Vol.10

Volume Ten:

How thirteen colonies created a nation that no one foresaw

After winning a war they were expected to lose, and achieving a unity that seemed unachievable, they fashioned a constitution that still endures

The United States of America, perhaps the most extraordinary nation ever produced by the human race, has about it one rarely mentioned idiosyncrasy. Although it has in many respects more than fulfilled the soaring vision of the people who founded it, the twentieth-century result of their great labor would in all likelihood bewilder and horrify the founders themselves.

What would the Puritans, fervently opposed to Catholicism, have thought had they known that in two hundred years Catholicism would be by far the numerically strongest denomination in their new country? What would a pope like Pius IX, who condemned the whole concept of a separation between church and state, have said if he had known that the United States, a country whose courts had accepted and asserted it, would see Catholicism grow so spectacularly? How would many of the founders have reacted if informed that the clause they diligently strove to insert in the constitution to protect freedom of religion as vital to republican democracy would be used by the courts some two centuries later to severely restrict the role of religion in public life?

In short, the country that emerged from the conflict of ideas, loyalities, and cannon fire in North America in the closing decades of the eighteenth century would confound all expectations. How this happened history can recount. Why it happened as it did, one could literally and without blasphemy say, God only knows—but most American Christians would probably agree that God must have had a hand in it somewhere. Thus begins the eighth chapter of We the People.

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The Christians: We the People - Vol.10: Eighth Chapter

Foreword to We the People

This volume, the tenth in our series of twelve, introduces in its last chapter the new challenge confronting Christians today, at the dawn of the third Christian millennium. For Christians of the twenty-first century, “the world” that Jesus Christ enjoined us to convert no longer consists of strange people living in strange lands beyond the seas. Today the nonbeliever also lives in the house next door, or sits at the next desk in the office, or is the earnest young public school teacher in charge of our children’s education. We live in the so-called “post-Christian era.” But its origins are not recent—the descent into post-Christianity dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We therefore begin the description of this descent, showing how and why it occurred, in the final chapter of the present volume and will continue its story in volumes 11 and 12.

For this reason also, we have begun this tenth book with the account of the Thirty Years’ War, surely one of the most deplorable and tragic events in the entire history of Christianity and a major contributing factor in the wide intellectual rejection of the faith that led to post-Christianity. Could that war have been avoided? Were the Protestants to blame? Were the Catholics to blame? Were both to blame? How can we ensure that such a catastrophe never recurs? It is the function of history to seek answers to such questions.

After that war, however, much becomes warmly positive in this volume’s two centuries. Out of the conflicts born in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, described in the previous volume, there emerged first in Britain and then in Britain’s American colonies the phenomenon of representative government. In the years that followed, this would lead to the establishment of what Sir Winston Churchill called the “Great Democracies.” Ironically, few if any of the founders of this movement on either continent embraced democracy as a desirable goal. Government by the people? Some were volubly aghast at the very thought. Yet this was the road they were following, and this the destination to which, through twists and turns, it took them.

Was modern democracy therefore a product of the Christian faith? Yes and no. Many of the leaders, particularly in America, were Deists, not Christians. However, every moral principle they sought to embody in law and in government derived directly from the New Testament, which no doubt explains why the establishment of democracy in the modern world was confined to countries with Christian origins. The great civilizations of the East knew nothing of it.

There were other heartening events—such as the powerful preaching of the redoubtable John Wesley, who brought Christ to the tens of thousands of dispossessed farmers thronging city slums after the sheep enclosures cost them their land; or the campaigns of the tireless Vincent de Paul, who recruited some of the richest and most aristocratic ladies of Paris to work among the destitute and ill; or the missions of the fearless Jesuit fathers, who gave their lives in an attempt to turn North America’s first nations into a veritable kingdom of Christ.

But perhaps most delightful of all is the astonishing development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of congregational hymn-singing and—more astonishing still—of great community choirs brought into being by the three creators of choral masterpieces like the oratorio: the firmly Protestant Johann Sebastian Bach, the vibrantly Catholic Franz Joseph Haydn, and the show business tsar of the London opera scene, George Frederick Handel, who unquestionably found personal faith in Christ when he composed for the world the greatest oratorio of all, the Messiah. Finally, this volume marks one further milestone. In 1683 the Turks made what would prove to be their last and most formidable strike at Vienna. Had it succeeded, and it very nearly did, all western Europe could easily have fallen into the dar al-Islam. But it did not succeed, and Turkey began its long decline, arguably qualifying the Siege of Vienna as one of the most thrilling stories in Christian history. It begins on page 152.

Ted Byfield