THE SEARCH BEGINS

Night had fallen on the small New England harbor, where fishing boats rocked gently at anchor. In a nearby chapel a gathering of some two hundred people was illuminated by electric candles, which glowed softly against the wood paneling. The speaker came quickly to the heart of his message: “This nation was founded by God with a special calling. The people who first came here knew that they were being led here by the Lord Jesus Christ, to found a nation where men, women, and children were to live in obedience to him. . . . This was truly to be one nation under God.”

The speaker paused. “The reason, I believe, that we Americans are in such trouble today is that we have forgotten this. We’ve rejected it. In fact, we’ve become quite cynical about it. We, as a people, have thrown away our Christian heritage.”

It was a strong statement; would he be able to back it up? One listener wondered what exactly our Christian heritage was—and had wondered it before: four years before, to be exact. The listener was David Manuel, who, while an editor at a major New York publishing house, had discovered to his astonishment that God was real. And not only was God real, but He loved David beyond all human comprehension and had been waiting all of David’s life for him to realize it. The discovery turned David’s world upside down. Not long after, he felt that God wanted him to use whatever writing or editing ability he had in the service of His Kingdom. David had several book projects in mind, one of which was to trace the spiritual legacy of our nation’s founders. But that idea had lain dormant until this night; the speaker was now reopening the file.

The speaker was Peter Marshall, who had grown up in rebellion against the spiritual legacy of two famous Christian parents: the late Chaplain of the Senate, also named Peter, and his author-wife, Catherine. Peter had given up this rebellion in 1961, when he, too, entered into a personal relationship with God and before long had committed his life to serving a living, risen Savior. This service took him into the ministry and a ten-year pastorate in a small church on Cape Cod, after which he would become a wide-ranging national speaker.

That night, on the eve of the first National Day of Prayer to be called in modern memory, what made the nation’s need even more compelling to Peter was the realization of how much God’s hand had played a part not only in America’s founding, but, indeed, in its very discovery.

“Here’s what Christopher Columbus himself said about why he came to the Americas.” Peter began to read a few translated excerpts from an obscure volume of Columbus’s which had never previously appeared in English.

It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel his hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scriptures. . . .

I am a most unworthy sinner, but I have cried out to the Lord for grace and mercy, and they have covered me completely. I have found the sweetest consolation since I made it my whole purpose to enjoy His marvelous presence. For the execution of the journey to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied. . . .

No one should fear to undertake any task in the name of our Savior, if it is just and if the intention is purely for His holy service. The working out of all things has been assigned to each person by our Lord, but it all happens according to His sovereign will, even though He gives advice. He lacks nothing that it is in the power of men to give Him. Oh, what a gracious Lord, who desires that people should perform for Him those things for which He holds Himself responsible! Day and night, moment by moment, everyone should express their most devoted gratitude to Him.1

Stunned amazement swept through the audience. Did Columbus really think that way? All we had ever read or been taught indicated that Columbus had discovered the New World by accident while seeking a trade route to the Indies. No mention had ever been made of his faith, let alone that he felt he had been given his life’s mission directly by God. Nor had we any idea of what we would later discover—that he felt called to bear the Light of Christ to undiscovered lands in fulfillment of prophetic passages in the Bible and that he knew he had been guided by the Holy Spirit every league of the way.

Moreover, this was not the wishful thinking of some overly enthusiastic Christian. These were Columbus’s own words—words that few Americans had ever read. To David, seated in the audience, the impact of this revelation was staggering. For it suddenly occurred to him: What if God had conceived a special plan for America?

What if Columbus’s discovery had not been accidental at all? What if it was merely the opening curtain of an extraordinary drama? Hadn’t Peter just referred to the first settlers as having been called by God to found a new nation based on the centrality of the Christian faith and God’s Word?

Did God have a plan for America? Like all who have discovered the reality of the living Christ, we knew that God had a plan for each individual’s life—a plan that could, with spiritual effort, be discerned and followed.

What if he dealt with whole nations in the same way?

The Bible said He did—at least once. It reveals that the Jews were His chosen people, and that He had told them that if they would obey His commandments, He would bless them as a nation, not just individually. The book of Deuteronomy was explicit:

For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. . . . it is because the LORD loves you, and is keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

Deuteronomy 7:6–9

Throughout their history, as long as the Israelites kept their end of that covenant, God blessed them. Yet almost as soon as God did so, they would turn away from Him, often in less than a generation. Yet, because He loved them He would not wash His hands of them, no matter how sorely they tried Him. All too often, however, they left Him no choice but to lift His grace and allow drought or flood or pestilence, or war or bondage or persecution, to turn His people back to Him.

Some modern Christians believe that this idea of a corporate covenant relationship with God ceased with the coming of Jesus Christ. They feel that, with the advent of Christianity, God replaced His covenant with Israel with the Church and that God is no longer especially interested in any physical entity called Israel. They believe that humankind’s relationship with God is now simply a spiritual matter.

But what if God’s point of view had never changed? What if, in addition to the personal relationship with the individual through Jesus Christ, God continued to deal with nations corporately, as He had throughout Old Testament history? What if, in particular, He had a plan for those He would bring to America, a plan that saw this continent as the stage for a new act in the drama of humankind’s redemption?

Could it be that we Americans, as a people, had been given a mission by almighty God? Were we meant to be “a beacon of hope,” as Lincoln declared, or a “Light to lighten the Gentiles,” to put it in Scriptural terms? What if God had called us to demonstrate to the world that if His children put into practice the Biblical principles of self-government, they could indeed create a society of liberty and justice for all? And was our vast divergence from this mission, after such a promising beginning, the reason why we now seemed to be sliding into a morass of moral decay, with our world growing darker by the moment?

The concept seemed nothing short of fantastic. But as David and Peter talked it over after the meeting that night, it began to take on a semblance of plausibility. And so, one sunny morning in May 1975, they—we—drove up to Boston, to ascertain whether research would bear out this hypothesis, perhaps even provide enough evidence for a book.

Peter had majored in history, but that had been years ago, and neither of us had ever done any serious research after our student days. For that matter, we had only the vaguest idea of how to go about finding what we were looking for and no idea of how to structure it into a book if we did find anything. All we knew was that we had prayed earnestly about it, and we felt that God would have us proceed. If He was in the project, He would guide us.

We had hoped to begin research at Harvard’s Widener Library, but upon arriving there, we found that affiliation with the university was required. Not having that at the time (it was later providentially provided) we decided to try the Boston Public Library. But as we were walking back to the car, the idea suddenly occurred to us to stop in at the Harvard Book Store across the street. There, on the history shelves, was a book by Ernest Lee Tuveson entitled Redeemer Nation.

As Peter read the jacket copy aloud, we discovered that we were indeed on to something—and that others had felt that God had a specific and unique plan for America. Further browsing in the history section revealed that the first settlers consciously thought of themselves as a people called into a covenant relationship with God similar to the one He had established with ancient Israel.

The Pilgrims and Puritans, looking at the parallels between the ways in which God had led them to America and the Old Testament stories of God’s dealings with ancient Israel, saw themselves as called to found a “New Israel” (in their phrase), which would be a light to the whole world. “A city set upon a hill” was how John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, envisioned it.

Our exuberance at this discovery was attracting a few stares. More soberly we went upstairs to the checkout counter, purchased our books, and beat a hasty retreat. But once in the privacy of our car and headed for the Boston Public Library, we were like Forty-Niners on their way to the gold fields.

The spirit of adventure stayed with us that afternoon, as David went through the card files and tracked down titles on the shelves, while Peter pored through the armloads of books that David had brought to him. A dozen musty volumes might yield one of interest. Then, by “coincidence,” a book near the one we were looking for would happen to catch our eye, and we would discover a nugget like Remarkable Providences, edited by John Demos. Among other things, this book contained diary and letter accounts of God’s “wonder-working providences” in the lives of settlers in Jamestown, Plymouth, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

But it was piecemeal work, and we still had no way of knowing what we might inadvertently be overlooking. And then Peter remembered that he had Nelson Burr’s critical bibliography of books on religion in America. Armed with this preliminary list of titles, we could begin to properly explore the resources of Yale’s huge Sterling Memorial Library, to which, as former students, we had access. Two weeks later we found ourselves making an unexpected trip back to our alma mater, the first visit for both of us since graduating.

Entering the Gothic pile of Sterling Library, where we had often studied as undergraduates, was like walking around the set of a long-forgotten movie. But going into Beinecke, the then-new rare-book library with its translucent marble walls, was the eeriest experience of all. There was a reverent atmosphere in the place, and the hushed whispers in which we instinctively spoke were not just from customary library courtesy. It was as if we were standing on holy ground. Then it struck us: for those who worshiped intellectual achievement, it was holy ground. There before us in thousands of ancient volumes in a six-story-high, climate-controlled glass cube, the sum and pride of human intellect was enshrined. We exchanged glances and went downstairs to the card catalog.

That afternoon in the basement reading room of the Beinecke Library, we made the discovery that would prove to be one of the most exciting of the entire project. In his journal Christopher Columbus described an incident that took place on his fourth and final voyage, after he had been made Governor of Española (Hispaniola) and subsequently had been forcibly removed from that command for gross mismanagement. Sick with a fever and in the depths of despair, he had a half-awake dream in which he heard a stern voice strongly rebuke him for his self-pity. The voice (quoted in chapter 3) reminded him that the Almighty had singled him out for the honor of bearing the Light of Christ to a new world, had given him all that he had asked for, and was recording in heaven every event of his life!

Now we had clear evidence that God was leading us in the project. Here, in Columbus’s own words, was a concrete example of God’s hand at work in the life of the person that He used to bring Europeans to the Americas.

In sum, this book is not intended to be a history textbook, but rather a search for the hand of God in key periods of our nation’s beginnings. With America’s destiny at stake, the need to discover the hand of God in our past is urgent.

Seeking to understand American history from a Biblical perspective, we found ourselves so caught up in the search that we felt we should occasionally share with the reader some of the issues and struggles that we faced. These comments take the form of brief chapter preludes and will be set off by this symbol:

Wherever possible, we have let the players speak for themselves, bringing their imaginative spelling and nonchalant punctuation into some conformance with modern usage. Occasionally we imagine a key conversation for which there was no eyewitness account. These have been flagged as such and presented as faithfully as possible to what the principals might have said, given the evidence at our disposal.

Our basic premise—that God had a definite and discoverable plan for America—was confirmed many times over, albeit occasionally with surprising twists. When it came to famous figures in American history, some, like Columbus, turned out to be far more dedicated to God’s service than we had imagined. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, whom we had assumed research would reveal as an orthodox Christian believer, turned out quite differently.

Once it had become clear that God did have a plan for America, our search for evidence of this plan became akin to tracking a rich vein of gold through a mountain. The vein of gold had four main characteristics.

First, God had put a specific “call” on this country and the people whom He brought to inhabit it. In the virgin wilderness of America, God was making His most significant attempt since ancient Israel to create a “New Israel” of people living in obedience to biblical principles, through faith in Jesus Christ.

The Pilgrims and Puritans actually referred to themselves as God’s New Israel. But it wasn’t that they thought they (and the Christian Church) had replaced Israel. We would discover that they used the Church’s traditional method of interpreting the Old Testament: typology. This meant that they saw “types” of New Testament events or persons in the Old Testament. In this practice they were in good company. Even the New Testament writers themselves understood the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea as a prefiguring of the sacrament of Baptism in the New Testament, and the Israelites’ forty years in the desert as a prefiguring or type of Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness.

America’s early Christian settlers, then, used typology to interpret God’s dealings in their own lives. They felt that certain passages in the Bible, originally addressed to Israel, also applied to them:

For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks and water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills . . . a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing . . . and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.

Deuteronomy 8:7–10

Thus, Samuel Fisher, in his Testimony in Truth in 1679, would write, “Let Israel be . . . our glass to view our faces in.”2

As we shall see, the Pilgrims’ pastor in Holland, John Robinson, described their migration to the New World in these terms: “Now as the people of God in old time were called out of Babylon civil, the place of their bodily bondage, and were to come to Jerusalem, and there to build the Lord’s temple . . . so are the people of God now to go out of Babylon spiritual to Jerusalem (America) . . . and to build themselves as lively stones into a spiritual house, or temple, for the Lord to dwell in.”3

A generation after that, John Higginson would sum up their view of their calling in his preface to Cotton Mather’s history of New England:

It hath been deservedly esteemed one of the great and wonderful works of God in this last age, that the Lord stirred up the spirits of so many thousands of his servants . . . to transport themselves . . . into a desert land in America . . . in the way of seeking first the kingdom of God . . . for the purpose of “a fuller and better reformation of the Church of God, than it hath yet appeared in the world.”4

The President of Harvard, Urian Oakes, gave this simile in 1673: “If we . . . lay all things together, this our Commonwealth seems to exhibit to us . . . a little model, of the Kingdom of Christ upon Earth.”5

A model of the Kingdom of Christ upon earth—we Americans were intended to be living proof to the rest of the world that it was possible to live a life together that reflected the commandments of Christ to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love others as ourselves.

Second, this call was to be worked out in terms of the settlers’ covenant with God and with each other. Both elements of this covenant—the vertical relationship with God and the horizontal relationship with their neighbors—were of the utmost importance to them. Concerning the vertical aspect of the covenant, they saw themselves as being called into a direct continuation of the covenant relationship between God and Abraham: “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you’” (Gen. 12:1–2). “‘And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you’” (Gen. 17:7).

To the Early Comers (as the first New Englanders called themselves), the Bible showed them how this would work: “And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also” (1 John 4:21). This meant that the more they loved God, the more they could truly love their neighbors.

This was crucial to God’s plan: it was His clear intent that as these settlers lived the Christian life, they would grow into unity and become a body of believers. The apostle Paul wrote: “So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Rom. 12:5). “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor. 12:26). In this spirit the early settlers covenanted together to form their churches.

As each church-community grew and became, in effect, a town, their church covenants provided the pattern for the first successful civil governments in the Western Hemisphere. Historians and sociologists have long regarded the early New England town meetings as the purest and most successful form that democracy has ever taken. But few, if any, have acknowledged what lay at the core of how and why they worked so well. There would be many modifications, but American government owes its inception to the covenants of the first churches on her shores.

Third, God did keep His end of the bargain, on both an individual and a corporate basis. It is a sobering experience to look closely at our history and see just how highly God regarded right attitudes of heart. One finds long droughts broken by the people of a settlement deliberately praying and humbling themselves, turning back to the God whom they once trusted and had imperceptibly begun to take for granted.

The recorded beliefs of the settlers themselves confirmed this. In private diaries and public proclamations the immediate response to any disaster, human or natural, was, “Where do we need to repent?” In fact, there seemed to be a continuing, almost predictable cycle: in great need and humility a small body of Christians would put themselves into the hands of their Lord and commit their lives to one another. They would do their best to live together as He had called them to live. And He, in turn, would begin to pour out His blessing on them with health, peace, and bounteous harvests. But as they grew affluent, they would also become proud or complacent or self-righteous.

Nonetheless, the blessing would continue unabated, sometimes for a generation or more, as God continued to honor the obedience of their fathers and grandfathers (Deut. 7:9). But inevitably, because He loved them (and because even God’s patience has an end), He would lift the protection from their land, just enough to cause them to turn back to Him. A drought, an epidemic of smallpox, a plague of grasshoppers, or an Indian uprising would come, and the wisest among them would remember. Like the prophets of old, they would call the people to repentance.

Few Biblical principles are more compelling than this: that God blesses repentance. And, in the early days of our history, it was frequently proven that when people began to earnestly repent, what followed was the return of God’s grace.

That a drought could be broken or an Indian attack averted by corporate repentance is an idea that sounds alien to many Christians today. Yet it was central to the faith that built this country, and it is a prominent, recurring theme in the Bible. One familiar example is, “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14).

This, then, was the key to God’s plan for America: that His people—three thousand years ago, three hundred and fifty years ago, or today—would see themselves, individually and corporately, in continual need of God’s forgiveness, mercy, and support. And this was the secret of the horizontal aspect of the covenant as well: for only when we know that we are no better than anyone else—only then can we truly love other people.

Moreover, from this humble position, it is impossible to enter into an arrogant nationalism, a kind of “my country right or wrong” attitude. Inherent in God’s call upon our ancestors to create a Bible-based society was the necessity to live in a state of constant dependency upon His grace and forgiveness—a strong antidote against pride and self-righteousness. Anyone tempted to arrogance concerning our nation’s call or history need only look at how badly we have failed—and continue to fail—to live up to God’s expectations for us.

The great leaders of our past warned us about this. Here is Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster: “If we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.”6

This, then, was the fourth and final theme: at times of great crisis God raised up great leaders to protect America from destruction so that His plan for us might have a chance of success.

Instead of aspiring to fame and fortune, leaders like Bradford, Winthrop, Samuel Adams, and Washington truly wanted nothing more than to serve God’s people. And because these servant-leaders were living out the example of the one who said, “I am among you as one who serves,” God was able to use them mightily to change the course of American history.

In 1775 when the U.S. Marine Corps was founded, the recruiting slogan stated that it was seeking “a few good men.” That is essentially what God said to Gideon in ancient Israel, when He reduced his army from thirty-two thousand to three hundred. And it was what He seemed to be saying three and a half centuries ago, as He began to gather those who were willing to give up everything for His sake in order to dwell in His “New Israel.” How much of the grace that continues to cover this country today and how many of the incredible blessings that have been poured out upon this land are a direct result of their obedience and willingness to die to self? Only God knows for certain.

That grace seems to be lifting now, but as we look through our nation’s history to discover God’s plan, we begin to see what a great difference a few dedicated people can make—and how much is still at stake. For God’s call to this country has never been revoked.

America, America. God shed his grace on thee. . . .