In Reply to: Re: Thank you, PW & RM posted by Radio Man on December 02, 2006 at 09:18:28:
I think it helps to understand the Christian heritage of citizens that has come down to us through the Puritans, who called themselves anabaptists. This heritage is now more widely recognized in the US as Baptist or evangelical or fundamentalist or Bible believing. Many of these Christians don't consider themselves Protestants in the sense that they represent or grew out of a reform movement within a state institutionalized church.
Keep in mind, all official forms of Christianity were state institutions after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the 3rd century. From that point on, Christians who didn't sign on with the beliefs and practices of the state-sanctioned religion were persecuted and deemed heretical. Actually, some of these Christians were heretical, but then, the same could be said of people in the official state-sanctioned churches by the middle ages.
Understanding the role of the Puritan movement in the founding of the US is extremely important inasmuch as the independent-minded and individualistic values of the anabaptists permitted the descendents of these European immigrants to pioneer vast areas of the U.S. to settlement and Christian civilization. The anabaptists were run out of England & Europe as trouble-makers because they held so strongly to the separation of church and state. They found refuge in the the New World, which they saw as the promised land for the people of God who held the new convenant in Christ. So they created colonies that became larer communities that were governed by God's laws and traditional Biblically-based values about marriage & family. They talked about it as being the New Jerusalem. This is, in fact, the dominant culture in many areas of the U.S.--primarily rural areas, btw, because the anabaptists were very much a "back to the land" movement. We have what's called the "Bible belt," which is the largely rural deep south that extends as far west as Texas & Oklahoma.
Thing is, the U.S. has become highly urbanized since WWII, and our "back woods" aren't so cut off and separate from the world any more, especially since there's a television in every home and a radio in every car. A lot of the church/state debate going on in our country today is driven by the fear that the world of secular America is overtaking the New Jerusalem, "the shining city upon a hill" to which the new world is dedicated and ordained of God. It's interesting to note that Ronald Reagan referred to the U.S. as "a shining city on a hill" in one of his more famous speeches. He was very consciously courting the allegiances of traditional Bible-believing Christians.
I wish I could recommend a book on the American history of this Christian movement--the one I had as a high school student at a Baptist missionary school in Hawaii was called "Those Indominatable Baptists." That was nearly 40 years ago. My exposure to missionary anabaptists at age 16 made me extremely susceptible to Berg's COG movement and more generally, to the Jesus People movement of the late 60s and early 70s.
My parents weren't evangelical. Actually, my father was agnostic. I wouldn't say my mother was an evangelical Christian, but she was devoutly Christian and generally held to the Bible. She was also a feminist, so it wasn't possible for her to say she believed in traditional Biblical principles in the 1950s and 60s. It was mostly my mother's idea that I should go to a Baptist missionary high school from 1967-69, but neither of my parents was very happy when I joined COG in 1972. I see joining the COG as a direct consequence of my exposure to Bible-believing Christians as an adolescent. The good thing about my exposure to evangelical missionaries is that I had enough understanding of doctrinally sound Bible-believing Christianity to recognize Berg as a crackpot fairly early in the game.