Is America a Christian Nation?

Is America a Christian nation?

All but two of the first 108 universities founded in America were Christian. Of those schools, Harvard was founded first and listed this as Rule Number One in its student handbook: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments."

U.S. President Harry Truman wrote to Pope Pius XII in 1947, saying, “This is a Christian nation.”

“He certainly did not mean that the United States has an official or legally-preferred religion or church,” said Carl Pearlston, writing in 2001. Pearlston, an attorney, a former professor of Constitutional Law and a Jewish conservative, says Truman didn’t mean to slight adherents of non-Christian religions, “But he certainly did mean to recognize that this nation, its institutions and laws, was founded on Biblical principles basic to Christianity and to Judaism from which it flowed.”

Truman also said, “The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and Saint Matthew, from Isaiah and Saint Paul…If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.”

Pearlston offers these quotations:

Woodrow Wilson said, “A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.... America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the tenets of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.”

In 1811, New York Chief Justice James Kent said: “...whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government...We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity...Christianity in its enlarged sense, as a religion revealed and taught in the Bible, is part and parcel of the law of the land....”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story said in 1829, “There never has been a period of history, in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.”

Pearlston asked in 2001, “Can America still be called a Christian nation?” He replied, “It is certainly a more religiously pluralistic and diverse society than it was during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. There are increasing numbers of non-Christians immigrating to this country….We live, not under a Christian government, but in a nation where all are free to practice their particular religion, in accommodation with other religions, and in accordance with the basic principles of the nation, which are Christian in origin. It is in that sense that America may properly be referred to as a Christian nation.”

A recent study found a decline in the percentage of Christians in the U.S. Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. In 2008, “Christians” reportedly comprised 76 percent of U.S. adults, compared to about 77 percent in 2001 and about 86 percent in 1990.

President Barack Obama stated during an April 2009 press conference in Turkey, “One of the great strengths of the United States is – although, as I mentioned, we have a very large Christian population – we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Jewish Nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

President Obama was right, in the sense that, as Pearlston states, America has no “official or legally-preferred religion or church.” But, 76 percent of Americans still identify with “Christian culture,” and America was founded on Christian principles. I believe our Founding Fathers envisioned a government that would promote and encourage Christianity. True Christians know that sin and the worship of false gods will destroy a nation, but “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12).

Father's Day - Not Easy for Everyone

Father’s Day is not an easy occasion for everyone, but it’s an important day – a time to honor living fathers and fathers who have passed on.

My wife, Carol, who was born in Oakland, California, remembers seeing her father only twice. Carol’s mother left her marriage and took Carol, who was then one and one-half years old, to her Pennsylvania homeland. Carol was seven or eight and staying one night at her maternal grandparents’ house when a man knocked on their door.

Carol, sitting at a kitchen table when her grandmother opened that door, saw the man in the darkness but didn’t recognize him. Her grandmother stepped outside to talk. When she reentered, she told Carol, “That was your father.”

Carol didn’t see him again until she was a college student in Greenville, S.C. After graduating from high school, she asked her mother to locate her father. Carol mailed one of her graduation pictures to him (he lived in New Jersey), and they arranged to meet in Greenville in the fall. He arrived with his second wife, their five children and a German Shepherd dog. Carol had mixed feelings about their meeting and never communicated again with her father. She keeps a small, framed picture of him sitting on the mantel in our home. The photo – taken before he and Carol’s mother separated – shows her father in his army uniform.

Though our children (two adult daughters) treat me royally on Father’s Day, and Carol enjoys seeing me in good relationship with our offspring, I am aware on each Father’s Day that Carol knows what it’s like “to grow up without a father in the home.”

The Psalmist comforts “the Carols of this world” and all of us with these words: “Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rides upon the heavens by his name JAH (the LORD), and rejoice before him. A father of the fatherless, and a judge (a defender) of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God sets the solitary in families: he brings out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land” (Psalm 68:4-6).

Psalm 27:10 offers these words: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.”

The writer of Hebrews 13:5 tells us that God has promised, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (KJV). A modern version translates that verse this way: “I will not give you up or desert you.”

No matter how well or how poorly our parents fill or filled their roles, we should honor (respect) our parents because God asks us to do so. Respecting parents is tied closely with respecting God and people placed in authority over us.

Augustine asked, “If anyone fails to honor his parents, is there anyone he will spare?”

The fifth of God’s Ten Commandments contains a promise along with its directive: “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee” (Exodus 20:12).

I talked years ago with a teenager whom I’ll call “Dan.” Dan’s parents left him with his maternal grandmother when he was a baby, and she, with small income, was raising him. Dan harbored mixed feelings toward his father, whom he infrequently saw. I pointed out that his father “brought him into the world” and though he might not be a good father, the man Dan knew as his father “was” his father. Dan was an excellent athlete, and I mentioned that he probably inherited his physical coordination from his dad, who participated in sports as a young man. I wanted Dan to find some way – even a small way – to respect his father and avoid self-destructive tendencies spawned from father-child conflict.

Doug, who worked as a personnel director, once told me that his father served as a pastor. One of Doug’s childhood jobs was to polish his dad’s shoes each Saturday night and get them ready for Sunday morning. One week, his dad punished Doug for something Doug had no part in. His dad later realized he’d wrongfully punished Doug, but he said nothing. Saturday night came, and as Doug picked up one of his dad’s shoes, he found an apology note from his dad placed inside that shoe. Doug smiled as he told me that story. I’m sure he would have preferred to hear words from his father’s lips, but the note in the shoe was his father’s “way.”

Father’s Day is not an easy occasion for everyone, but it is an important day.

Fatalism or Free Will?

I believe God gives us “free will,” allowing us to choose many of the paths we take.

For centuries, Christians have debated extreme “predestination” versus “free will.”

A story goes that an older Christian believed all that happened in his life was “predestined” or “meant to be.” He rose from bed one morning, walked to his home’s staircase and fell down a long flight of steps. Hurting, he got up, looked at the staircase and said, “I’m glad that’s over."

Non-Christians also talk about “destiny.” Someone said destiny may be seen either as a fixed sequence of events that is inevitable or that an individual chooses his destiny by selecting various paths throughout his life.

I’ve heard of soldiers who say a man won’t die in battle until a “bullet has his name on it” or “until his number is up.”

Here is an old Arab tale about “destiny”:

A merchant sent his servant to market. The servant returned trembling and said, “Master, just now in the crowded marketplace I was jostled by someone, and I turned and saw it was Death that jostled me. Death looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Please, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Damascus and there Death will not find me.”

The merchant lent him a horse, and the servant rode as fast as the horse could gallop. The merchant then went to the marketplace, saw Death standing in the crowd and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”

“That was not a threatening gesture,” Death said. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him here, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Damascus.”

As a child in 1956, I heard the song “Que Sera, Sera,” meaning (in French and in several “romance languages”) “Whatever Will Be, Will Be.” Singer Doris Day first recorded these lyrics to that song’s first verse:

“When I was just a little girl / I asked my mother what will I be / Will I be pretty, will I be rich / Here’s what she said to me / (chorus): Que sera, sera / Whatever will be, will be / The future’s not ours to see / Que sera, sera / What will be will be.”

The lilting melody of “Que Sera, Sera” seemed comforting to me in 1956. That song’s message seemed to be “Relax; many things – maybe all things – are beyond your control.” While some people may find solace in that song, there is also an inherent fatalism in its message.

French novelist Alphonse Karr (1808-90) is credited with saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Karr’s quote seems to convey that the more we change things, the more we tend to live out patterns that do not change. There seems to be a bit of “rearranging the chairs on the Titanic” flavor in that quotation.

In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1643), God “freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass.”

Someone asked me, “If God knows who will be saved and who won’t, how do people have ‘free will’ to choose their destinies?”

That’s a hard question, but I believe God’s foreknowledge of how things will turn out does not exclude the free will he gives to each of us. We can only partially understand the “mind of God” – “his ways are higher than our ways” – so we trust the character of God, who is good, loving, just and merciful.

The Lord is longsuffering (patient), “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

Christians differ over how much control each person has over his own life. Someone said that if human responsibility is overemphasized, Christianity turns into legalism, without an appreciation for God’s power acting in lives. If God’s responsibility is overemphasized, Christianity turns into fatalism, losing the emphasis on obedience to God and service to others.

I believe God gives us “free will.” Let’s decide to follow Christ, block out worldly, fatalistic thoughts and make daily God-honoring choices.

“But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve...But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord" (Joshua 24:15 (NIV).

John Harper's Last Convert

Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died Sunday, May 31, 2009.

She was just over two months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the icy North Atlantic, according to AP reporters Meera Selva and Jill Lawless. Dean, 97, died in her sleep “where she had lived – in Southampton, England, the city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.”

The Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank within three hours. Dean was one of 706 people – mostly women and children – who survived. Her 2-year-old brother and her mother also survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.

John Harper also died that night, and Mark Dever tells this awesome story about him in a chapter of “The Gospel and Personal Evangelism” (Reference: Moody Adams, “The Titanic’s Last Hero: Story About John Harper,” Columbia, S.C.: Olive Press, 1997, 24-25):

John Harper was born into a Christian home in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1872. At about 14 years of age, he became a Christian and began to tell others about Christ. At 17, he began to preach, going down streets of his village and pouring out his soul in pleading for men to be reconciled to God.

After five or six years of preaching on street corners and working in a mill during the day, Harper was taken in by the Rev. E. A. Carter of Baptist Pioneer Mission in London. This set Harper free to devote his whole time and energy to evangelism.

In September 1896, Harper started his own church with 25 members. It numbered over 500 when he left 13 years later. During this time, he was both married and widowed. Before he lost his wife, he was blessed with a beautiful daughter named Nana.

Harper almost drowned several times. When he was two-and-a-half years old, he fell into a well but was resuscitated by his mother. At the age of 26, he was swept out to sea by a reverse current and barely survived. And at 32, he faced death on a leaking ship in the Mediterranean.

While pastoring his church in London, Harper continued his fervent evangelism. The Moody Church in Chicago asked him to come to America for meetings. Those meetings went well, and a few years later, Moody Church asked him to return. Harper boarded a ship – the “Titanic” – with a second-class ticket at Southampton, England, for the voyage to America.

Harper’s wife had died just a few years before, and he had with him his only child, Nana, age six. What happened after this is known mainly from two sources. One source is Nana, who died in 1986 at the age of 80. She remembered being woken up by her father a few nights into their journey. It was about midnight, and he said their ship had struck an iceberg. Harper told Nana that another ship was almost there to rescue them, but, as a precaution, he was going to put her in a lifeboat with an older cousin, who had accompanied them. As for Harper, he would wait for the other ship. Nana and her cousin were saved.

An unidentified Scotsman is reportedly the only other source of information concerning Harper’s last earthly actions. Here is that account:

In a prayer meeting in Hamilton, Ontario, some months or years after the Titanic sank, a young Scotsman stood up and in tears told this unusual story of how he was converted.

He said he was on the Titanic the night it struck the iceberg. He had clung to a piece of floating debris in the freezing waters.

“Suddenly,” he said, “a wave brought a man near – John Harper. He, too, was holding a piece of wreckage.

“He called out, ‘Man, are you saved?’

“‘No, I am not,’ I replied.

“He shouted back, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.’

“The waves bore (Harper) away, but a little later, he was washed back beside me again.

“‘Are you saved now?’ he called out.

“‘No,’ I answered.

“‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,’ Harper said.

“Then losing his hold on the wood, (Harper) sank. And there, alone in the night with two miles of water under me, I trusted Christ as my saviour. I am John Harper’s last convert.”