Next time one of your liberal friends insists that America is not now, nor ever was, a “Christian nation,” put this column in front of him or her, and ask him or her to explain the following observations about and by John Adams and Benjamin Rush.
Among so much else this New Englander did in his hugely significant lifetime, Adams also edited Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence, and later became the second president of the United States, succeeding George Washington in that esteemed position. Adams and Jefferson would part pays politically but reconciled later in life, exchanging a fascinating series of letters before dying on the same day, July 4, 1826.
Benjamin Rush was born in Pennsylvania and grew up to become one of the most esteemed doctors in the colonies. But when the Revolutionary War came, Rush joined the patriot movement, and was, with Adams, a signer of the Declaration. During the war, Rush served under Washington, providing medical services to the Continental Army. After the war, Rush was a leading American medical expert who was known as a vigorous defender of education, and the father of mental illness treatments. Toward the end of his life, he would become an early Abolitionist.
For this column, I want to focus on two documents for which Adams and Rush were responsible, but which are almost never discussed these days, and especially not in America’s public schools or the mainstream media. Why are they not discussed? Well, consider the opening paragraph of Adams’ March 23, 1798, Proclamation of Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer.
Adams issued the proclamation in the midst of the growing troubles with France, which he references in the text, observing that the country was “in a hazardous and afflictive situation by the unfriendly disposition, conduct, and demands of a foreign power, evinced by repeated refusals to receive our messengers of reconciliation and peace, by depredation on our commerce, and the infliction of injuries on very many of our fellow-citizens while engaged in their lawful business on the seas …”
Had Adams promulgated this document before a population of contemporary secular materialists, it would have been ignored, or worse, ridiculed. But the most famous man from colonial Massachusetts knew his countrymen well, and he addressed them in their language, which was that of the Christian faith:
“I have therefore thought fit to recommend, and I do hereby recommend, that Wednesday, the 9th day of May next, be observed throughout the United States as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that the citizens of these States, abstaining on that day from their customary worldly occupations, offer their devout addresses to the Father of Mercies agreeably to those forms or methods which they have severally adopted as the most suitable and becoming;
“that all religious congregations do, with the deepest humility, acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation, beseeching Him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offenses, and to incline us by His Holy Spirit to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction …”
Note the emphasis added, which illustrates that Adams spoke in the language of the Christian Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. Clearly, Adams was not referring to the Deist god of the man who would succeed him in the Oval Office. By the way, Adams’ reference to “sincere repentance and reformation” is the language of the Protestantism that dominated in the colonies, and in the current day is best represented by the Evangelical movement.
What we find in Rush in the same year of 1798 is a tract he authored in which he made the case for the proposition that a representative republican form of government to be most suited to and indeed all but the only appropriate one for Christians:
“A Christian cannot fail of being a republican. The history of the creation of man, and of the relation of our species to each other by birth, which is recorded in the Old Testament, is the best refutation that can be given to the divine right of kings, and the strongest argument that can be used in favor of the original and natural equality of all mankind.“A Christian, I say again, cannot fail of being a republican, for every precept of the Gospel inculcates those degrees of humility, self-denial, and brotherly kindness, which are directly opposed to the pride of monarchy and the pageantry of a court. A Christian cannot fail of being useful to the republic, for his religion teacheth him, that no man “liveth to himself.” And lastly, a Christian cannot fail of being wholly inoffensive, for his religion teacheth him, in all things to do to others what he would wish, in like circumstances, they should do to him.”
The title of the Rush work was “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” and he further insisted that the Bible was an essential, indeed central, teaching resource to assure the raising of many generations of Americans who would seek righteousness, peace and liberty rather than rancor, crime and chaos.
Do these examples prove that American is a “Christian Nation,” such as is often and erroneously argued by *propagandists on the left who warn about a mostly illusory “Christian Nationalist” movement?
No, but Adams and Rush do provide evidence of the proposition that the America that declared independence in 1776 and adopted the Constitution in 1789 was indeed a nation of Christians, a people who if you sought to communicate with them, you had to speak in their language.
* See, for example, this preposterous imitation of genuine scholarship that argues, presumably with a straight face since photographs of the authors aren’t provided, that “anecdotal evidence suggests that Christian nationalist theologies may have a natural violent outgrowth.”
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