Editor’s note: This is the introduction from the new book “America: A Call to Greatness.” Authored by John W. Chalfant, the book presents a stunning blueprint for major national revival in the U.S. America is losing its greatness, Chalfant says, because Christian clergy have abandoned “the militant, power-filled, full-dimensional” faith of America’s founders.
In this introduction, Chalfant shows how Christianity was inextricably linked to the founders’ ideals of liberty.
One of the author’s political science professors opened his class with these words:
“The history of the world is the history of a gigantic slaughter bench.”
How right he was! Until the advent of Christ, the author of personal and political freedom, history was essentially a dog-eat-dog world of the survival of the fittest, full of wars, conquests, and torture chambers. Slavery was universal with no distinction between men and women, children, black, white, or any other color. The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle declared that “a slave is simply an animated tool.”
Personal freedom as American citizens know it was unimaginable. After thousands of years of this horror and hell on earth, a tiny brilliant light of truth and liberty appeared in the mire of darkness and evil. That torch was carried by a handful of men whose lives were spiritually rooted in the Bible and were politically deeply committed to the Christian worldview.
Though only a handful, these inspired Founding Fathers of America – educators, doctors, lawyers, farmers, merchants, scientists – committed their “lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor” to the “holy” cause of freedom, both personal and political.
Trying to maintain tyrannical rule over the colonies, King George of England sent foreign mercenaries to subjugate the colonial leaders and citizens. As Patrick Henry orated, “Our chains are forged! Their clanking can be heard on the plains of Boston!”
More than 80 percent of the revolutionary literature calling for separation from the king’s tyranny was written by the clergy. In fact, the motto of the American War for Independence became “No king but King Jesus.”
Thus, the Founding Fathers, armed with their invincible faith in the Great Emancipator Jesus Christ, and stating their sacred cause of liberty in the Declaration of Independence, declared war on the mightiest military force in the world at that time, Great Britain.
Accounts by both sides of the most pivotal conflicts during that war attest to apparent interventions by God Himself, which turned seemingly impossible odds into stunning victories for George Washington’s forces. The British declared that there could be no other explanation for their many and final defeats.
The Peace Treaty of 1783 between the Continental Congress and Great Britain, which was signed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, opened with these words: “In the name of the most Holy and undivided Trinity, it having leased Divine Providence to …
Jesus said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). Such was the conviction of the Founding Fathers and the colonists. In fact, history records that all of the articles of the U.S. Constitution, and the executive, legislative and judicial structure of our government were derived from the Bible. If a proposed article was not rooted in the Bible, it never made it into the Constitution.
In 1867, the North American Review summed up the Founding Fathers’ accomplishment:
The American government and the Constitution is the most precious possession which the world holds, or which the future can inherit. This is true – true because the American system of government is the political expression of Christian ideas.
So stunned was the world over America’s obvious greatness and her freedoms that in 1831 the famous French statesman, historian and social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in search of her secret. He concluded in his book “Democracy in America”:
Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. … The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one with out the other.
This is a brief overview of what “America: A Call To Greatness” is all about. It’s about the America that the Founding Fathers, at terrible personal cost, gave to future generations. It’s about understanding the forces in perpetual conflict: the forces of freedom vs. tyranny and slavery; righteousness vs. evil; and the Bible and its eternal truths vs. atheism and Secular Humanism.
America’s plight is rooted in a conflict of worldviews. One is the Christian worldview, based on creation, which teaches the primacy of the spirit and the worth and dignity of the individual, and which brought forth from the Word of God our national and personal freedoms.
The other is the secular humanist worldview, based on evolution. It teaches that there is no God; that everything can be explained through nature and that man himself is the supreme authority. In total opposition to the Christian worldview, the secular humanist worldview denies man a sense of purpose.
Edmund Burke summarized: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
John Curran wrote in 1790: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”
Vigilance must derive its strength from clearly defined values. If America is to restore her vanishing freedoms and rise again to true greatness, and hold out the torch of hope for the world, it is imperative that her citizens, led by learned clergy, go back to origins.
America faces the same imperative for commitment today that Joshua posed:
… choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve (Josh. 24:15).
