Biblical ideas influence development of America

Rural churches sprang up throughout the region shortly after pioneeers and immigrants arrived. Many of them are still active, including St. John's Evangelical Lutheran church south of Fall Creek. It is more than 100 years old.

     Biblical ideas had a decisive influence in development of American society since establishment of settlements on the East coast.
     Many settlers were refugees from old-world religious intolerance and saw their move to America in the image of ancient Israelites who broke free from bondage in Egypt. America was the "Promised Land" seen as a venture of Divine Liberation from "pharaohs" of Europe and settlers entered the unknown "wilderness" to build a "New Israel."
     "We shall find that the God of Israel is among us," wrote the governor of New Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, at its beginning in 1630. "For we must consider that we shall be as a 'City upon a Hill'...The eyes of all people are upon us."

Seen as re-enactment

     Colonists saw their experience as a re-enactment of the ancient deliverance of the Children of Israel from slavery, a pilgrimage into the wild toward a "promised land."
     These Biblical metaphors came to fore in minds of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1776 when designing an official seal. Both considered the image of the exodus from Egypt as the best representation of the American struggle.
      Benjamin Franklin proposed a portrayal of Moses lifting his hand over the Red Sea as its waters engulfed Pharaoh's troops. Jefferson suggested a representation of the Children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night as in the Biblical account.
     The U.S. Seal, adopted in 1782 and appearing on dollar bills, shows the "eye of God" above an Egyptian pyramid with these words: "Annuit Coeptis," -- "He has favored our undertakings."
     Puritans adhered to a "covenant-type" government, traced to a Biblical convenant between God, Abraham and descendants. In each community, sometimes in a field, he new American would gather and pledge himself to God and one another for community order and protection. The Bible was regarded as a handbook for directing individual, family, social, economic and government affairs.
     The most powerful religious force in America's origins stems from the Puritans whose name originated in British ridicule for their determination to "purify" the Church of England of musty formalism. Historians estimate that at the American Revolution, 75 percent of the population drew its spiritual breath from Puritanism.

"Light to the nations"

     The Puritan sense of divinely-appointed destiny, of being chosen for a special mission in the world to bring "light to the nations," as the Scriptures phrase it, pervaded life of colonial communities, fired the American Revolution and has since tinged the country's outlook.
     Puritanism was authoritarian and hierarchical, with command placed in hands of the academically qualified. It was rigorously demanding and could be harsh in penalties. But it set a cultural mold for a budding nation.
     Severe punishments were meted out to religious nonconformists by Puritan magistrates of Colonial New England: whipping with knotted cords, imprisonment on bread and water, boring through the tongue with red-hot iron, fines, banishment.
     Although colonists often came to the new country to worship in their own way, they insisted on conformity when in the majority.
     Harsh tortures had ceased by 1700, but most established churches were as intolerant of heretics as state churches of their homelands had been to them.

Required church support

     Established churches prevailed in most colonies, with laws requiring dwellers to pay taxes to support the church and its ministers, heed Sabbath laws and attend worship Only church members, and in some instances only Protestants, could hold office or vote.
     Although many migrated to America to gain religious freedom from what they considered ecclesiastical tyranny, "it did not necessarily mean they were ubterestd ub sycg freedom for others," says historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
     This ironic situation led to an unprecedented innovation in world history -- separation of church from state. The movement that challenged church-state ties and fanned flames of independence and national consciousness was the "Great Awakening."
     Historians use this term to describe the surging, churning, explosive religious conversion experience that swept through the early 1720s. Thousands of nominal Christians were caught in evangelistic fervor that shattered old forms and traditions and opened new channels of spiritual growth.
     The Great Awakening was the explosion that shook loose old European patterns, old world structures of society and prepared the American community for ultimate separation from England.
     Biblical religion generated ideas, nurtured character, spawned deeds. It inspired the Declaration of Independence. That document spelled out justification for the nation's birth - that all human beings are "endowed with certain unalienable rights."

Theological treatise

     The Declaration was essentially a theological treatise. Responsibility, it claimed, was bestowed by the Creator on individual consciences. Four times that short document of July 4, 1776, invoked the Biblical God of Creation. Signed by 56 men, most were Anglicans and Congregationalists, several Presbyterians, including clergyman John Witherspoon, a Baptist and a Roman Catholic, Charles Carroll.
     Most were committed churchmen; all had a firm, thoughtful belief in God.
     After independence, the founders forged another time-honored document, the U.S. Constitution of 1787. The Constitutional Convention bogged down to standstill and it seemed the impasse was not resolvable.
     In that crisis, Benjamin Franklin, then 81, intoned, "In this situation...how has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our understanding?" We have been assured in the Sacred writings that 'except the Lord build the house ,they labor in vain that build it'...I have lived a long time, sir, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men."
     It has a muffled ring to it these days, but the new nation openly interpreted events as divinely significant.
     The Almighty controlled history, particularly the destiny of this "New Israel" which had found its way by Divine Providence to the "Promised Land."

-- Willis Gertner
UWEC, Dept. of Religious Studies.

Extracted from the Eau Claire Leader Telegram
Special Publication, Our Story 'The Chippewa Valley and Beyond', published 1976
Used with permission.