How can we restore America? By recovering the original Pilgrim and Puritan vision of America as a shining “city upon a hill.”
Those first Christian settlers who stepped ashore on the beaches of Massachusetts were not just a bunch of religious refugees who came over here to avoid persecution. They had a compelling vision: to put the Bible into practice and create a self-governing society with liberty and justice for every soul. They were missionaries, intent on creating a Bible-based commonwealth that would be an example to the rest of the world — that would, as Abraham Lincoln would later phrase it, “hold out a beacon of hope to all men of all time to come.”
But we have lost that vision — we seem to no longer know who we are or why we are here. We seem to have developed a serious case of national amnesia, a loss of our collective memory. That means that in order to restore America we have to recover the truth about America’s Christian heritage, and God’s hand in our history. For example, Patrick Henry, a great Founding Father, and one of the strongest evangelical Christians of his time, said that “It can not be too often repeated, or too strongly emphasized that America was not founded by religionists nor on any religion, but by Christians on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” This is a statement that never shows up in the history books that are read by the vast majority of American schoolchildren. John Adams, our second President and a true son of the Puritans, spoke for all the Founding Fathers when he spoke these words to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
