Who is Your Sovereign?

A sovereign is the supreme lawmaking authority within its jurisdiction. When the Pilgrims left England and came to America, in their hearts they didn't recognize as their sovereign lord the King of England, realizing that anyone who could make it wrong to practice your religion could not truly be the real authority over your actions. The Pilgrims didn't recognize themselves as sovereign lords over themselves, able to determine what was right and wrong for themselves, knowing that this sort of selfishness and vanity would lead away from morality and create an absence of law. When the Pilgrims came to America, they didn't recognize 'no one' as sovereign, realizing that someone had to be responsible for their actions and had to provide law over them or else their community would dissolve into anarchy.

When the Pilgrims arrived in America, they knew in their hearts who their sovereign lord was- they knew who was the real lawmaking authority who watched over them and governed their behavior. Even on the shores of a faraway world, far from the British military or the power of the crown, far beyond the reach of any monarch, in a hostile land filled with potentially hostile people, the Pilgrims sat down and gave thanks to their sovereign lord and savior, to the authority which governed their society, to the source of law and rules and power, and to the one person who could possibly guarantee their safety and salvation. The Pilgrims gave thanks to God and his son, Jesus Christ, recognizing him as their sovereign.

Nolan Finley, writing in the Detroit News today, wrote in Editing God out of history distorts truth:

Ask any grade school kid who the Pilgrims were giving thanks to on the first Thanksgiving and I'll lay you three-to-one odds that the answer you get is, "the Indians." Public education is so obsessed with separation and so uncomfortable with discussions of religion that it has sanitized the unbreakable link between faith and America's founding. Now children are taught that the Pilgrims set the first Thanksgiving dinner for the Native Americans who helped keep them alive during their first harsh year in the New World.

This is more than just a small distortion in the name of political correctness. And it's not one of those Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays issues. Whether you're a believer or non-believer, you should be concerned that God is being written out of this nation's history because doing so will limit our understanding of who we are as a people.

Faith was the driving force in the lives of the Pilgrims. Certainly the Indians helped them through the deprivations of that first year. But the settlers believed it was their prayers that accounted for their survival. And despite the starvation and sickness, they saw this new land as a great gift from God, a place where they were free to practice their religion.

The freedom to worship sparked a hunger for other liberties and created a culture that chafed at submission to arbitrary authority.

The words they used matter. When you edit out "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" from the Declaration of Independence, as President Barack Obama has been doing lately, you lose the understanding that the early Americans were able to take the extraordinary risk of breaking way from their king and taking responsibility for their own governance because they believed God was the only sovereign they were answerable to.

It was a remarkable proposition at a time when the entire rest of the world was under the rule of monarchs.

The belief in America's divine destiny and its providential partnership fueled the nation's sea-to-sea expansion and sparked a missionary zeal for spreading freedom. It gave rise to the notion of America's large and unique place in the world and the theory of American exceptionalism that is also now considered quaint in many quarters.

The irony here is that schools have no problem exposing our flaws in the name of getting history right. It almost relishes defrocking our heroes — Jefferson owned slaves, and so did Washington; Jackson practiced genocide; the pioneers ravaged the land. They do so even to the point of challenging the nation's legitimacy.

But when it comes to discussing the very complex and integral ways religion shaped our history, educators lose their nerve. So they invent more convenient scenarios, such as Pilgrims cooking up the idea of a huge Thanksgiving dinner to honor their Indian benefactors, instead of the God whom they ardently believed led them to this New World and controlled every aspect of their fate.

There's both good and bad in the nation's religious history. Americans have done some noble things in the name of serving God, and they've made some tragic mistakes doing the same. It's not proselytizing to explore that relationship between God and country. It's just telling the truth.

Truth is largely being scrubbed from public schools today, especially in the social studies, in ways big and small, and the fact that almost every single one of my students thinks that Thanksgiving was held to give thanks to the Native-Americans and not God is just one more piece of evidence that our nation is losing its history and its soul, and soon when people ask you who your sovereign is, your answer of "The President of the United States" will not be the same as the Pilgrim's reply of "God and Jesus."