A Nation Like No Other by Newt Gingrich Read Free Book Online

based on man’s equality and personal sovereignty, by the close of the seventeenth century the colonies featured highly diverse political structures and economies. From British Army general James Oglethorpe’s debtors’ haven in Georgia to Virginia’s plantation culture to New York’s commercial hub, the colonies developed their own traditions and modes of life. Religious practice was particularly diverse; though a fraction of Britain’s size, the combined colonies had hundreds of faiths evangelizing
and growing aggressively in the spiritual free market of America, in stark contrast to Britain’s thirty socially proscribed “non-conformist” sects. 12
    The transformation of the disparate colonial cultures into a common American identity occurred through a massive religious revival that began in the 1730s. As John Adams noted, “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people: a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” 13
    Adams was referring to the Great Awakening, which swept from small New England towns through the mid-Atlantic ports and southern agrarian outposts. The movement, which de-emphasized religious ceremony and stressed an intense, emotional, and individual relationship with God, further democratized religion, as independent sects flourished, religious education became personalized, and crucially, “New Light” believers abandoned the government-established Church of England in droves. A key leader of the Awakening was the revivalist George Whitefield, who visited every colony in English North America, delivering an estimated 18,000 spellbinding sermons from the 1730s until his death in 1770. Whitefield’s efforts were assisted by Benjamin Franklin, who became a friend of Whitefield’s, though not a convert, and reprinted at great profit Whitefield’s sermons in his newspaper.
    True liberty had come to mean freedom of faith and conscience, while religion was deemed necessary to support liberty, a gift of God. The purpose of liberty was to give glory to God. If God was forsaken, liberty’s purpose would be destroyed, and liberty itself would give way to tyranny. In the words of Gouverneur Morris, a key contributor to the U.S. Constitution, “Religion is the only solid Base of morals and Morals the only possible Support for free governments.” 14
    The Great Awakening had a deep, unifying effect on the American colonists. As Paul Johnson writes, the Awakening “taught different colonies, tidewaters and piedmonts, coast and up-country, to grasp and appreciate what they had in common, which was a very great deal.” 15
With their common experiences, values, and beliefs, the colonists were transforming into a nation.

    The New World, though created by men of the Old World, birthed wholly new expressions of ancient ideas. The American experience taught the Founders that self-government was not only possible, but effectual and just—that God’s gifts of life and liberty were universal and good. These ideas had been bandied about in European universities and salons for centuries, being refined and debated by high-minded scholars, but they were made real by the citizens of the primitive townships of colonial America. The New World, as much as the Old, wrote the American Creed.
    By the time that creed was codified in the Declaration of Independence, it was already widely known and understood, from Boston to Savannah. For the tinkers, farmers, soldiers, and cobblers in New York who heard it read aloud as the British Navy lurked off Staten Island, the source of their rights was self-evident. They were free and godly men, equal in God’s eyes and self-sufficient in life. The natural rights of the Englishmen, derived from the Reformation, Enlightenment, and