of human reason and Enlightenment social arrangements, did not build upon the authority of God that limits all human governments better than any humanly devised "checks and balances," and depended upon man’s essential goodness to maintain self-control and order, was ultimately a failure. Flag-waiving, Christian revisionism, and patriotism notwithstanding, this document did not and has not secured us against the encroachments of tyranny. The many were sacrificed upon the altar of the one, of centralization, of the loss of local authority, of the abandonment of the Puritan vision of a society built upon the authority of God’s holy Word.

This sacrifice was made final in 1861. Northern commercialism, Unitarianism, and Egalitarianism, i.e., pluralism, were willing and anxious to sacrifice the last bastion of the older religion in the South in order to preserve their stranglehold upon the nation and rid themselves once and for all of those who had the theological principles and God-inspired courage to resist tyranny. For all practical purposes, the Constitution has been a dead document since then. Men refer to it, even profess to be strict constructionists. But the creeping authority of the Federal consolidation of all power within its arrogant halls has now gobbled up all resistance. Small liberty remains. Why? Because men are not following the Constitution? No. Because the Constitution did not truly or lastingly provide for it. And why is this? Because it did not ground liberty upon God’s law like the earlier documents did, but upon trust in man’s reason, and the supposed religious protection provided by a religiously neutral federal government. The Puritan experiment did not fail. It was hijacked.

None of this is intended to depreciate the sacrifices and commitments of many Christians who were involved in these events. It is, however, a recognition that by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the older Puritan political theory of limited government based upon God’s sovereign authority, of human law based upon his law, and of a society dedicated to the propagation of his word, did not hold self-conscious sway over the thoughts of many of the founding fathers. How could it? The nation was already divided religiously into a variety of conflicting theological perspectives. Presbyterianism, ever the safeguard against tyranny and the promoter of the apostolic religion and an all-sufficient Bible, had already begun to lose influence before the rising tide of shallow Revivalism. There were exceptions, but their voices were drowned out, as is evidenced by the difference between the older Puritan documents and our Constitution. This document might even be said to have served us adequately while the older faith still influenced the thinking of the majority of the citizenry. But as we have already seen and as Patrick Henry feared at the time, once the nation lost its faith in God and practical submission to the Bible, this document would become an instrument of tyranny. It was intrinsically deficient.
Thus, when a Hindu gives the opening prayer in the Senate, I am not remotely surprised. I am barely agitated. Yes, I am grieved for the insult given to the Prince of the kings of the earth. I also know this sort of pluralism was violently condemned by our founding fathers, many of whom professed that this nation was founded upon the principles of Jesus Christ. But other principles were also at work, a not-to-consistent allegiance to Jesus Christ as King, as advocated by the Puritans, and a faith in Jesus more influenced by the less doctrinally concerned and consistent Great Awakening than by the Bible-focused piety and politics of the earlier generations. In the hands of men who do not share the worldview and moral framework of the best of our Founders, our Constitution, as was feared by Patrick Henry and others, cannot safeguard our liberties under God because it is not explicit in recognizing him as their author or specific in grounding them upon his revelation in Scripture.
Hence, when some speak of a "Christian America," I must ask, which one? The Puritan vision? If this is your theological and political vision, then we have never had this as a nation. Never. It thrived only in the pre-Constitutional period. If you mean the America set forth in the Constitution, you now have it. Its full and bitter fruits are general morality, theological inconsistency, and political empire. Choose wisely.
If you would work for something better, a few suggestions are in order. First, rid yourself of Christian revisionism. Our people, churches, leadership, and philosophy were very different in 1650-1750 than they were in 1750-1850. Do not be simplistic or believe in fairy tales. To the degree that any past era of history would serve us as a model, and this is always a dangerous business, it should be the earlier Puritan era and not the later Federal era. But Federalism now reigns, and because of this, we can expect the full consolidation of the American Empire, which was envisioned by some of its contemporaries and many of its first implementers. We are now living in the nightmare of their inconsistency, a program that seemed to them at the time necessary to secure our liberties by consolidating government power and allowing for commercial prowess in the markets and banking houses of Europe. Our fathers ate sour grapes; we have had a national toothache ever since.
Second, you must recognize that our present government is not friendly to the concerns of thoroughgoing Christian political theory. Our Constitution does not represent the Puritan vision of government power primarily exercised at the local level, in the hands of genuine Christians, and directed by the authority of Scripture. Hence, when we complain against abortion, Hindu prayers in the Senate, or the removal of "God" from government schools, we are expecting our leaders to interpret an at best generally Christian influenced Constitution by theological commitments it does not explicitly represent. Our vision, a consistently biblical vision, can neither be defended nor implemented upon such a weak foundation. We are asking our nation to be something it was only when it was not a consolidated nation, our leaders to be something they do not understand and do not appreciate. The Constitution by all accounts is a compromise document, and compromise has been our national byword ever since: politically, theologically, and morally.
Third, there is a remedy. I am afraid, however, that pursuing it will require more than we are capable of doing at the present time. The Puritan vision of liberty under God did not spring up overnight. It was the fruit of many generations of theological refinement, strong expository preaching through the entire Bible, and principled self-government. It was forged in the furnace of persecution by the same forces of tyranny that raise again their ugly specter in our day: humanism, secularism, and pluralism. It required great personal sacrifice, strong, Bible-centered families, and generations of self-denial. When I look at the church today, I see few of these things. We are still held tightly in the grips of the Revivalist, Baptist culture that disdains serious theological reflection, strong preaching, strong men, personal responsibility, and obedient children. The kind of nation we desire will never be recovered or built anew upon the foundations of present American Evangelicalism. It is too dominated by emotionalism, shallow spirituality, and narcissistic materialism. This was evidenced most painfully by the recent Christian response in Alabama to Chief Justice Roy Moore, a modern man with the old Puritan vision of a city set on the hill. Most believers opted for the compromise candidate, to side with the forces of consolidation and secularism rather than the candidate of courage, resistance to tyranny, and Bible-based political theory.
We must recognize that a Christian nation is not a birthright, cannot be achieved through the ballot box or political activism, and will not be obtained by demanding that our leaders stand for principles that take root in men only by the power of the Holy Spirit. So while we remember fondly the legacy of the past and labor in the present to do what we can to defend the honor of the living God in the public arena, broader goals are necessary. It is our responsibility to relay its foundation, likely with never seeing its fruits. The forces of compromise, consolidated empire, and commercialism can be broken. They were. The Reformation and its Puritan heirs did break them. They gave us a little over a century of religious and political liberty, resistance to tyranny, and political justice based upon God’s law. Even when their vision had already dimmed significantly, sufficient strength remained to fight for liberty in our Revolution. These things can happen again, but it will not come through force of arms, bumper sticker wars, or Willow Creek spirituality. They will happen when God’s people are committed again, in their lives, families, and businesses, at great personal cost, through the fires of persecution that are being kindled throughout the west at this moment, to the Kingship of Jesus Christ, the all-sufficiency of his Word, and the preaching of the whole counsel of God. Let us pray that if and when our heavenly Father mercifully breathes upon his Church again by his Spirit and restores her to biblical religion, and if we are given the opportunity to fight for the City of God, we make better and more complete use of the opportunity. Until then, fight against sin, saturate yourself with his preached Word, train your children, disciple your neighbors, defend the honor and kingdom of Jesus Christ at every opportunity, and wait upon the Lord. This battle belongs to him, and the zeal of the Lord of hosts will yet cause the nations to flow into Mount Zion, his blessed Church.