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Friday, February 10, 2012

What Made This Country Tick

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I focus on the topic of integration of biblical beliefs and work. Work of all kinds. Not just business work, but art work, engineering work, scientific work and house work. One area of work I have not yet focused on is political work.

Don't worry. I'm not going to write about candidates, or make pronouncements about one person's qualifications over another. But I do want to focus on the integration of Christian belief and politics in general, because this is an area of enormous confusion. Some may ask, "Is it even legal?"

In 1831, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to find out what made this country tick. He published his findings in Democracy in AmericaBelow are quotes taken from page 281-291 in the George Dearborn & Co. edition, published in 1838:

"From the earliest settlement of the emigrants, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved…I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion; for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society.…The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other....Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country....America is still the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men’s souls; and nothing better demonstrates how useful and natural it is to man, since the country where it now has the widest sway is both the most enlightened and the freest."

What!?!

Stay tuned. 

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