To Its Illogical Conclusion

I was recently exposed to an interesting idea. The source of the idea shall remain nameless. All I will say is that it takes the idea of America’s godly heritage to new heights. Or at least heights I was previously unaware of.

This source gives a short history of the discovery of North and South America by European explorers and the conditions in Europe which led some to travel to the “New World” and start a new life there. At one point, it states that God protected North America, the future United States, from European influence by putting an ocean in between the two continents. The context here was a discussion of how God foreordained certain explorers to discover the Americas at just the right time in history for settlers to come and eventually form the USA.

I have, in recent years, been questioning a lot of what I have been taught on this subject. During the current “culture wars” our nation’s godly heritage is referred to often as the standard of how our country should be run and what we should return to. I have been incredulous as to exactly how godly our nation ever was, but I realize I wasn’t there and haven’t done the research to figure it out, so I don’t really know. This new idea, however, has really rubbed me the wrong way.

If I understand this correctly, God foreordained explorers to come at just the right time (when people wanted to leave Europe to find gold or because of religious persecution) to discover this land which had been protected from European influences (the kind that make people want to find gold and persecute others for their religious beliefs) by the Atlantic Ocean. Fortunately, God also thought to put Native Americans here as convenient placeholders to take care of the future chosen land but be easily subdued when the godly people decided to show up and steal it. He also gave the holy thieves diseases that could not be resisted by the placeholders, which meant the land was even easier to take. He also foreordained that Henry the VIII cause the Anglican Church to separate from the Catholic church so he could marry multiple women in his quest for a male heir, so that Protestantism could get a better hold in England, so that Admiral John Drake could be a Protestant, so that he would be especially motivated to defeat the Spanish armada (A.K.A. Catholics in boats), so that the northern part of the new world could be mostly settled by Protestant England instead of Catholic Spain, so that one day we could look back on all of this history and reclaim our rich heritage?

I think my rant is finished now. If the actions of some early settlers were motivated by their religious beliefs, that is a godly heritage I can believe in and be interested in reclaiming. However, as stated before, this is the first time I have heard the USA’s “godly heritage” used to account for the placement of the Atlantic Ocean, so that really threw me for a loop.