Rethinking America: What Made It Great?

In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States, and stated that he had found the secret of American greatness and strength. It was not in the textile mills, the shipyards, anything we had built, in fact, he didn't even mention our precious founding documents, although those documents permitted the activity that de Tocqueville discovered.

He found that America's greatness lay in the fiery preaching of the Gospel in America's churches. Simplicity of life, humbleness of mind, and a pervading sense of the presence of Almighty God and the accountability of His creation, mankind, to obedience to the faith, gave America her character and her strength.

Once the land was noted for her many churches, preaching the Bible as truth. We still have churches, but what are they preaching? Tolerance? Diversity? Something bland and inoffensive? The Gospel is offensive to sinners. All men are born sinners until they are reborn, so says our Gospel. Forgiveness of sins, absolution from guilt, accountability to the Creator of the Universe, keeps man from becoming proud, self-sufficient, rebellious toward God to the point of denying Him and desecrating His standards by flaunting man's achievements and sinfulness.

Before we try to rebuild America, or the Twin Towers site, perhaps we should first rethink America.

Isn't it time to reject the theories of the evolutionist, the babble of the secular humanists who offer no hope, and the globalists with their planetary village?

Americans aren't educated in spite of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on education by the federal government. Government itself dictates education, and the people have become stupid. That may be the point of government education, but it is not the goal of education itself. It should not be the goal of parents to bring up blathering nitwit children.

Americans are a particularly proud people, but God says that pride goes before destruction. Have we seen the beginning of the humiliation of America because of pride? Let the evidence speak for itself.

A once-honest people who could name its criminals ... Capone, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde ... now have overcrowded prisons and folks who could care less about human life, whether they abort it before birth or shoot a teen/adult in a driveby. We've become a people with "relative" morality, which is no morality at all. And we're told these miscreants had a bad childhood. If they weren't told about God and His standards, imbued with a sense of personal responsibility and the relationship of cause and effect, they had a bad childhood. That applies whether they grew up in the ghetto or in an upper middle class home without values.

We were able to put fifty thousand workers in twin towers but we cannot fill a church on Sunday morning. We could draw fifty or sixty thousand to a ballgame, but couldn't get the family together around the dinner table.

We were founded on Christian principles, we were settled by Bible-believing Puritans and Pilgrims, we were established as a nation by God-fearing men who believed in the liberty that is proclaimed by our religion: ours was the liberty to be what God wants, not license to do as everyone pleases. We've forgotten what was once our original understanding of liberty.

We can't haul people to church at sword's point or baptize them at the point of a gun. That doesn't make character, it makes intimidated subjects. Christianity is a religion of freedom, of liberty, but within the boundaries of the "thou shalt nots" set down by the Almighty for our good.

American greatness was built on solid character, universities established for the education of students of theology (Harvard, Yale and Princeton weren't always wildly liberal, they were chiefly seminaries), and a belief in our founding documents. We were to permit others to worship as they pleased without harassment, but we were also to proclaim the Gospel at every opportunity in the faith that many would hear and understand.

Now we build monuments to man's achievements. We build towers, automobiles, resorts, great theaters, mansions, amusement parks and stadiums. We build, but to the glory of man and not to the glory of God, whose Name we desecrate.

To be sure, Christianity has suffered dark moments at the hands of politically-minded men who hid behind religious fervor. There were the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials on our own soil. But our faith also produced St. Augustine, John Newton, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, David Livingstone and D. L. Moody. One Supreme Court, in the 19th century, proclaimed that the United States is a Christian nation.

At present, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Supreme Court, we're trying to prove it is not Christian. The trash on media, the burgeoning of topheavy, oppressive government and the moral decline (particularly in women's liberties to do as they please from sexual freedom to active combat roles in war) all testify to the fact that if we were once a Christian nation, we no longer can claim to be such.

Why would what once made us a great nation ... belief in the Bible and our accountability to God ... not make us great once again? It depends on whether one believes that man is accountable only to himself (humanism) that produces a vacuous sense of morality and endless tributes to self, or whether one believes man is created in God's image.

The churches are always full after a great disaster. Man's need for God was put there by God so that we would always have a great void until we came to rest in Him. But after we resign ourselves to the fact of tragedy, the churches are seldom full. That isn't Christianity ... it is bombshelter religion.

The Bible as God's written word was what was once preached from America's pulpits. Now we hear trivia. It is time to speak of sin and judgment lest they come upon us unawares, as did the events of September 11, 2001. It is time to speak of redemption and why we need it, every one, lest we step off into eternity suddenly and without remission of sins.

Dorothy Anne Seese was born in Southern California where she obtained her degree in political science. For the past forty years, she has made her home in Arizona where her primary career was a business systems analyst. Dottie is now retired and makes her home in an Arizona retirement city. She is the editor of The Flagship Log. Her e-mail address is dottie@politicalusa.com.

actually, that's not really a precise analysis of de Tocqueville. While it's true that he said that america was a great nation because it was a good nation, and that if it ever ceased to be good it would also cease to be great....

Well, actually, he didn't say that America was great because she was 'good' either....That was someone else whose words have been attributed to Tocqueville so often that we find leaders using them as authentic Tocqueville.

It is clear, however, that Tocqueville recognized the roots of American liberty as being firmly grounded in the spirit of liberty inherent in a people deeply influenced by their religious beliefs.

If we don't like Tocqueville's analysis, then perhaps an even earlier passage from Edmund Burke's 1775 Speech to the British Parliament on "Conciliation with the Colonies" might say it as clearly:

"In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole....Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness....

"Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it....This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of libety, is predominant in most of the northern provinces....and these people of the southern colonies ar much more strongly and with a higher and more stubborn spirit attached to liberty than those to the northward...."

This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of libety, is predominant in most of the northern provinces....and these people of the southern colonies ar much more strongly and with a higher and more stubborn spirit attached to liberty than those to the northward...."

Sorry! Didn't proof carefully. Please correct the above passage, with the following correction of typos:

This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces....and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly and with a higher and more stubborn spirit attached to liberty than those to the northward...."

What your father and those students did wasn't wrong. Your father didn't act as a teacher (i.e. state official) because the prayer meeting was before school and that meeting wasn't mandatory. In my eyes those parents who complained are victims of that widespread misconception that prayer (and religion) in school is unconstituational. Go ask some people on the street if prayer in school is allowed and I'm pretty shure most of them will say no. But that's wrong, only state mandated religion is verboten. If that problem still persists just print that page from the ACLU website and hand it out to those parents and the principal. That should silence them at once and it shouldn't even be necessary to involve the ACLU (I don't know why they didn't answer, maybe there was some asshole on the phone, perhaps they also need a copy of that page from their own website ;-).

Those religious 'trappings' were removed because leaving them there would mean that the state is supporting a religion (of course if those trappings were some Wiccan symbols or some Sure from the Qur'an they would also have been removed). I'm sure it's no problem to put some religous trappings on your workplace (cubicle, desk, etc.) and they shouldn't be more unconstitutional than the photograph of your wife/husband/children you put there too. You are also allowed to wear religious symbols and in that case people can see that it is your opinion but if those symbols cannot be linked to a particular person (because they are in the lobby or elevator) it is automatically the 'opinion' of the state and that's not allowed because a secular state should be neutral to religion.
Nativity displays are religious in nature because it depicts the birth of Jesus but that should be obvious. The tree isn't really part of the original Christmas canon but it's a rather new invention. Of course one can say it's only displayed on Christmas and nitpick that it's therefore a religious symbol but I have no problems with that. A tree is a neutral object and with religiously neutral decoration it shouldn't be a big problem.

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