Reflections on the 4th of July

Though some of the "Founding Fathers" were deists influenced by the Enlightenment, they were also influenced by the culture in which they lived which was a culture dominated by a Christian worldview.  For example, this is what confuses some people about Thomas Jefferson.  When one reads his thoughts on religion, he was clearly not an orthodox Christian--he was  a thoroughgoing deist.  However, his language sounded Christian at times.  Why?  He was still operating with a cultural setting and paradigm that was Christian.  This Christian paradigm had been reinforced by the revivals that had swept the colonies in the decades before the Revolutionary War known as the First Great Awakening.  It would receive a booster shot of reinforcement from the Second Great Awakening, revival movements that covered all of American territory in the first half of the 1800s.

Much of the philosophy behind the American ideal came out of the Enlightenment but it was also rooted in this Christian paradigm.  Humans are equal because they are created equal.  Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence that the unalienable rights that characterize a human being are endowed by a creator.  The idea was that each individual was free to live his/her life and would be held responsible as an individual for that life--an idea rooted in the notion of the person being individually responsible before God.  It bears an aroma of the Protestant ideal of the
"Priesthood of the Believer," i.e., if I interact with God directly, than the ability of any authority--ecclesiastical or governmental--to interject itself into my life is limited.

Several of the founders, including some of the deists, wrote or stated in various ways that religion was an important part of this experiment that is America.  Without the ethics instilled in humans through avenues such as religion, the exercise of individual freedom could become selfish and democracy disintegrate into anarchy.  Without the concern for others nurtured by ethical systems such as religion, the free market capitalism could become contaminated by selfish greed and lead to economic chaos.

Much of what is going on in our society today reflects this possibility.  If the American ideal is, at least in part, rooted in the soil of the Christian worldview, then if you remove the plant from that soil, the plant cannot flourish.  Or, to use another metaphor, if we remove one of the cornerstones of a building, the building becomes structurally weak and can collapse.  As our society (including, sadly, much of the church) has moved into a Post-Christian worldview, the American ideal has lost one of the key foundations on which it is built.  Therefore, the building is wobbling.

For example, greed manifests itself among some in our society as a sense of entitlement--give me what I want regardless of whether I have earned it, deserve it, or really need it.  This has combined with a loss of personal responsibility to create a crack in the economy.  Likewise, greed manifested itself in Ponzi schemes and unethical business practices with a goal of acquiring wealth for wealth's sake.  It led Americans to spend far more than they earned in dangerous materialism and consumption running up tons of personal debt further weakening the economic strength of our families and our country.  Now that our chickens have come home to roost, everyone is blaming everyone else with hints of class warfare.  The reality is that we are all to blame:  we have pursued the freedoms of the American ideal without the ethics and Christian paradigm and the result is a path that could lead to chaos.

We have not moved form the American ideal, we have moved the American ideal from its moorings and are shocked to find it adrift on the sea.