10 Truths About Christians And Politics

Coral Ridge Ministries
Dr. D. James Kennedy, Founder

From the 10 Truths Series
TRUTH #5 - America Was Built by Biblically Literate Citizens

He is the most influential Founder you’ve never heard of—and he was typical of his generation. Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) was, at his death, one of the three most well-known and well-regarded Founding Fathers, along with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Today, however, you will not find him in high school American history textbooks. Rush believed that “patriotism is both a moral and a religious duty.”

He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and urged Thomas Paine to publish Common Sense, providing him with the title. He served in the Continental Congress and was physician general of the Continental Army. At his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “. . . a better man than Rush could not have left us, more benevolent, more learned, of finer genius, or more honest.”

Author John Sanderson wrote of Rush in 1823:
In all the periods of his life, he was remarkable for his attention to religious duties and his reverence for the Holy Scriptures. He urges, in all his writings, the excellency of the Christian faith and its happy influence upon the social habits of the country.

Seminary-Trained Declaration Signers
Rush, who helped launch the American Sunday School movement and the Bible Society of Philadelphia, was not alone among America’s founders in his religious convictions. Historian David Barton reports that almost half of the signers of the Declaration (24 out of 56) held what today would be considered seminary or Bible school degrees. Rush’s life shows in microcosm what is sometimes denied and often overlooked: America began as an enterprise of Christian religious liberty and is the product of deeply committed and biblically literate Christian citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who toured our nation in the early 1830s, wrote in Democracy in America, “It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo- American society.”

Daniel Webster, a nineteenth century statesman who served as a Congressman, a Senator from Massachusetts, and as U.S. Secretary of State, looked back at America’s origins in an 1820 speech commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival:
Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.

Sermons: More Powerful Than TV
The men who drafted our nation’s founding documents and fought the American War for Independence were products of a 150-year-old colonial culture that was self-consciously Christian.

Nowhere was this more evident than in New England, where the primary vehicle for the inculcation of values—spiritual, moral, and political—was the Sunday sermon. In an age without iPods, cable television, news-talk radio, or the Internet, there was precious little to compete with sermons, which were delivered twice on Sunday and sometimes once during the week. According to historian Harry Stout, New England sermons were “so powerful in shaping cultural values, meanings, and a sense of corporate purpose that even television pales in comparison.”

The average weekly churchgoer, he writes, heard close to 7,000 sermons in a lifetime, representing about “fifteen thousand hours of concentrated listening.” These sermons addressed nearly every question and area of life—including politics.

Beginning in 1634, election-day sermons—which focused on civic duty and the mission of New England—were preached at the outset of the civil year to a joint assembly of ministers and civil magistrates. These annual sermons, which were printed and distributed, served to direct the public mind to the demands of God’s Word and to remind leaders of New England’s unique mission—its “errand into the wilderness.”

In a 1677 election-day sermon, Puritan minister Increase Mather told his audience:
It was love to God and to Jesus Christ which brought our fathers into this wilderness. . . . There never was a generation that did so perfectly shake off the dust of Babylon, both as to ecclesiastical and civil constitution, as the first generation of Christians that came into this land for the gospel’s sake.

The original spark for that errand across the Atlantic came from the Reformation and the reformer John Calvin (1509-1564). The influence of Calvin was so pronounced that nineteenth century historian George Bancroft called him “the father of America.” Colonial leaders embraced Calvin’s ideas about resistance to tyranny and the Presbyterian system of church government, which he articulated from Scripture and which offered colonists a laboratory for self-government.

Reformation ideas were propagated through the Geneva Bible, which was first published in 1560 and was widely used by the Pilgrims and Puritans. Just as with some of the study Bibles of today, it had marginal commentaries that were the work of Reformation scholars who had been driven from England by Bloody Mary and King James I. Those sidebar notes so provoked King James’ ire that he commissioned his own official version, the King James Bible, which duly had all “seditious” commentary, as he called it, removed.

Falling back to an earlier era, James embraced the Greco-Roman theory of the “divine right of kings,” which held that the monarch was accountable only to God for his actions. It also made the claim that total obedience was due the king by his subjects on all matters, both civil and ecclesiastical. This doctrine would have served as an effective prop to James’ rule, but it was severely undermined by the Geneva Bible, which proved to be so popular with his subjects that it went through 144 editions between 1560 and 1644. One passage that James no doubt would have found offensive was the note on Exodus 1:9, stating that the Hebrew midwives acted properly in disregarding the command of Egypt’s king to kill newborn male Hebrew babies. Widely distributed and uncompromising in its application of Scripture to the civic arena, the Geneva Bible, as Dr. Marshall Foster, founder and president of the Mayflower Institute, writes, “began the unstoppable march to liberty in England, Scotland, and America.”

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