The Seven Visions of the United States

What Is Our Identity?

With Gladiator 2 coming out, I can’t help but reflect on the first movie and doubt that this sequel can live up to it.  The one line that always comes to mind from Gladiator is Marcus Aurelius saying, “Rome is an idea.”  This is a good revision for a Stoic Emperor at the end of his life.  Nevertheless, Rome didn’t begin on a foundation of ideas.  It looked to the gods and heroes for its founding.  It was through Jupiter’s protection and the strength of his arm that Aeneas arrived at Rome.  His father, Anchises, carried the household idols out of the flames of Troy, and these became the gods of Rome.  The very gods that failed Troy were then used to found Rome.  No one seems to have raised any questions about this at the time.

There was something similar operating in the heart of Israel.  Having seen the devastating plagues in Egypt, they returned to worshiping the golden calf within a few weeks.  Even as they were warned against the Canaanites and saw miraculous victory over them, they still turned to Canaanite deities.  This culminated in the Temple itself being desolated by idols, and Israel handed over to Babylon for judgment.  One thing is true: Ezekiel prophesied, “And they shall know that I am God,” and indeed, the Israelites never again returned to that form of idolatry.  

Other nations have operated as extended family groups or were ruled over by an extended family.  The Carolingians, the Capets, the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, etc. These ruling families warred with neighboring families, and this is usually what a student learns about such nations.  In pagan times, such families relied on claims, as did Rome, about a founding by deified ancestors.  Once Christianity was introduced, their claim may have shifted to God, but because they each made this claim while fighting each other, it only brought confusion among Christians and laughter among non-Christians.

Compared to these nations, the United States stands out.  It actually was founded on an idea.  It isn’t the result of a royal family or people group.  It wasn’t started by the idols of some other city.  Being a part of the United States doesn’t require familial relationships, polytheistic worship, or allegiance to a ruling family.  It requires understanding and agreeing to ideas.  But what ideas?

There are different visions of what these ideas are.  I have identified seven such visions.  These are not mutually exclusive visions.  However, a person or group generally places emphasis on one of them over the others.  They also might have logical order between them, meaning that focusing on one of them as basic when it is not logically basic distorts its meaning and causes problems.

Each of these visions serves as a foundation for the worldview of political parties or factions in our day.  You will see here the Harris voters and the Trump voters.  But when a political party builds on a faulty foundation, its edifice will break.  A faulty foundation does not sustain the weight.  When we cash out this metaphor, it means that false or insufficient beliefs, which are relied upon as the foundation for a world and life view, will not preserve meaning.  Challenges will expose where it is incoherent.  I will give examples for each.

The First Vision: Opportunity

This vision is so well known that you will sometimes simply hear the United States referred to as the “Land of Opportunity.”  This is one of the ways that the United States government tried to frame itself during the Cold War.  This idea is easy to understand for anyone around the world.  In the United States, you can work hard, get ahead, and provide a better life for your children.  They can then build on that work and do even better for themselves.  The claim is that this can go on indefinitely.

Besides the allure of financial gain, one of the promises of this vision is common ground between persons of otherwise competing religious or ideological outlooks.  All people from anywhere in the world can come together and live in peace as they pursue their financial interests.  Their religion or ideology need not affect others in this common pursuit.  For persons coming from parts of the globe that are torn apart by ideological conflicts, such a promise can sound like a dream come true.

The need for common ground is a part of each of the visions.  And in a way, we can see where each fails when it gets common ground wrong.  In this case, financial gain is not a sufficient common ground.  Humans are not merely animals.  They need more than material goods.  This kind of economic story does not fill our deepest need, and this can be seen as people using their financial gains to escape reality and the meaninglessness in their lives.  This vision quickly turns empty.

The Second Vision: Freedom

It was a common narrative in history books to tell the story of freedom from the Greeks to the United States.  The idea was that these people were especially concerned about being free from government control.  So the Greeks fought the Persians, the Germans fought the Romans, the English fought the French, and the Americans fought the British. In each case, the other side of the story says, “Wait a minute, that’s not an accurate representation of us at all.”  That didn’t matter to such historians.  They were capturing the march of freedom.

It is an easy vision to understand.  Every teenager in the United States expresses it daily when they say, “I can do what I want, it’s a free country.” In the 20th century, people from around the globe who lived under the totalitarian rule of the Soviets and other Marxists desired to be free.  This shaped the narrative of the Cold War.  The United States promoted freedom, and the Soviets promoted totalitarianism.  This is where these visions can build on each other.  The claim was that since the United States defended freedom, people were able to freely pursue their financial interests, and the economy grew while the Soviets’ stagnated.

Freedom became the common ground that glued everyone together.  Other facts about a person no longer mattered.  The purpose of the law was to protect their freedom to do what they wanted (within limited bounds, such as: don’t hurt anyone else).  Liberty turned into Libertarianism, which longed for a limited government.  The expansion of the United States government into all areas of human life and all parts of the globe increasingly was a threat to such liberty.

Freedom is defined as “doing what you want.”  To be free, or have a free will, means to have an unrestricted will.  The modern origin story is the fictional “state of nature.”  In that state, there is no government; individuals are just doing what they want.  The point of this mental exercise is to ask, “When is government necessary, and for what purpose?” In the “state of nature,” you had no restrictions.  Once the government is introduced, you will have restrictions.  The freedom vision argued that restrictions must either be due to consent to be necessary.  The top reason for accepting restrictions was safety.  From there, other kinds of new restrictions were permitted in order to work together to reach goals out of reach for an individual alone.  The claim is that the United States best perfected the balance between the individual and the group, between the majority and the dissenters. 

The problem with this vision is that freedom can’t be a foundation.  Freedom is a means.  We want to be free so that we can pursue our desired goals. Freedom itself cannot be our highest goal because we are left with the question, “free to do what?”  If we don’t have freedom, we can have the goal of getting freedom, but then the next step is to use our freedom to achieve the goal we were kept from pursuing under totalitarianism.  

For a similar reason, freedom cannot be the common ground that keeps everyone together.  Freedom allows us to pursue our goals, and many times, those goals are conflicting.  The United States has a system that was designed to allow for moderated conflict.  The Federalist Papers lay this out in terms of how a majority rules without taking away the right of dissent.  The Freedom vision reappropriated that framework for its own purpose to support liberty.  Yet, when the goals of groups or individuals are simply at odds and incompatible, “freedom” is not the answer.  The deadlock needs to be broken by agreeing on one common goal.

This vision also reveals something about the human condition.  The same philosophers who used the “state of nature” myth also argued about whether humans were predisposed to good or evil.  It is easy to see how “liberty” quickly transforms into licentiousness.  The noble idea of “liberty” for which men died turns into the license to be drunk and fornicate.  When given freedom, what is inside a person’s heart comes out through their actions.  This can begin in secrecy by keeping something like pornography hidden and embarrassing.  However, as the number of people who desire to live in debauchery grows, they begin to demand that society accept their sexual perversion and not only accept it but be proud of it.

If we look at the “march of freedom,” we see increased legalization of drugs, pornography, gambling, but not increased reading of the Great Books or memorizing the Bible.  This supposed march follows Romans 1:18-32 perfectly.  Freedom itself is not sufficient as a foundation for the United States.

Vision Three: Progress

Progress is an easy idea to understand when it is paired with the first two visions.  In this retelling of history, the vast majority of humans throughout history were poor, miserable, uneducated, unhealthy, and under the totalitarian control of a feudal lord or aristocracy.  And then along came progress. The United States is a place of continued progress.  Each generation is to develop further than the last.  Each generation is increasingly liberated from the trauma of the past.  Whereas the past was divided into oppressors and the oppressed, the future holds out the promise of a utopia of equity.

This progress is attained by education.  The claim is that education brings about progress.  By educating a population, we are moving them from the darkness of tradition and superstition into the light of . . . well, that’s part of the problem.  What exactly is the end goal?  Today, it is called “equity.”  We have more college educated people than ever before, and also more depression and anxiety in that same educated group.

The emphasis on education is a secularized version of the Great Commission.  The godless jettison Christ and try to keep education.  Sin is no longer the problem.  The problem now is ignorance–ignorance about how to lead a healthy and wealthy life.  For all of its disdain for the health-and-wealth gospel, the secular university promotes the same promised outcome through its education programs.  Be educated by us, and you will get a better job and therefore more money and better health care.

These first three visions are solutions to the problem of evil.  More specifically, they are solutions to the problem of natural evil.  Natural evils are the aspects of the world that cause suffering but are not directly due to moral choices.  Everyone in the world struggles with old age, strife, toil, sickness, and death.  These become magnified into war, famine, and plague.  Although strife and war involve humans and their choices, there is a way in which we are simply born into a world with those features and born onto one side or the other.  We can make healthy lifestyle choices, but we still get sick and die.  At times, natural evil can be magnified, and at other times, it can be decreased, but it is always there. 

The idea of economic opportunity, freedom to pursue one’s ends, and progress in human education and technology all promise a decrease in some forms of natural evil.  They promise to decrease strife and toil.  They promise to give technologies that increase health and cure sickness.  However, none of them can promise to deal with moral evil.  And it is moral evil that ends up rotting these three visions from the inside.  Moral evil is something real, and we need to get it into better focus as we continue.  

All three of these visions still draw people to the United States, but none of them confer an identity that lasts longer than the vision.  If the promise of economic opportunity stalls out or looks better elsewhere, a person will not stay in the United States for some theoretical American identity.  If freedoms are lost or progress regresses, then the same will happen.  Critics of the United States who brag about their own national identity rooted in ethnicity or race point out that this is a weakness in the United States.  It is only a weakness if one of these three visions are mistakenly made foundational.

The Fourth Vision

The Fourth Vision of what constitutes the United States is not as easy to understand.  It may not sell on State Department brochures the same way that freedom and opportunity do.  However, it is a much better candidate for an actual identity and foundational idea.  This vision says that the Founding Fathers worked out a particularly resilient form of government that could protect dissenters while having rule by the majority.  And even the rule of the majority has numerous checks and balances.  The Founders are said to have understood human nature and our propensity for greed and the misuse of power.  We are not inclined toward goodness but are instead inclined toward selfishness.  Because of this, a government must protect against these inclinations.

This fourth vision can be summarized this way: 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, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It tells us about the highest authority: Reason and the self-evident.  It tells us about our origin: Created by God.  It tells us about our relationship with each other: the respect of Rights.  It also gives us the freedom to learn about and pursue our understanding of a good life.  All of this is governed by an appeal to Reason, Theism, and Natural Law (in the sense of “not revealed law.”)

This vision requires a Civics class.  It will probably require more than one.  It asks the individual not simply to trust the Founding Fathers but to understand their system, objections to that system, and how they argued toward agreement.  It is not easy to get people to take a Civics class.  It is not easy to get people to study history and to be engaged with arguments.  This is especially true when times are good, when opportunity and progress seem unbounded, and suffering has reached a nadir.  

In the fourth vision, natural theology is the common ground.  Truths that all persons can and should know simply by studying what is available in creation to everyone are therefore required to be known by everyone.  The Declaration is not skeptical about what these are; it states them right up front.  That is why we can say the United States was indeed founded on an idea.

There are two branches of this vision.  One of those branches takes its direction from the third vision of progress.  This branch says that the essence of the United States is Democracy and each person having the right to be whatever they want to be.  In most of the history of the United States, this was understood economically, philosophically, and religiously.  Individuals can pursue whatever career they would like, believe what they would like about the meaning of life, and join or not join a religion.  

In just this past decade, it has come to have an ontological meaning.  Progressives now say that “you can be whatever you want” is “radical freedom” to redefine yourself.  You can decide what gender you’d like to be and even what species you’d like to be.  This view comes to expression, most notably in sexual licentiousness, thus borrowing from the second vision.  It is existence without essence, particulars without universals.  

This branch also relies on seeing culture today and in the past as a conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed.  It can pull from the first vision to do this with other countries, but it also aims this critique at the United States.  It is here that it begins to saw itself from the trunk to which it is attached.  The foundational beliefs of the fourth vision become the structural racism of this branch.  It is precisely what the Founders (and pretty well every political scientist from Plato to Locke) feared about Democracy.  Furthermore, in order to support its claim about the oppressed, it divides the United States into people groups and then blames the white group for any kind of suffering experienced by any other group.  The contradiction between putting people into such groups and radical freedom (only particulars) doesn’t matter as long as its adherents have good intentions.  They are using the “right kind of discrimination.”  

The other branch of this fourth vision sees what the Founders produced as the best political system consistent with human nature.  This branch recognizes that there have been significant problems in the history of the United States.  This is why there was still a Civil War over slavery and the need for legal reforms for civil rights. The problem is not the system itself, but that the ideals of the system were not evenly applied.

Overcoming slavery and Jim Crow were instances of applying what was already in the ideals of the United States to everyone.  Although critics say that slavery was built into the Constitution, it was a compromise that clearly contradicted the Declaration of Independence.  The particular form slavery took was neither biblical nor justifiable by natural law.

This branch sees the preservation of the founding principles of limited government, checks and balances, natural theology, natural law, and equality before the law as worthy of being defended and preserved.  They are real insights made by humanity as it grew in knowledge over the centuries, and turning our backs on these pieces of wisdom in order to return to an older failed system would be a tragedy if it was not also a willful sin. 

And even so, this fourth vision cannot provide a sufficient foundation.  Perhaps it is the first floor of a foundation.  Or a part of the foundation.  But the division into two branches show us that something is left undone.  Many use this fourth vision to justify the second vision about freedom.  The Rights given to us are to allow us freedom.  Freedom to do what?  Freedom to pursue what we think is good.  And now we are back to the same problem that plagued the second vision: a circular argument about being free to be free.

The Fifth Vision

The Fifth Vision concerns the hotly debated question: Is America a Christian Nation?  The purpose here is not to settle that question.  We saw in the fourth vision that the Declaration of Independence makes a natural theology reference to God the Creator (Theism).  We know that the First Amendment protects against a State Church.  We often hear the claim that many of the Founders were Deists, not Christians.  However, not having a State Church is off-set by quotes from the Founders about the necessity of Christianity to the Republic.  And the claim about Deism is overblown.  There is no doubt that the great majority of the Founders were Christians and believed Christianity to be essential to a good life.  A quick look at the state constitutions with their faith requirements for office will help show this and explain why the national constitution didn’t have one.

However, the United States is not a Christian nation in the sense that it looks to revealed religion for its laws.  It is a nation that believes in natural law.  It does not appeal to one specific tradition of natural law, but to the idea that we can know the law from the nature of things.  And that is where the debate comes in.  What is the “nature of things?”  What exactly is a human?  What is a good life? Here is where the debates among the Founders do come down to us and hand us problems we didn’t ask for.  

We know that Jefferson rewrote the Gospels.  He believed himself wiser than the God and his vision clearer than the Apostles so that he could determine which were and which were not the true teachings of Jesus.  It turns out that Jesus was only a moral reformer and did not perform miracles.  He may have been the greatest moral teacher of all time, but he was not God incarnate.  We know many other Founders were faithful and orthodox Christians.  This division comes back to human nature.  The American Founders leaned toward saying humans are inclined toward evil and need to be checked.  But here we have another set of branches.

The first branch is represented by Jefferson and Paine. It says that although humans are inclined toward selfishness, they can be perfected through education.  The problem for the individual is ignorance.  When he commits a morally evil act, he does so because he has not received the right instruction.  If we correct this and educate the individual, then we will see a corresponding decrease in moral evil and progress toward a good life and a well-ordered society.  Jesus came in order to give us just this sort of moral education.  After many centuries, his teaching might need to be updated, but it is within the same general spirit of his approach.  

The second branch says that there is a much deeper problem at hand.  Those who maintain this view say that it is true that education has many benefits and can preempt and solve many moral problems.  However, it cannot solve the problem of sin.  And “sin” is a much more fitting term here than “moral evil.”  Morality can be improved.  The problem of sin goes deeper.  It is not merely a lack: a lack of education, a lack of economic equity, a lack of equal rights.  Sin is something that exists and has power.  Sin is a condition we are in and from which we cannot escape. It is the condition of not seeking God, of not understanding, of not doing what is right.  

This branch teaches that humans, by natural theology or natural law, cannot overcome sin.  They are slaves to sin.  They are under the power of sin.  And humans have no power of their own to overcome the power of sin.  In fact, humans love sin and hate God. No revolutionary war can free humans from sin.  No systemic change in the justice system can grant humanity pardon from sin.    

This branch is occupied by the majority of the Founders.  They knew that the only answer to this problem was found in the Christian Scriptures.  It isn’t so much that the Christian Scriptures give the true answer among many competitors.  It is that there aren’t any competitors.  No other religious texts claim to explain how humans can be restored to God through vicarious atonement.  And yet both the Torah (Old Testament for Christians) and the New Testament contain this exact message.  The other religious texts either deny God the Creator even exists or they are derivatives from the Christian Scriptures but teach another form of moral improvement (do these five things, and you’ll be set right, maybe).  

Our Present Circumstances

If you trace these visions, and especially these two branches in the fifth vision, you will see they explain where we are at today.  There are people who only want economic prosperity out of the United States.  Other considerations are of no concern as long as they do not affect the economy.  There are some who only want liberty to do whatever they want whenever they want (as long as they don’t hurt anybody else). There are progressives teaching college students about the next revolution that will undo systematic racism.  There are conservatives who call for the preservation of the Founder’s system.  And there are Christians who believe and teach the Gospel to a nation lost under the power of sin.

The universities are packed full of professors who believe in the third vision, especially the first branch of the fourth vision.  They teach their students that the purpose of education is to make the student a better advocate and revolutionary so as to overthrow a systematically unjust system and replace it with something closer to a pure Democracy where each individual is in charge of their own life.  For them, the United States has largely been a failure up until just recently, when freedom for all began to make its way into the sexual identities of the infinite genders.  The purpose of the government is to guarantee freedom and access to sexual licentiousness.  Any suggestion that this might be unhealthy, let alone immoral, is policed as hate speech.  Any book, such as the Bible, which teaches that there are two genders and marriage is the union of a male and female, is as close to getting banned as any book can be in a society of progressives who oppose censorship.  Sometimes, you need to be intolerant and censor in order to heal.

By just observing the current teaching in your standard secular university humanities department, you can see the point about the power of sin.  The first branch of the fifth vision once educated its students to know the good, the truth, and the beautiful.  They left their studies with a desire to pursue wisdom.  Now, they are taught about different sexual positions and why polyamory is a beneficial option.  They leave in pursuit of sensual gratification, and it is doubtful that they could even define “wisdom.”  

Progressive education has perfectly followed Romans 1:18-32.  Having rejected their Creator, they put an idol in His place and were handed over to a darkened mind to commit unspeakable sexual immorality.  Not only do they practice this, but they approve of others who practice it as well.  However, our solution is also in Romans 1:18-32.  We must resolve the tension left to us by the Founders about sin and redemption.

That solution builds on what the Founders already knew.  Paul tells us that creation reveals God’s eternal power and divine nature to all persons.  To not understand this is a form of culpable ignorance for which there is no excuse.  Similarly, the law of God is written on the hearts of all humans.  That is, it is part of our very being, our nature, a natural law.  Although this law is summarized in the 10 Commandments in Scripture, it is knowable by all.  This, of course, means that all are responsible.

Unbelief about God is a kind of unbelief that progressive education cannot help with.  It is the unbelief that is the beginning of all other sin.  We can call it the first sin or the root sin from which the branches grow.  It is unbelief that allowed Adam and Eve to accept the lie that by eating the fruit, they would know as God knows.  It is unbelief that keeps a person from seeking God.  It is unbelief that manifests as a failure to understand and to do what is right.

Such unbelief has no excuse, and it cannot be merely educated away.  No government program can touch it.  It compromises the best family unit.  Religion and morality are outward behaviors, and they don’t put a dent in it.  Humans have no power of mind, emotion, or will that can withstand it, let alone free them from it.  Humans can know all kinds of things about God, but they do not believe.  And the reasons they give for their unbelief are laughable.  The most educated minds of our times reject Christ without any good reason.

Is It Worth Keeping?

What, then, is the vision of the United States?  Is there any benefit to it worth preserving?  Much in every way.  The vision of the United States includes the five visions we saw above.  Some of them are an effect of having a solid foundation (economic opportunity), and others are a means to an end (freedom and progress).  The fourth and fifth visions get closest to articulating the unique beliefs about government that make the United States stand out.  

However, the United States is not just a government.  As explained in the Declaration of Independence, it is a set of beliefs about reality, the good life, and our relationship together.  The Founders did not make the mistake of the “solo scriptura” crowd who say all knowledge is from the Bible alone.  Nor did they make the mistake of Thomas Paine and deny that there is special revelation (scripture).  The vision of the United States is to protect against the power of sin in each person while providing room for the one institution that offers freedom from sin.

Freedom from a state church gave us freedom to have church.  The church functions as its own institution.  It is not under the state.  The church has a unique and necessary message: Redemption through the atoning death of Jesus Christ.  It is only the Gospel that can free us from the power of sin.  It is only Christ who can reconcile us to God and overcome our natural alienation from Him (an alienation worse than any alienation Marx ever imagined).  

A Sixth Vision and Another Division

Does this make the United States a Christian nation?  It makes the United States a nation founded on principles from natural theology and natural law consistent with what is taught throughout the Bible.  It makes the United States a nation that allowed for the freedom of the Gospel so that Christians could work toward the Great Commission.  But it is not a nation of Christians, and even those who say they are Christians are in dire need of discipleship.  This is a sixth vision of the United States: Christians in the United States were uniquely situated to preach the Gospel and advance the Great Commission.  The Gospel is common ground because all have sinned and come short the glory of God.

By articulating this vision of the United States, we are running parallel to the question of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should remain a Christian nation.  We are parallel because we certainly affirm the role of Christianity in the vision of what constitutes the United States.  Only a troglodyte recently emerged from a cave could deny that relation. However, my emphasis here is that the United States is an idea.  The particular freedom that it embodies is the freedom to pursue the Great Commission.  We must ask ourselves how well we have done in this.  What the United States has uniquely given us is the freedom to debate this exact thing.

For the person who rejects Christianity, whether in favor of atheism or some other religion, they are free to debate their view of the highest reality.  The goal of debate is not merely to keep ourselves busy on long winter nights.  It is to come to knowledge.  Have we used this freedom to come to know what is the highest reality?  My impression is that we have largely neglected this duty and used our freedom for lesser goals.  The United States is not founded on academic skepticism where we relegate such debates to the realm of “that’s your opinion.”  The United States took a stand and claimed God’s existence is self-evident.

When we neglect a duty, we can anticipate the consequences.  The consequences are that we are badly divided about what constitutes the highest reality and that, therefore, we are equally divided about what counts as our highest good.  Freedom alone cannot keep us together because these competing goods are more often than not at odds; it is one or the other, but it cannot be both.

The divided Founding Fathers about this point (how to overcome the problem of moral evil/sin: progress or Gospel) has handed down to us a number of conflicts.  The going solution now is that progressive education can solve the problem through state funded universities.  However, that hegemony only comes after over two centuries of opportunity to spread the Gospel.  During that time, many new cults sprung up, and members of all of the world’s larger and smaller religions moved to the United States.  This gave Christians an unprecedented opportunity to make a huge advance on the Great Commission.  And yet, largely, Christians have not used our freedom for that purpose.  

As a quick side note, I want to argue that this is not a difficult task.  It is a task that will take work, but it is not intellectually difficult.  Earlier I said that Christianity is unique in its message.  It teaches about God the Creator.  Many of the world’s religions teach that “all is one” and there is no Creator.  Others are polytheistic or animistic.  The cults of the 19th century appeal to new revelation that contradicts both natural theology (God the Father had a Father) or Scripture.  What the Christian needs to show is that God alone has existed from eternity (not all is one), humans have sinned against God, and redemption is only possible through the vicarious atonement of Christ.

The Seventh Vision

So, we come to the seventh and final vision of the United States.  Although the fourth and fifth visions had divisions, and the sixth vision was left neglected, we can still find identity in the final seventh vision.  The United States is a place where we can come and reason together about the most important truths that shape our lives.  This is how we were founded.  The Declaration is a sustained argument.  It presupposes that humans are rational and use Reason to know the truth about origins, human nature, and our purpose.  

This means that not only is the United States an idea, it is a place for ideas.  It is a unique place where the use of Reason is our common ground rather than ethnicity, race, or tradition.  It is a place where anyone can join that debate.  The United States has a message for all people because the United States was founded on natural theology and the freedom to preach the Gospel.

The United States is not built on academic skepticism.  Our freedom is not simply the freedom to disagree.  It is a freedom to pursue the truth.  The United States began by affirming that God the Creator should be known by all.  It began by affirming that any attempt to get human rights and the pursuit of happiness without our Creator is doomed to failure.  The United States presented an argument and asked the world to evaluate it.  We can and should still be doing this.  The argument was not merely about government overreach. It was about our purpose as humans. 

I am very confident that such a debate will affirm the truth of God, of our alienation from God due to sin, and that redemption is only available through the person and work of Jesus Christ.  I am equally confident that neglecting to do this in favor of economic success or sexual licentiousness will bring both inherent natural consequences and the continued judgment of God.  Thomas Jefferson argued that each generation should write its own constitution.  Each generation should recommit itself to Reason, the knowledge of God, and preaching the Gospel.

Rome wasn’t an idea.  Gladiator’s Marcus Aurelius was mistaken.  The proof is that the real Marcus Aurelius had Justin Martyr killed over pagan identity.  However, the United States is uniquely founded on an idea.  If we do not want to lose that identity, we must take responsibility to commit ourselves to the use of Reason to know what is clearly revealed about God and redemption in both natural theology and scripture.  That is the source of our common ground and identity. Whereas the fourth, fifth, and sixth visions had their divisions, on this point, we can and should be united.  A society that rejects the use of Reason to arrive at the knowledge of God is a society that exists with a darkened mind.

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