heart & soul
Honoring the History of Our Great Nation by Tim Morgan
I vividly remember the summer of 1976. As a small-town Indiana youth whose dad had served as a Navy corpsman in WWII, the bicentennial celebration was significant for our family. As a nation, we were facing economic and political turmoil— oil shortages, soaring prices, long gas lines, the Watergate scandal and the controversial end of the Vietnam War. Many Americans were left feeling uncertain about the nation’ s direction. Nevertheless, 1976 brought renewed patriotism as we celebrated the 200th anniversary of our nation. We watched news coverage of tall ships filling New York Harbor, the Freedom Train rolling through South Bend and the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, which seemed somewhat strange but important. Obviously, that July Fourth celebration felt more important to me than any other I had experienced, but what I remember best was the patriotic service at our church and the fireworks display that followed.
The service was about God’ s involvement in the founding of our nation. It was then that I began to understand the profound impact that Christianity had on early Americans and the Founding Fathers. The American story did not begin in 1776. Long before the Declaration was signed, something else was stirring across the colonies. In the 1730s and 1740s, the Great Awakening swept through towns and the countryside alike. Preachers like Jonathan Edwards, best known for his sermon“ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and George Whitefield, a British preacher who traveled the colonies and spoke to large outdoor crowds, urged people to have a personal and active faith, not one based only on tradition, but one they experienced for themselves by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.¹
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