{"id":2164,"date":"2007-01-03T22:22:03","date_gmt":"2007-01-04T03:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/03\/america-founded-to-be-free-not-secular\/"},"modified":"2007-01-03T22:22:03","modified_gmt":"2007-01-04T03:22:03","slug":"america-founded-to-be-free-not-secular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/america-founded-to-be-free-not-secular\/","title":{"rendered":"America founded to be free, not secular"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.townhall.com\/columnists\/DennisPrager\/2007\/01\/03\/america_founded_to_be_free,_not_secular\">Townhall.com<\/a> Dennis Prager January 3, 2007<\/p>\n<p>Contrary to what you learned at college, America from its inception has been a religious country, and was designed to be one. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>As the greatest foreign observer of America, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, noted in his &#8220;Democracy in America,&#8221; &#8220;Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.&#8221; Or, as the great British historian Paul Johnson has just written: &#8220;In [George] Washington&#8217;s eyes, at least, America was in no sense a secular state,&#8221; and &#8220;the American Revolution was in essence the political and military expression of a religious movement.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>In fact, the Founders regarded America as a Second Israel, in Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s words, the &#8220;Almost Chosen&#8221; People. This self-identification was so deep that Thomas Jefferson, today often described as not even a Christian, wanted the seal of the United States to depict the Jews leaving Egypt at the splitting of the sea. Just as the Jews left Egypt, Americans left Europe. <\/p>\n<p>There has been a concerted, and successful, attempt over the last generations to depict America as always having been a secular country and many of its Founders as deists, a term misleadingly defined as irreligious people who believed in an impersonal god. <\/p>\n<p>. . . <a href=\"http:\/\/www.townhall.com\/columnists\/DennisPrager\/2007\/01\/03\/america_founded_to_be_free,_not_secular\">more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Townhall.com Dennis Prager January 3, 2007 Contrary to what you learned at college, America from its inception has been a religious country, and was designed to be one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}