The Faith of our Fathers
From Dr. Bill Bright
Founder and Chairman
Campus Crusade for Christ International
Dear friends:
There is a distortion of history frequently heard that our nation does not have biblical or Christian roots and that our Founding Fathers were mostly deists and not Christians. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Careful research has found just the opposite -- that most early American leaders were dedicated, Bible-believing Christians who took their faith seriously.
Few people know that 52 of the 55 framers of the Constitution were avowed biblical followers of Jesus. Almost to a man, our Founding Fathers sought to serve and glorify Jesus Christ with their lives. According to a University of Houston study, 34 percent of all the quotes of the Founding Fathers came from the Bible. Another 60 percent of their quotes from men who used the Bible to form their conclusions. A total of 94 percent of all their quotes either directly or indirectly cited the Bible.
A good example is the father of our country and first President, George Washington, who said, "It is impossible to rightly govern ... without God and the Bible."
James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, said, "We have staked the whole future of American civilization... upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
The Founding Fathers got most of their ideas about government from people such as William Blackstone, the famous English legal genius, who got most of their ideas from the Bible. Even the concepts of private property and free enterprise are biblically based.
Historian C. Gregg Singer points out, "Christian theism had so permeated the colonial mind that it continued to guide even those who had come toregard the gospel with indifference or even hostility."
For example, it is true that a few of the founders were not Bible-believing Christians. However, the influence of the Bible was so great that even those who were not believers had a biblical world view. Benjamin Franklin is not known to be a biblical believer, but he believed in God's sovereignty and intervention in human affairs, and it was God who gave us our nation, and he quoted Scripture. Thomas Jefferson believed the same.
Yours for fulfilling the Great Commission
each year until our Lord returns,
Bill Bright
Dr. Bill Bright is founder and chairman of Campus Crusade for Christ, an
organization which began as a campus ministry in 1951 and now has more
than 25,000 full-time staff and 553,000 trained volunteer staff in 196
countries in areas representing 99.6 percent of the world's population.
In the past 50 years, Campus Crusade for Christ has seen approximately 6
billion exposures to the gospel worldwide. The film, "JESUS," which
Bright conceived and funded through Campus Crusade for Christ, is the
most widely viewed film ever produced. Since its use began in 1980, the
film has been translated into more than 689 languages and viewed by more
than 4.5 billion people in 234 countries. Dr. Bright is also the author
of more than fifty books.
Copyright (c) 2002, Bill Bright. All rights reserved. However, readers
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