If you appreciate the freedom that’s still ours in America to worship the risen Lord Jesus Christ, there’s no need to thank your lucky stars. Lucky stars had nothing to do with it. But history points to some brave heroes who helped pave your way to liberty.
America’s freedom started long before America. The free grace of Christ as embraced by the first disciples of the early Church continued to revolutionize lives around the world – as our spiritual forefathers brought the light of gospel hope to places where there was no light at all. For their brave commitment to truth, they often paid a steep price.
In southern Bohemia – now the Czech Republic – Jan Hus spoke out boldly against rampant corruption among the religious elite, and devoted his life to realigning the Church with the Word of God. His earthly rewards were few, but His punishment was to be burned alive in 1415. Today, if your congregation values the Bible at all, you stand on the shoulders of spiritual giants like Hus.
Though born in Gloucestershire, and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, William Tyndale was forced to flee his homeland. For his tireless ministry in Germany and modern-day Belgium, and for the unforgivable crime of translating the Bible into English, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. Tyndale’s faithfulness still helps a Tennessee farm boy read a page from the Scriptures without needing a priest to tell him what it means.
In France, in the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered simply for holding to the radical idea that the human conscience belongs solely to God. Freedom, you see, never comes to us in a vacuum, but at great personal cost.
The Puritans of England were willing to risk it all to set sail for this distant and unknown land of wilderness and peril. Why? They preferred the real risk of starvation and even death over surrendering their right to worship according to Holy Scripture as they understood it. Among those courageous women and men were the faithful Separatists whom we remember fondly as the Pilgrims. They landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620.
Religious freedom shaped our nation from the beginning. Even before the beginning. The Bible offered a new way forward for the ordering of a just society, one in which the fallen nature of humankind would be acknowledged – and formally safeguarded against – by the intentional distribution of power among three branches of mutually accountable government. The earliest seeds of the great nation that was being forged sprang from vital evangelical Christian faith. From the Mayflower Compact to a free society built around free markets and free expression.
From the very beginning, self-rule through elected representatives would be our way of life. Why? Because we each bear the “imago Dei” – the image of Almighty God (Genesis 1:27).
Even our pre-Revolutionary academia was built upon the theology and practice of the Bible. The first president of Harvard University was a gospel minister, and the early Ivy League was profoundly centered on evangelical Christianity. Harvard’s historical mottos tell the story: “Veritas” (“Truth”), “Christi Gloriam” (“For the Glory of Christ”), and “Christo et Ecclesiae” (“For Christ and the Church”).
In the 18th century, on a significantly wider scale, as the tectonic shifts in Western thought known as the Enlightenment came under the steady influence of Christ’s gospel of grace, hope for liberty was renewed. Here in the colonies, in the Great Awakenings, transformative evangelical revivals fostered a common identity in the unique form of what would become our democratic republic. The way was paved for the American Revolution. It had to happen. America sprouted from the fertile soil of a soul-level thirst for freedom. In my humble opinion, the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution was Christianity.
The heroes of early American history died not for their own gain in this life, nor did they die for a trivial cause. Rather, they died for a Biblical truth: the individual soul has direct access to God, unmediated by any institution, and no power on Earth has the right to stand in between.
That sacred truth became a nation. Our nation. The United States of America: “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
In 1776, those cherished tenets of our shared freedom would be affirmed emphatically in the time-tested and battle-worn words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Such ideals are uniquely American. They did not come to us out of nowhere, friends, but through the blood, sweat, tears – and prayers – of our spiritual heroes. The foundational truth which we’ve inherited is a higher truth. From the Pilgrims to the Founding Fathers to the Constitution’s First Amendment.
In the 19th century, by God’s grace and for His glory, enshrined in our governmental framework – our national DNA – were the enduring political mechanisms which ended slavery in America. It took far too long, regrettably – but a wonder of our shared history is that Americans recognized that enslaving any person is evil and must be stopped. Why? Slavery is a frontal assault on our bedrock doctrine: the image of God. Thankfully, the spiritual roots of many abolitionists were planted deep in gospel soil, and the Word of God eventually prevailed over all opposing forces.
America was immeasurably blessed with yet another opportunity to celebrate our freedom, and to unite together as “one Nation under God.”
“O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?”
The rights and liberties which we presently enjoy in this land come to us directly from our God – the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No institution or government on Earth overrules or stands in between. Between our Creator and “we the people” there exists no mediator except the one who stands high above us all (John 14:6): “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
May His higher truth bring us together again!
Pastor Charles
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