12/21/2020
Re: Tell Us Your Stories! We Are Not A Nation Of Immigrants. Honoring 400 Years Of The Mayflower Compact
From: Jonathan in Pennsylvania
Most of 2020 has been dominated by self-defeating views that belie both truth and common sense — the “anti-racist” movement and belief in the infallibility of the Covid Churchstate being the worst of these.
But in the past, Americans were a proud and fearless people, partly because we appreciated our ancestors’ accomplishments and held up our founding fathers and other leaders as our common ancestors, in a way. We understood that respect for them was appropriate.
Several of my ancestors fought with the Patriots (including two named Jonathan). To tell this rant I’ve got to go a lot farther back to their ancestors, none of whom came here on the Mayflower. But one, William Harvey, was here in 1630, He was one of the many English Christians who took advantage of a greater chance at freedom and opportunity by settling in what became Massachusetts during the Great Puritan Migration of 1620-1642, when upwards of 21,000 or so of these folk came here.
How’s it all tie in with the Mayflower folk? America never happens, without them. They were the beachhead — the first gutsy, God-fearing group to make it happen in this new world. Jamestown had been repeatedly wiped out, and besides, was not comprised of the same sorts of religious educated people and families as were the Plymouth residents.
Think of it: before the Great Puritan Migration, there were just a few hundred white people in North America. Then, civilization.
It happened because of those sometimes bumbling, always Providence-expecting Pilgrims and their faith-inspired journey to a new land to worship as they chose. They came here and many of them had several children, as did the Puritans who followed them — a pattern I see repeated in my family over and again through the generations. One of my ancestors who fought with the Patriots had eight children, and I also came from a large brood.
I came from a religious family — we not only attended our church weekly, but read and recited the KJV Bible at home, daily. So I take this notion of worshiping as you choose as a Christian rather personally, and find it maddening how many people are accepting lock stock and barrel all of the propaganda and government overreaching engendered by the Wuhan Flu (not to mention the mandates of the Woke Church, too).
I've strayed some from the faith, only making it to a service or two per year in recent years. But the lessons learned from the Bible and my Christian upbringing are hard to shake, especially when life teaches you through hard knocks that these rules often work to prevent you from harming yourself and others. That is, if you follow those rules.
My first American ancestor led to many fruits of true faith, as evidenced in the actions of his descendants, including one who enlisted with the Union Army when he was not yet 16. Those and many other actions taken by descendants of that first American ancestor showed their faith and its ethos of love. That faith also was shown in the actions of my parents, who I don’t believe knew of this first American ancestor, but nonetheless followed in a pattern of free religiosity and belief in Jesus Christ and traditional values that always informed the United States and the American Colonies.
The Mayflower folk set the tone for that moral perspective, and the legal and legislative framework that enabled this nation to be born. Without them, there is no United States of America — it cannot happen, without these English Christian “Fundamentalists,” if I may use a tritely inaccurate modern word to describe them.
We live in a fearful and judgmental age. People who believe in no overarching morality have platforms and claim to know what’s what, maligning our English Christian founders as the worst sort of people — racists who were greedy more than anything else and deserve to have their statues toppled and their memories besmirched. These modern fakers make such outrageous accusations, calling America corrupt at its core, while also laying claim to whatever good things the USA is still credited with having done.
But to paraphrase the Biblical passage: Can both foul water and fresh water come from the same spring?
The writer is an American journalist.
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