[Magdalen] 239th year since the birth of the United States of America as a nation

[Zephonites at aol.com]

Folk
 
Interesting article on this matter
 
Any one agree with any/all of it?
 
Blessings
Martin
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America celebrates her 239th birthday tomorrow.  According to a  recent 
survey, nearly two in three Americans say God has granted our nation  an 
exceptional role in human history.  Is this true?

Charles  Murray earned a BA in history from Harvard and a PhD in political 
science from  MIT.  In American Exceptionism: An Experiment in History, he 
states  categorically: "American exceptionalism is a fact of America's past, 
not  something you can choose whether to 'believe in' any more than you can 
choose  whether to 'believe in' the battle of Gettysburg."  In its early 
years, the  United States was considered to be "exceptional" by foreign 
observers as much as  by Americans.

According to Murray, four factors contributed to the  nation's uniqueness:
1. Our  geography: rich soil for farming, a frontier to encourage 
immigration, and the  Atlantic Ocean to separate us from European conflict.
2. Our people:  hardworking pioneers who formed close-knit families.
3. Our ideology: the  belief that humans possess innate rights which the 
state cannot bestow or  withhold.
4. Our religiosity: by separating church and state, we formed  
congregations composed of people committed to their faith, not just those born  into it. 
 John Adams was blunt: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral  and 
religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any  other."

Do these factors mean that our founders  were all Christians?  We sometimes 
hear that 52 of the 55 signers of the  Declaration of Independence were 
"orthodox" Christians, and that 24 held  seminary degrees.  But their personal 
spiritual commitments are actually  hard to determine.  We can characterize 
only about 20—half were biblical  Christians, while the rest were deists or  
non-orthodox.

While America's founders were not all committed  Christians, they were 
clearly committed to a Judeo-Christian moral  standard.  Even Thomas Jefferson, 
himself a deist, insisted: "Injustice in  government undermines the 
foundations of a society.  A nation, therefore,  must take measures to encourage its 
members along the paths of justice and  morality."

How can we take such "measures" today?

Abraham  Lincoln warned, "America will never be destroyed from the outside. 
 If  we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed  
ourselves."  Spiritual renewal is critical to the future of our  democracy.  Our 
greatest need today is not to make America a Christian  nation, but to help 
America be a nation of Christians (Matthew 28:18-20).