10 Truths About America's Christian Heritage

Coral Ridge Ministries
Dr. D. James Kennedy, Founder

From the 10 Truths Series
TRUTH # 8 - Foreign Nations Acknowledge Our Christian Roots and Heritage

While secularists and atheists in America may attempt to rewrite our history and deny our Christian heritage, they cannot erase from the record the observations of our Christian heritage that have been made by other nations and their leaders.

In the last century, the free world stood toe-to-toe against the threats of atheistic communist regimes. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot imposed their tyrannical governments on their peoples. When skeptics point to the sins of wayward Christianity, such as the Crusades and the Inquisition, they almost always ignore the fact that these atheistic communist regimes were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. The twentieth century closed as the bloodiest in the history of the world.

At the opening of the Cold War, America was seen by its Allies as the antithesis of Communist Russia’s oppressive despotism. The world saw the brilliance of America’s liberties shining against the darkness of a repressive and brutal Soviet regime. Furthermore, America was not only free, it was Christian. The rest of the world began to see the connection. In an address to the American people, General Carlos P. Romulo, president of the United Nations General Assembly from 1949 to 1950, declared:
Never forget, Americans, that yours is a spiritual country. Yes, I know you’re a practical people. Like others, I’ve marveled at your factories, your skyscrapers, and your arsenals. But underlying everything else is the fact that America began as a God-loving, God-fearing, God-worshipping people.

Likewise, the Honorable Charles Habib Malik, elected president of the 13th Session of the United Nations General Assembly and Ambassador to the United Nations from Lebanon, stated in 1958:
The good (in the United States) would never have come into being without the blessing and power of Jesus Christ.... Whoever tries to conceive the American word without taking full account of the suffering and love and salvation of Christ is only dreaming. I know how embarrassing this matter is to politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and cynics; but, whatever these honored men think, the irrefutable truth is that the soul of America is at its best and highest, Christian.

Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain and an essential ally during the Cold War, urged America to remain loyal to its biblical foundations. “If you accept freedom, you’ve got to have principles about the responsibility. You can’t do this without a biblical foundation,” she explained. She added:
Your Founding Fathers came over with that. They came over with the doctrines of the New Testament as well as the Old. They looked after one another, not only as a matter of necessity, but as a matter of duty to their God. There is no other country in the world which started that way.

These comments from objective foreign observers of America’s Christian identity are not idiosyncratic. They have been the pattern throughout our nation’s history.

Different Founding, Different Result
America’s founding was unique. In America’s first years as a constitutional republic, France underwent its own revolution—a revolution influenced by the so-called Enlightenment era philosophies. Unlike America’s revolution, this revolution sought to exalt men above God and to eliminate Christianity’s influence from government.

Such a turn of the national character in France did not come as a surprise. Nearly four decades before the onset of the French Revolution, America’s Founding Fathers witnessed the deterioration of morals plaguing an increasingly atheistic Europe. In an effort to lure prospective immigrants to America’s shores, Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet in 1754 aimed at Europe’s Christian families.
[B]ad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents. To this may be truly added, that serious religion, under its various denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel.

“[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” —George Washington

Indeed, the atheistic philosophies feared by the Founders ultimately led France into one of the bloodiest and most shameful periods in its history. Starting in the year the U.S. Constitution was ratified, 1789, the French Revolution brought a regime to power in France which instituted a program of de-Christianization, imposing death sentences on clergymen, closing churches, destroying religious monuments, and outlawing public worship and religious education. The Christian Gregorian calendar was replaced with the French Republican calendar, which imposed a 10-day week and eliminated the Sabbath. Perhaps the greatest display of this regime’s arrogant hostility toward Christian religion came when the goddess “Reason” was enthroned inside Notre Dame Cathedral.

America’s Founders were utterly appalled by France’s attempt to impose state-sanctioned atheism. In the shadow of the French Revolution, George Washington delivered his Farewell Address in 1796. Pleading with future generations to avoid the disastrous consequences that inevitably accompany atheistic regimes, Washington warned, “[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Likewise, in 1798, Alexander Hamilton condemned the “disgusting spectacle of the French Revolution.” Hamilton wrote, “The attempt by the rulers of a nation to destroy all religious opinion, and to pervert a whole nation to atheism, is a phenomenon of profligacy [wickedness].”

Three Frenchmen Agree
Just decades after France’s atheistic revolution failed, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited America, traveling extensively and writing his observations in Democracy in America. As a Frenchman, de Tocqueville had a unique perspective on the relation between Christian religion and liberty in American life.
Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention…. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country… The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.

The French revolutionary regime attempted to impose its atheistic ideology as a means to become an “enlightened” nation, but Tocqueville commented that the Christian faith—not atheistic secularism—had helped America become “the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.”

In his book, A Moral and Political Sketch of the United States, French historian Achille Murat likewise stated,
There is no country in which the people are so religious as in the United States; to the eyes of a foreigner they even appear to be too much so…. [But] while a death-struggle is waging in Europe…it is curious to observe the tranquility which prevails in the United States.

Gustave de Beaumont, another French historian, wrote:
Religion in America is not only a moral institution but also a political institution. All of the American constitutions exhort the citizens to practice religious worship as a safeguard both to good morals and to public liberties. In the United States, the law is never atheistic....

Even the British feminist writer of the same time period, Harriet Martineau, conceded, “The institutions in America are, as I have said, planted down deep into Christianity.” Though Martineau, a Unitarian, called the Christian faith a “monstrous superstition,” she marveled at the success and prosperity of America, which she labeled “the most glorious temple of society that has ever yet been reared.”

Throughout America’s history, foreign observers have recognized that America’s successes have come because of its unique allegiance to the God of the Bible. Without that allegiance, America cannot expect to retain either the blessings of freedom or the prosperity that it now enjoys.