Exchange Club, March 28, 2022, "One Nation Under God"

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

I am honored to be in Savannah and to already be a part of this community. My boys and I attended the fair last fall and I remember when it was because it was a Braves playoff game against the Dodgers that we lost! But, we know the rest of the story and are thrilled with the outcome. Oh yeah, and your fast pass option was fantastic. I don’t know if y’all noticed it, but my boys remember that at least two of the workers at the fair had the name of J E S U S. They kept telling me, “Daddy, Jesus is here!” To which I responded, “He is!”

At the National Cathedral in 2018, historian John Meachem eulogized George Herbert Walker Bush.

I believe that it was one of the most powerful eulogies I’ve ever experienced. It was personal, powerful, and eloquent. Amongst what Meachem said about “H.W.” was this… “The story was almost over even before it had fully begun. Shortly after dawn on Saturday, September 2, 1944, Lieutenant Junior Grade George Herbert Walker Bush, joined by two crew mates, took off from the USS San Jacinto to attack a radio tower on Chichijima. As they approached the target, the air was heavy with flack. The plane was hit. Smoke filled the cockpit; flames raced across the wings. "My god," Lieutenant Bush thought, "this thing's gonna go down." Yet he kept the plane in its 35-degree dive, dropped his bombs, and then roared off out to sea, telling his crew mates to hit the silk. Following protocol, Lieutenant Bush turned the plane so they could bail out.

Only then did Bush parachute from the cockpit. The wind propelled him backward, and he gashed his head on the tail of the plane as he flew through the sky. He plunged deep into the ocean, bobbed to the surface, and flopped onto a tiny raft. His head bleeding, his eyes burning, his mouth and throat raw from salt water, the future 41st President of the United States was alone. Sensing that his men had not made it, he was overcome. He felt the weight of responsibility as a nearly physical burden. And he wept. Then, at four minutes shy of noon, a submarine emerged to rescue the downed pilot. George Herbert Walker Bush was safe. The story, his story and ours, would go on by God's grace.”

A staple of “Christian America” history is the claim that “half,” or “twenty-nine” of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had “seminary” or “Bible college” degrees.

This claim shows up in Fourth of July sermons and even the occasional megachurch pastor’s tweet.

The claim is, on a literal basis, easy to refute. In fact, there were no seminaries in America, in a modern sense of a graduate school of theology, until 1807, when Andover-Newton Theological School was founded. (ANTS was originally a traditionalist Calvinist school founded in opposition to Harvard’s theological liberalism. In 2016, having long since become theologically liberal, the ANTS campus was closed, and the school was folded into Yale Divinity School.) Princeton Theological Seminary, arguably the most influential American seminary of the 19th century, was founded as a separate institution from Princeton’s undergraduate college in 1812.

If you wanted “graduate” theological education in the 1700s in America, you could stay on for extra study with someone like Princeton’s John Witherspoon, which is what James Madison did (he may have been considering the pastorate at the time). But Witherspoon is really the only signer who had a recognizable seminary education, since he did graduate study in theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland prior to coming to America.

In the 19th century, “Bible colleges” began to appear alongside liberal arts universities. The two took an increasingly separate path in America. Nyack College (originally called the Missionary Training Institute) was arguably the first such college, founded by A. B. Simpson in 1882 in New York City, before relocating to the New York village of Nyack in 1897. The most recognizable Bible college in America was probably Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, founded in 1887.

Some of the leading Founders, such as Franklin and Washington, did not go to college, but virtually all of them had a level of Bible literacy that far surpasses that of the average American today. The self-described “Deist” Franklin grew up in a Boston Puritan family, and from a young age knew the entirety of Scripture quite intimately and could quote it at will. Even a skeptic like Thomas Jefferson was virtually obsessed with the Bible, which accounts for his two compilations of the Gospels, which we call the “Jefferson Bible.” Jefferson avidly read the Bible and even the Septuagint in Greek, but his multiple-language editions of the Gospels removed most of the miracles, including the resurrection.

New York founder John Jay not only became chief justice of the Supreme Court, but also a president of the American Bible Society. Those founders who did go to college received a classical and Christian education, together, as most of the original colonial colleges (Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, Princeton, and so on) were designed in part to train pastors. To cite just one example of the purposes of the colonial colleges, early students at Yale were to “consider the main end” of their schooling “to know God in Jesus Christ and answerably to lead a godly sober life.”

The belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated in the 1930s when businessmen enlisted religious activists in their fight against FDR’s New Deal.

Corporations from General Motors to Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen, encouraging them to attack the New Deal as a program of “pagan statism” that perverted the central principle of Christianity: the sanctity and salvation of the individual. Their campaign for “freedom under God” culminated in the election of their close ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.

But this apparent triumph had an ironic twist. In Eisenhower’s hands, a religious movement born in opposition to the government was transformed into one that fused faith and the federal government as never before. During the 1950s, Eisenhower revolutionized the role of religion in American political culture, inventing new traditions from inaugural prayers to the National Prayer Breakfast. Meanwhile, Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s first official motto. With private groups joining in, church membership soared to an all-time high of 69%. For the first time, Americans began to think of their country as an officially Christian nation.

While the idea of being a Christian nation and One Nation Under God may have originated as a political ploy to kill proposed legislation, as Romans 8:28 tells us, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

My Grandfather, Francis Everette Allen, was the postmaster in Cairo for many years.

He was humble man who knew nothing other than service to his community and his local church, Cairo First Methodist. But what most people did not know about him is that he served his country in WWII. During his training in Louisiana, due to mechanical failure, he had to parachute out of one of the planes that he flew in. Some of his crew mates didn’t make it. A short time later, he was assigned to a B-17 bomber. As a member of the 463rd “Swoosh Group”. After multiple short term deployments, he was assigned to a southern Italy airbase formerly occupied by the Germans. The bombers had been in Italy just one month and had flown seven missions when on the eighth, the unthinkable happened. On a bombing mission to Vienna, Austia, their plane sustained anti-aircraft fire. With the plane descending to the earth, a German fighter plane circled the aircraft and continued to unload bullets into the downed plane. The nine crew members parachuted out upon Hungarian civilians who watched and waited for their landing. The youngest crew member who suffered a broken leg was transported to a local hospital while my grandfather was severely beaten. When Francis regained consciousness, He saw that the other Americans had not been harmed. At one point, he was told to run so that he could be shot in the back. He did not run and eventually was shielded by a Hungarian soldier. With their hands chained together,

they were loaded onto a truck and taken on a four day journey to Gyer, Hungary and on to Budapest where they would be incarcerated in Budapest penitentiary, a jail for foreign political prisoners. They were well fed until eventually they were moved by the Germans in railroad cars onto Northern Germany. There were 10,000 American soldiers there in a 20 acre compound. The Red Cross provided some food, clothing during the Cold Winter months, while the Germans primarily provided barley and potatoes.

Francis Allen would be a prisoner of war for 299 days and it culminated in a three month death march as the Allies closed in from multiple directions. My grandfather said that they received word that it would either be the British or the Soviets who would liberate them, and they prayed that the British liberated them first. They feared Soviet liberation might just mean further captivity. Luckily, the British did liberate them but told them not to leave the camp until it was safe as there were still snipers throughout the area, and they could be shot dead if they did not remain in the camp a little while longer.

I had the privilege of being close to him in his later years. The Bible was always on the coffee table in the living room. He taught the Fellowship Sunday School class and was chairman of every committee in his church. As I think back about my most fond memories, I remember him have perspective. Not much rattled him and he always wanted everyone to get along as he served. Maybe that’s one of the greatest lessons that we’ve lost as The Greatest Generation has gone onto glory in recent years…

A 96 year old lady came into my office the other day and said, “We are a more polarized nation than at any other time in my lifetime.”

She’s got the perspective of WWII and the Cold War, and I believe that she’s right. One Nation Under God for me means that we must become a nation yet again that goes to our knees together not to ask God to bless what we’ve already done, but to ask God to show us where we should go, what we should do, and then to join Him in His work. H.W. and Francis Allen knew sacrifice and servanthood. I pray that we do not have to pay again the extremely high cost of learning the lessons of sacrifice and servanthood. But, history is known to repeat itself. And right now in Ukraine, what is going on has the reverberations of a time long ago, both in WWI and WWII. God can redeem any soul and circumstance. It is my prayer that as a nation and as a world, we are realize that real peace and lasting peace is only found as we trust in Him. One Nation Under God… Dear Lord, let it be!