As rioters in America ransack cities, topple statues, and disparage our heritage, a key quadricentennial is happening largely unheralded. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the momentous voyage of the Mayflower, which set sail from England on September 6, 1620 for what its passengers deemed to be, as recorded by William Bradford, “those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation…. It was granted that the dangers were great, but not desperate. The difficulties were many, but not invincible…; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome.”
The city of Leiden had proven not to be the spiritual haven they expected, and before sailing back to England to continue on to America, they engaged in a day of fasting and “pouring out prayers to the Lord with great fervency, mixed with abundance of tears.” With renewed faith in their Creator, they then “left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years, but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”
Sailing on a northern route across the Atlantic through treacherous storms, the ship made landfall at Cape Cod on November 11. The passengers had no doubt about the power that had preserved them. “Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land,” Bradford recorded, “they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof.”
Thus began the drama of faith that would eventually forge a new nation under God. As explained on the official Plymouth website, the Pilgrims arrived “in hopes of making a better life for themselves and their children while being able to worship freely and in peace. Undoubtedly the most famous colonists in world history, their faith and fortitude are legendary. Their perseverance laid the cornerstone of a new Nation,” and their “courage, gratitude to God, and love for one another still inspire people today…. They crafted a region rich in intellect, spirituality, self-government and commerce; a place of creative splendors whose influence on American culture and the world is inestimable.”
To forget the Pilgrims’ ardent faith in God would be to forget the very foundation of America, whose Founders not only acknowledged Creator-endowed unalienable rights but did so in the Declaration of Independence by “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” and “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” Their faith was not in vain, as attested by General Washington following the miraculous victory against far superior British forces. When showered with praise by his grateful countrymen, he refused to take credit: “The praise is due to the Grand Architect of the Universe,” he insisted. On another occasion he explained, “Disposed, at every suitable opportunity to acknowledge our infinite obligations to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe for rescuing our Country from the brink of destruction, I cannot fail at his time to ascribe all the honor of our late successes to the same glorious Being.”
And if that glorious Being is not expressly mentioned in the Constitution (over whose creation Washington presided), His reality is certainly presupposed. The Declaration’s insistence that the purpose of government is to “secure” God-given rights is echoed in the preamble of the Constitution, whose stated purpose is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty.” As pointed out by Kevin Seamus Hasson, “Blessings was not an empty word in the eighteenth century. Nor did it equate simply with ‘good luck.’ A blessing was a gift from the Creator. It needed only to be secured by law.”
The upshot is clear, as expressed by the United States Supreme Court (in the 1952 decision of Zorach v. Clauson): “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” And should we ever forget the God who gave us liberty, it would be to our peril, as the Founders warned. “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” for “it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand,” cautioned John Adams. President Washington’s Farewell Address was equally clear: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
Well did Justice Antonin Scalia remind us (in his dissenting opinion in the 1992 Lee v. Weisman decision), “Religious men and women of almost all denominations have felt it necessary to acknowledge and beseech the blessing of God as a people, and not just as individuals, because they believe in the ‘protection of divine Providence,’ as the Declaration of Independence put it, not just for individuals but for societies; because they believe God to be, as Washington’s first Thanksgiving Proclamation put it, the ‘Great Lord and Ruler of Nations.’”
For those in America today who believe otherwise, we must protect their divinely endowed right of free speech as carefully as we protect our own, even though they deny the very foundation of their liberty. What we cannot countenance is unlawful upheaval that violates our divinely endowed rights as it seeks to denigrate and obliterate our sacred heritage, nor can we accept the lie that our heritage does not matter. It is time to remember and remind our fellow citizens of the foundation of faith in God laid by the courageous passengers on the Mayflower and continued by those who, as Lincoln declared, “brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It is time to assess whether we, like Lincoln’s colleagues, “have forgotten God” and “forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us.” And it is time to recall Rudyard Kipling’s words that might well serve as a prayer at this critical hour in our history:
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!