The American Founders established the Bible in the 1600s as the principal text in public education, believing that virtue in its citizenry is the key to sustainable freedom. By contending that self-governance requires integrity and a high moral standard, the Founders set Scripture as the foundation for righteous discernment.
By 1700, religious dissent brought structure to the major Christian groups: Anglicans in Virginia, Puritans in New England, Catholics in Maryland, and Quakers in Pennsylvania. These religiously strong communities laid the spiritual foundation that influenced American liberty, where Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and others could freely organize and worship.
The First Great Awakening [1730s-1740s] and the Second Great Awakening [1790s-1840s] brought revival, controversy, and mass movements – in a sense, early America’s version of culture wars. This provides clarity that the struggle between secularism and American Christendom for ideological supremacy and control in contemporary America simply determines the moral direction for the upcoming Gen Z and Gen Alpha generations.
Benjamin F. Morris [1810-1867] showed in his magnum opus The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States that the persecution of the Puritans in England for non-conformity and dissent from Anglicanism were but the preparatory ordeals for qualifying Christian men for the work of establishing civil institutions on the American continent.
The 17th and 18th century Biblically based culture created a social norm where a man’s promise or spoken agreement was considered as binding as a written contract. One’s reputation, character, and honor were measured by whether they kept their word. A person was legally, morally, and socially obligated without requiring written documentation. Early American education focused on moral character in its youth based on Scripture:
• Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. 36 Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt. [Leviticus 19:35-36; NIV]
• The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him. [Proverbs 11:1; NIV]
• Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike an abomination to the Lord. [Proverbs 20:10; ESV]
Jewish Hebrew scholar Michael V. Fox adds that “Fear of God in conscience is the only thing that can keep one honest, doing right when no one is looking.” And Thomas Watson [c. 1620-1686], the English Nonconformist Puritan preacher put it thus: “A godly man dares not sin secretly. He knows that God sees in secret.”
Our subtlety cannot deceive God, so our secrecy cannot exclude Him.
Unfortunately, American Christendom’s abandonment of the public square in the 20th century left secular atheism to fill the vacuum and ever since become the nation’s dominant religion. The demise reached its crescendo during the Obama years, when in 2016, following the murder of 14 innocent people by Muslim terrorists in San Bernardino, CA, the syncretistic president placed a veil over militant Jihadist barbarity in his keynote address before the Christian National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, by saying:
“I can’t imagine a clearer expression of Jesus’ teachings. I can’t imagine a better expression of the peaceful spirit of Islam than when a Muslim father filled with fear drew from the example of a Baptist preacher and a Jewish rabbi to teach his children what God demands.”
The former president’s subterfuge, theological heresy, and performance were an abomination before a Holy God, as Exodus 20:2-3 clearly shows: “I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.”
Sadly, King Charles pulled the same froth from the syncretistic cauldron in his Easter Sunday message last week. “The love He [Jesus Christ] showed when he walked the Earth reflected the Jewish ethic of caring for the stranger and those in need, a deep human instinct echoed in Islam and other religious traditions and in the hearts of all who seek the good of others.”1
| Outraged, Dr. Gavin Ashenden [born 1954; D.Phil.], who served Queen Elizabeth II as an Honorary Chaplain from 2008 to 2017, responded to the King’s dappled multifaith Easter message and praise of Islam: “Nobody had to say that all religions are true and equal when they’re not. We have people who are not Christian, not English, not British flooding into our country to the extent that … in about 2050 or 2060, white Indigenous people will be a minority. So, in other words, this is a recipe for civil disorderBy presenting this entirely fallacious, misleading, untrue picture of the relativism of religions [syncretism], and of the accommodation of Islam, [as] ‘a peace-loving religion that cares for the needy’ … Before we can determine the prognosis, we have to get the diagnosis right, and what King Charles has done in the name of wishing people a Happy Easter is to use his platform to confuse and to lock us into a diagnosis that is untrue and dangerous. “I’m afraid you could say the king has committed treason against his people. Has he done it knowingly? Is he culpable? I have no idea.”2 America should take to heart that “Thou shall have no other gods before Me” [Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:7]. This is the core principle that underlies everything else in the Bible and in life. The First Commandment is crucial because it establishes that Jehovah3 alone is God – the source of truth, the protector of freedom, the foundation of covenant, the guardian of human dignity, and the only secure basis for all life, morality, and society. Praise be to God that Gideons and Rahabs have begun to stand … and not just in America. David Lane American Renewal Project 1. www.royal.uk/news-and-activity/2025-04-17/a-message-from-the-king-to-mark-easter 2. x.com/jimfergusonuk/status/1914214297619595274?s=42 3. To our many Jewish friends following American Renewal Project’s weekly opinion pieces, the New International Version of the Bible, and other versions, translate the Hebrew tetragrammaton YHWH as LORD. This revealed name of God [Exodus 3:12-18; 6:1-8] describes his eternal existence and causative essence. Modern scholars transcribe the name Yahweh, although Jewish people have long considered the name too sacred to pronounce or attempt to transliterate. Instead, they substitute Adonai in all recitations to avoid the remotest possibility of blasphemy. |
