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If you believe in miracles, clap your hands
Please look closely at the title of this book: "A MIRACLE which changed the world." The very first item in the book (before any preface or introduction) is a short essay on "The Miracle at Philadelphia," which tries to convince readers that the Constitutional Convention was actually a miracle "influenced, guided, and governed by the hand of God."
What follows is a rather clumsy attempt to shoehorn Christianity (or Mormonism) into the Constitution, and to claim that religion played a major role in what the author calls "The 5000 Year Leap." (Where DID he get that number, anyway? Not 4000? Not 8000?)
Now, you don't need advanced history to realize that, by the year 1776, Christianity had been around for a long time. It had been chosen as the official state religion by countries from Armenia to Norway, and including the late Roman Empire. So, in 1776, Christianity was not a new force in the world.
What WAS new was everything in the Constitution that had never been seen or tried before (including specific language FORBIDDING the United States from adopting ANY OFFICIAL RELIGION). What the Constitution set in motion was basically the English system of government, minus the aristocracy and the monarchy. Out went the King and the House of Lords, in came an elected President and Senate. These items, plus a guarantee of equal rights for all citizens, were quite definitely new items --- not entirely new (based on the British common law and parliamentary history) but certainly never tried before.
And the United States took off. Within two hundred years, we had a man walking on the Moon --- something else never seen before.
You decide what happened. Was it a Christian "miracle?" Or was it all the other genuinely new items that had little or nothing to do with religion (except for guaranteeing freedom of choice in religion, something else Christianity was never famous for)?
My own guess would be that the second factor was the most important, but some extremely ancient ideas were also involved. Skousen is dead right in emphasizing the major role played by the Roman author Cicero, and his concept of Natural Law --- almost two thousand years old by then, but never really put into practice. In fact, if you would like to get a better "feel" for the intellectual background of the Founding Fathers, you couldn't do much better than to read Cicero.
If you'd like a better understanding of the author, you might want wander over to Wikipedia and read about W. Cleon Skousen. To put it very mildly indeed, he was a man with Definite Views.
July 2009 · Books · verified purchase