Has America Forgotten God?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concern for America to return to God. In the spring of 1863 – several months prior to the famous Gettysburg Address, “President Abraham Lincoln declared April 30 ‘a day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer’ and called on Americans to ‘abstain from secular pursuits’ in favor of ‘acts of devotion and public worship.’ According to Scott Raines, this is a “very foreign tune from today’s obsession with separating church and state.” 

In his declaration, Lincoln stated: “We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. … We have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!”

At a time of costly, violent political tensions and national division, and an increasing sentiment of secularism, the president in that “foreign” era of United States history sought to aim the vision of his people not to himself, nor to the legal system, or even to the body politic, but to God – a foreign notion indeed.

However distant or strange the past may seem relative to the present, our nation is still experiencing many of the same problems as did the “foreign lands” of Civil War America. Though – thankfully – nothing nearly as violent, there is still a deepening political and social divide both felt and seen across the American landscape.

A study out of Pew Research Center showed that when Americans were “asked to sum up their feelings about politics in a word or phrase, very few (2%) use positive terms; 79% use negative or critical words, with ‘divisive’ and ‘corrupt’ comping up most frequently.” In terms of political tension and division, perhaps things aren’t so different from those foreign lands after all. What is different, however, is our approach to healing our divide, and where we turn to for help.

Most of our Founding Fathers, and many, if not most of our past presidents (including George Washington, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, to name a few would often (and publicly) look to God to guide and direct, and even course-correct, our country. Today, this seems almost unthinkable; our overwhelmingly secular society wouldn’t allow for it. But this is precisely what we need, and perhaps what most Americans hope for.

Like the foreign country of yesterday, a large majority of Americans (3 in 4) still espouse religious affiliation, despite the alarming increases in “religious nones.” On a global scale, “more than half of American adults (55%) say they pray daily, compared with 25% in Canada, and 18% in Australia and 6% in Great Britain. (The average European country stands at 22%).” In many ways, we are the land of the free because we are faithful.

America will remain free for as long as the majority of Americans worship the God of the land who is Jesus Christ. We must humble ourselves, or we will be humbled. We must turn to God, or He will not heed our cries for help when we need Him.