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A series of fascinating books on those remarkable people called Christians, who say they have been born anew through the power of a man called Jesus Christ, and who have shaped the course of human history for the last two thousand years. They include emperors and peasants, kings and transients, extraordinary women and challenging men, people of great wealth and people sworn to a lifetime of poverty, scientists, poets, politicians and musicians, but all holding one captivating thing in common, a deep faith in, and commitment to, the man called Jesus, who regards them all as his brothers and sisters. Here is their story, told as it has never been told before, an epic like Lord of the Rings, but soundly historical, factual and true, with people so vibrant, so real that they will make you question the depth of your own commitments, and examine your own life in the light that shines from theirs across the ages. See how they met the horrendous difficulties that so often beset them, how they regarded death as a triviality and life as an eternal phenomenon. But see also how they were far from infallible, frequently went astray and erred seriously. Yet they were always called back, and step by painful step laid the very foundations of the society we live in today–a society we could delude ourselves into thinking we cannot lose. If you are a Christian, then you are one of these people, and this is your story, the story of your family, your brothers and sisters. Meet them. For you too have wars to win and souls to save, and they may show you how.
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How thirteen colonies created a nation that no one foresaw
After winning a war they were expected to lose, and achieving a unity that seemed unachievable, they fashioned a constitution that still endures
The United States of America, perhaps the most extraordinary nation ever produced by the human race, has about it one rarely mentioned idiosyncrasy. Although it has in many respects more than fulfilled the soaring vision of the people who founded it, the twentieth-century result of their great labor would in all likelihood bewilder and horrify the founders themselves.
What would the Puritans, fervently opposed to Catholicism, have thought had they known that in two hundred years Catholicism would be by far the numerically strongest denomination in their new country? What would a pope like Pius IX, who condemned the whole concept of a separation between church and state, have said if he had known that the United States, a country whose courts had accepted and asserted it, would see Catholicism grow so spectacularly? How would many of the founders have reacted if informed that the clause they diligently strove to insert in the constitution to protect freedom of religion as vital to republican democracy would be used by the courts some two centuries later to severely restrict the role of religion in public life?
In short, the country that emerged from the conflict of ideas, loyalities, and cannon fire in North America in the closing decades of the eighteenth century would confound all expectations. How this happened history can recount. Why it happened as it did, one could literally and without blasphemy say, God only knows—but most American Christians would probably agree that God must have had a hand in it somewhere. Thus begins the eighth chapter of We the People.
© Copyright 2010 Society to Explore and Record Christian History