It was pretty clear to the founders that the United States of America was “God’s idea in history,” Eric Metaxas, author of the upcoming book Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
Speaking with Host Matthew Boyle roughly two months from America’s semiquincentennial celebration, Metaxas walked through what he believes Americans must do to ensure that America lives on another 250 years and beyond.
“I think the one thing that comes out which is kind of – it’s going to be shocking to some people, certainly to leftists or secularists. It seems pretty clear that every single person involved in the birth of America 250 years ago, believed this was God’s idea in history,” Metaxas began.
“This was not just some, you know, twist or turn in history. This was God’s idea. Thomas Paine puts it clearly that it’s the birthday of a new world. Now, if you take God out of that equation, that becomes utopianist lunacy that leads to the bloodbath of the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution. But if God is in the middle of it, if you’re submitted to the king, capital S, the sovereign, that’s, you know – Samuel Adams refers to him that way – if we are looking directly to God, which is what all the founders saw, this is not being taught,” he said, noting that while many celebrate the birth of democracy in Greece, the reality is “none of that holds a candle to what we have the United States of America.”
“And the founders, John Adams, again, more than anybody, they saw this, that this is a new day in the history of the world. So, this is not like other empires. This is a new way of where people could actually govern themselves,” he said.
However, the founders only saw it as possible because they looked to God to give them strength and virtue. That, Metaxas said, is simply a reality that secularists have to acknowledge, even if they do not like it. Samuel Adams, he continued, made that abundantly clear in a speech, where he said they had restored the sovereign capital ‘S.’
“We no longer have a tyrant, a monarch, King George the Third. We now look directly to God as our sovereign, and that is just,” Metaxas said. “It’s everywhere in our founding, and they all understood this. They didn’t say, oh, separation of church and state… they understood that we need robust faith and virtue, and that’s how you get actual liberty, and you never coerce faith.”
Those realities have been “aggressively pushed out in the last 50 or so years,” he added, emphasizing the importance of the nation as a whole looking to God again to continue on. Further, he pointed out that even the “least religious” founders understood this on a level.
“And even the least religious, Jefferson and Franklin, they understood this. When they were asked to design a new seal for the new country, both of them came up with images of the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai. And I think, look again, you don’t have to like it. You don’t have to agree with it. But the point is, this is our history. … All of that generation understood it. So, if you want to know, how do you get liberty? That’s how they got liberty. And if we want to restore this nation, if we want to have more liberty, not less liberty,” he said, adding, “We have to acknowledge this. These are the roots of it.”
If we do not acknowledge that, he warned, America could become like the very countries our ancestors ran away from.
He added, “I hope people will come to a new understanding that we’ll talk about this more openly. Because as we drift away, we see Europe drifting away from liberty. Why do you drift away toward big state authoritarianism? Because you forget about virtue, you forget about faith. When those things are really at the center, as they were in the 13 Colonies, you get more liberty. It’s kind of … an amazing paradox.”
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