Has America Lost Her Identty?

You can imagine the scene. It was outside Independence Hall as the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended; the people were crowding in to hear the news- a nation on the cusp of establishing a great destiny- as Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation, Franklin responded,
"A republic, if you can keep it." While conservative activists, political pundits and the like never truly believed we would have this discussion, the time has come. The line is drawn and Benjamin Franklin’s words echo as the prophetic voice of complacence and apathy. We see America losing her identity.To understand our identity we must first understand our foundation. America is different from every other nation in that we were not established through a common ethnicity rather a set of principals and ideals. A common ethnicity is simply perpetuated by birth while ideas must be passed through generations to ensure the foundation remains firm. But what happens when we miss a generation or allow the perversion of truth to corrupt the generation thus creating a gap between our foundation and our future? To answer that question we look to our public education.Today a majority of eighth graders are not able to accurately explain the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. Only 5% of seniors can tell us how the presidential power can be checked by Congress and the Supreme Court. God has been expressly forbidden within the school halls and rooms with the few exceptions of after-the-fact acts of violence. It seems we need Him to pick up the pieces of broken lives rather than establish a foundation that would prevent these acts of violence altogether. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a founding father, said it best, “I do not mean to exclude books of history, poetry, or even fables for our schools. They may and should be read frequently by our young people, but if the Bible is made to give way to them altogether, I foresee that it will be read in a short time only in churches and in a few years will probably be found only in the offices of magistrates and in courts of justices.” Dr. Rush realized the importance of the Bible as the foundation of teaching. He also accurately predicts the demise of the Bible as a societal influencer should it be removed from the schools. We see today’s public education as a broken system of government waste and bureaucracy but do we even understand why we have a public education system? As the early pioneers were fleeing England and Europe due to religious persecution, they established a country built on principals of Jesus Christ- servantry, freedom, truth, and evangelism. Under the repressive rule of religious leaders in Europe, the common people did not have access to the word of God in their daily lives. It was this access that opened their eyes to truth and stirred a revolution.As the revolution builds and culminates into the Declaration of Independence and American Revolution, you find a new nation determined to ensure the past repressions of government does not infiltrate to ideology of the new nation. They determined the education of future generations would be critical and the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1692 was passed to establish a system to teach all children the principles of religion, as well as, a civic understanding of the laws that governed them. An excerpt from the law summarizes its intent, “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so that at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors. – it is therefore ordered…” The founders of public education wanted to ensure every child had the opportunity to know the scripture. Why? Our government and legal system is based on scripture. Without knowledge of scriptures man cannot test the law against the scripture and secure the stature of the Constitution. They believed the best way to safeguard the liberties sought in the new world was to educate the children, thus giving them the knowledge that would protect them from the threat of governmental tyranny. Also, they believed the Bible must be the primary mechanism for learning.For decades our education has been hijacked by a progressive thinking sect dedicated to removing the very essence of knowledge from our public education. With a collapse in the effectiveness of America’s public education it is easy to identify how America has lost her identity. The question moving forward is- Can America regain her identity as that great nation built on set of ideas encompassing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness attached to the foundation built by our founding fathers through the Word of God?