Plimouth Plantation recreates the Pilgrims' settlement. A wood stockade surrounds dwellings inhabited by historically knowledgeable actors pretending to be Puritans. Modern dress and devices fascinate them and you can find yourself struggling to explain how your camera works. In my experience they never, ever come out of character.They landed in Plymouth on December 26th at the start of a brutal winter that killed half of them. Those remaining drew on their faith, learned to survive and celebrated the first Thanksgiving the next fall.
Survival took bravery, resilience, determination, endurance, ingenuity and unremitting faith in God. Other qualities sprang from their faith, including a work ethic, fairness, honesty, reliability, equality and personal responsibility. These became traits of a nation built by generations of people who shared the same values.
Christianity was woven into the American character. Patrick Henry said, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly, nor too often, that this great nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ." Thomas Jefferson concurred: "I have little doubt that the whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our Creator, and, I hope, to the pure doctrines of Jesus also." This mindset was codified in the U.S. Constitution.
Americans have the right to worship as they choose. But whatever their faith, there's a Puritan ethic in the American psyche that crosses religious boundaries and it's been there from the beginning. All presidents have paid homage to it, including Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy who said "God's work on earth must truly be our own."
It's called American Exceptionalism and faith in God is a primary component. It's central to our national identity, but it's been under siege for decades. Lawsuits seek to ban crosses from hilltops, Christian flags from cemeteries and Christ from Christmas.
Why?
America has grown an entitlement culture that violates exceptionalist principles. In order to justify this system its advocates challenge the very idea of exceptionalism, and this effort requires discrediting the Christian faith that provides its moral underpinnings. The antagonism spawned in the universities, bled into politics and infected the press. The apparent goal is to delegitimize exceptionalism and Christian faith to enable secularists to supercede God as the ultimate authority.
A godless system has already been tried: it's called communism. The result is an elite that prospers while the rest of the population loses its freedom and becomes impoverished. Stalin killed millions trying to create a master class; Mao's Cultural Revolution did the same. This is less likely to happen when nations are tethered to God and not the whims of men. Christians, for whom God is the ultimate authority, are inconvenient for secularists who wish to usurp God's position for themselves.
Ever since that winter in Plymouth generations of exceptional people have passed down faith in God, freedom and an ethic that made America special. But these are being whittled away by intelligent people who are either clueless about the ramifications of what they're doing or they're deliberately trying to install humans and their ideas in the place of God.
Either way, no good can come of it.
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Chet, I always appreciate your perceptions and your blogs, but this one was "exceptional." Thanks for stating this so eloquently.
ReplyDeletegg
Chet,
ReplyDeleteI too very much enjoy your posts but I decidedly disagree with this one. There is no need to discredit the Christian faith in order to discredit American Exceptionalism, in fact, I'd argue that claiming that there is an American Exceptionalism discredits the Faith. No society founded on the backs of slaves or with a founding document that makes certain humans 3/5 of a person should be able to claim to be exceptionally Christian. When we talk about what was woven into the fabric of our country we have to talk about all of it. We can't talk about all of our postive exports to the world without talking about the negative things we've exported as well. And how can we ignore how we got this land in the first place?
In critiquing Communism you said, "The result is an elite that prospers while the rest of the population loses its freedom and becomes impoverished." Can not this criqitue be levied against the United States and our capitalist culture as well? Through much work, freedom has been restored, at least legally, but there are a great deal that find themselves impoverished in this system. I could go on, but basically I'm suggesting that American Exceptionalism would be a more legitimate idea, in my opinion, if we did not have the PLETHORA of scars that we have in our history. America is a great nation and I'm glad to be here, but I dont understand how a realistic and robust view of our history can support this idea of exceptionalism.