What America Needs Now

May 1, 2002

by Dennis Lombard

A couple of guys named David Manuel and Peter Marshall, back in the mid-1970s, went on a search for the heart and soul of America and chronicled their adventure in a book, entitled The Light and the Glory. It was truly a work of passion because they loved God and country.

They started out with a premise to test with historical scholarship that somewhere, somehow, back in the days before our nation’s formal founding, as white Europeans came to the land of the native Americans, God had a purpose in all of this people movement. Furthermore, they felt sure, but wanted to verify it as more than just a religious prejudice, that some of those folks actually had made a covenant with God.

Far fetched premises these were by present-day 21st century standards. Our national standards, if we have any left, are supposedly set for us by Dan Quayle’s "cultural elite," the jackals of the biased press, the power brokers of the political parties, godless educational theorists, and the daily trash-purveyors of TV and movies. The vast majority of our 21st century "cultural elite" would angrily denounce any such premises that God had anything to do with the founding of our country, or that the primary movers sought religious freedom let alone sought to honor God on these shores.

Moreover, would such evidence, if indeed it could be found, offer any sense of direction for our nation today? Even then, back in the 1970s, morally conservative people were crying out about the moral slide of the nation and its culture. In our political history, we’ve had many hopeful catch phrases such as the New Deal, the New Frontier, "Help is on the way," but politics is not our salvation. Politics is letting us down, to the consternation of the Religious Right. Where indeed will our help come from?

My own premise here - and you can begin to see where I am going with this - is that our nation does indeed need renewal of some sort. And if there were ever any kind of covenant with God made by any of us here, we need a New Covenant. Alan Keyes refers to it as a Third Founding, hearkening back to our First Founding by George Washington, who set this unique experiment on its feet, and our Second Founding by Abraham Lincoln, whom we credit with renewing our nation’s creed when we had abandoned it to the breaking point and civil war.

Here are some tidbits that Messrs. Marshall and Manuel came up with:

Christopher Columbus, that currently out-of-favor white European male, wrote: "It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel His hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the West Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me."

In the Boston Public Library they found a dusty volume, entitled Redeemer Nation, by Ernest Lee Tuveson, and other history volumes in which they ran across repeated definitive statements that "the first settlers consciously thought of themselves as a people called into a continuation of the covenant relationship with God and one another which Israel had entered into. "For the Lord God is bringing you into a good land... ." They often quoted from the Bible (Deuteronomy 8:7,9) and felt certain the scripture applied to their adventure also.

Remarkable Providences, a volume by John Demos, contained first-hand accounts of "wonder-working providences" in the lives of settlers at Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony. There was no doubt among early pioneers that God had His hand on them.

They moved on to the famous Sterling Library at Yale where rare books were preserved in reverent atmosphere, thousands of ancient volumes in air-conditioned glass cubes – a veritable storehouse of man’s intellect. In a personal journal of Columbus, the explorer told of a half-waking dream in which a stern voice rebuked him for self-pity, reminding him that God had singled him out for the honor of bearing the Light of Christ to a new world.

On and on their search went, and they came to some conclusions:

"First, God had put a specific ’call’ on this country and the people who were to inhabit it ...

"Second, this call was to be worked out in terms of the settlers’ covenant with God, and with each other ..."

Thirdly, "These covenants provided the pattern for the first successful civil governments in the western hemisphere ... the purest and most successful form that democracy has ever taken ..."

And "God did keep His end of the bargain ... and He did so on both an individual and a corporate basis."

All of that can be an astounding discovery for those of us steeped in the post-modernism of today coming at us from all of our cultural sources – education, media, and entertainment. I have only scratched the surface here and highly recommend to all of you that your read The Light and the Glory and two later volumes about later periods of America history. It will truly be like re-discovering America yourself!

You will come away convinced as I am that we do indeed need a New Covenant (or a Third Founding as it were) in our beloved nation. We need to re-establish the historical fact that we are a nation founded upon God and that we are the last best hope of mankind in a world gone mad with terrorism. It is our only way out!

I pray that God will covenant with us once again – to use our nation in a broad spiritual renewal, to lead a lost world back to God (and out of my own faith I’ll add, to Christ). There is no question in my mind that "revival begins in the house of the Lord," and that American Christian churches bear much responsibility for the moral slide of America – and they need revival soon! Jews can relate to this seeking of renewal (See Jeremiah 31:33). They need a Nehemiah today to rebuild their own walls. I am confident that if American Jews can find the same relationship with God as David or Joseph, they too will find their Messiah.

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© 2002 Home Times Family Newspaper

Dennis Lombard has been a community newspaper editor since 1972, and is currently editor and publisher of Home Times Family Newspaper, a traditional conservative monthly which he founded in 1990. He resides in Lake Worth, Florida with his wife, Mary, and they have seven children, 13 grandchildren, and one great-grandson. Home Times, soon going weekly, serves Palm Beach and Martin Counties in Florida and the nation by mail subscription, covering world, national, and local people and issues, home and family, arts and entertainment, and religion, all with a traditional conservative worldview. For a free copy call toll-free: 888-439-3509 or go to http://www.hometimes.org.

Send the author an E mail at Lombard@ConservativeTruth.org.

For more of Dennis' articles, visit his archives.