With Thanksgiving just a couple days away, let’s review a bit of history about our country’s founding with this illuminating video from David Wood (Acts 17 Apologetics) ~
During the presentation, Wood mentions John Adams’ rather famous declaration ~
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
What our second president and the other founders understood from history – as well as from personal experience – unchecked freedom eventually leads to chaos. And when society is destabilized, people will submit to whomever can restore order, thus surrendering their freedom. Eric Hoffer put it like this ~
“When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom.”
The only answer to this perennial dilemma is that self-governance requires self-control; living freely – but under God’s law ~
“If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.” ~ William Penn
The United States is a Christian nation because the alternative is tyranny. When we’re no longer sustained by Christian teachings and values, we’ll no longer be one.
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Updated: 11-21-16
Related:
American Freedom was Founded on Knowledge of Man’s Fallenness ~ An excellent article from Eric Metaxas further illustrates the founders’ genius in creating our Constitutional Republic ~
In the day of our nation’s birth the idea of self- government was so new as to be staggering. All of the great nations of Europe had been ruled by monarchs since time immemorial. For many the idea of detaching from something that had been stable and continuous for many centuries seemed like uncharted lunacy. It was a decidedly radical notion, if not a preposterous one. [..]
The ordered freedom given to us by the founders was meant to enable the people to govern themselves. […]
Freedom is Unsustainable Without the Virtues that Spring from Faith.
So the founders understood that freedom and religion went hand in hand, that freedom must have religion and religion must have freedom. One without the other was in fact neither. Freedom without religion would devolve into license or end in tyranny; and religion without freedom would really be only another expression of tyranny.
