Coral  Ridge  Ministries - November 2001
America’s “Spiritual Ancestors”
The Church That Helped Found America
By D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.
Everyone knows that the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth Rock after a long, grueling voyage on the Mayflower. Few know, however, what compelled the Pilgrims to leave England for the wilderness of North America. 
  Public school education is chiefly responsible for the widespread ignorance. Fifteen years ago Paul Vitz documented the “washing-out” of religion in public school textbooks.		 Born of the Bible
  At Scrooby they had a precious treasure: the Bible in their own language—something illegal at that time. 
  As they read the Scriptures they saw things that were not right in the Church and in the land. Thus, the movement that eventually brought these people to our shores and founded this nation began when people had the Word of God and 
  He looked at 60 widely used social study textbooks and found that not one of them portrayed the spiritual meaning of the Pilgrims. He cited one teacher who told a first grader that it was the Indians to whom the Pilgrims gave thanks on that first Thanksgiving! 

A Great Scandal
  Our culture’s impoverished and 		 ______________________
The Pilgrim’s 1606 covenant for church self-government was later transmuted into the first written charter for civil self-government: the 
Mayflower Compact.
______________________		 began to study the Holy Scriptures. Ours is a nation born of the Bible.
  No sooner had they organized themselves into a secret Separatist Church in 1606, than they began to be harried and hunted and persecuted by both church and civil authorities. They would hide out and move from place to place; their homes would be watched; they would be thrown into jail, be “clapt up in prison.” Finally, they
distorted understanding of the Pilgrims and their enormous contribution to America is a great scandal. A generation earlier, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison placed the Pilgrims in proper historical context. They were, he wrote, “a simple people inspired by an ardent faith in God, a dauntless courage in danger, a boundless resourcefulness in the face of difficulties, an impregnable fortitude in adversity: thus they have in some measure become the spiritual ancestors of all Americans.”
  Daniel Webster, one of America’s greatest orators, cautioned fellow citizens in 1820 not to “forget the religious character of our origin.” Speaking on the bicentennial of the Pilgrims’ arrival, he declared, “our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”
  The Pilgrims came to America in 1620 not to seek their fortune, but “for the glory of God and the Advancement of the Christian faith,” as stated in the Mayflower Compact. They were, first and foremost, a church, one formed some 14 years earlier in Scrooby, England, when a small group of believers withdrew from the Church of England and covenanted together to walk according to the light given in the Word of God, regardless of what persecution they would endure. It was that covenant for local church self-government that was later transmuted into the first written charter for local civil self-government: the Mayflower Compact. 
  decided there was nothing else for them to do but to leave England if they were to worship according to the Word of God and the dictates of their conscience.
  They determined to cross the sea to Holland, a place of religious liberty where others had gone before. After 12 years, things began to happen that made them realize they had to move on again. The Dutch at that time were very worldly. The Sabbath was grossly profaned. The Pilgrim’s own children were growing up and intermarrying with the Dutch. They decided they would move to a new land and establish a place where they could worship and live according to the teachings of Scripture.
  The decision was made to voyage to Virginia and they obtained a “patent” to settle there. They left England in September 1620, and after 66 days in the fierce and vast wilderness of the Atlantic, they made it to Cape Cod. Their intent and hope was to arrive in late summer, but it was not until December that they first set foot on the shores of what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was indeed the howling of winter—a very dreary time.
  Fortunately, the winter did not last long. The first mild day of spring came in March, but not before nearly half of the 102 Pilgrims who embarked for the New World eight months earlier had died. If it had been a long winter, none may have survived. Those who lived managed to endure that first year, and the second, after which conditions improved, and the rest of the Pilgrim Church came to join them in their new land.

                                                            
 
The Church That Helped Found America  continued
Pilgrim Lessons
  What does this church congregation that relocated to the New World to worship God without harassment and persecution by the State or the corruption of an ungodly society have to say to us today?
  The first thing I would have you note is that these were men and women of conviction born of the Word of God. These were men and women willing to go to prison, to be killed, and to cross the wild ocean and live in the midst of savages all because of the Word of God, which was a precious treasure to them. Their zeal and piety can be measured in their habits of worship. Many walked ten or twelve miles each way to go to church. They had two four-hour services each Sabbath!
  Many of us today have many Bibles in our homes, and yet we spend little time searching them or hiding the Word in our heart. How true are we to their conviction that the Bible is the very Word of God, for which they were willing to give their whole lives, even to be harried out of the land, if necessary.
  Second, they were men and women who loved one another, who lived as examples unto the world. They were indeed an exemplary people, even recognized as such by the Dutch government. They worked assiduously and faithfully in their jobs; they could be counted on and trusted in all things. The Dutch delighted to lend them money, confident they would always be repaid. There was never a lawsuit or an argument or disputation among them.
  Their great desire was to live for God, to follow His commandments and to apply them to every aspect of their lives—not only to worship, but to personal conduct, church and civil governments, even the economy. 

 Zeal to Witness
  Lastly, they had a great zeal to witness. William Bradford, who served as governor of Plymouth Plantation for 35 years, and who was with the Pilgrims from Scrooby onward, wrote that they “cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations … for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world.” 
  It was only a few years after the Pilgrims declared in the Mayflower Compact that they had undertaken their journey “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith” that one of the first missionaries to the American Indians, John Eliot, set off to take the Gospel to them in their own language. Many more were to follow, until more missionaries have gone out from America than from any other nation in history. As Bradford further stated, “Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing….”
  There is nothing Americans today cherish more than their freedom; and the origin of that freedom can be traced directly back to the Pilgrims. Religious freedom (the right to own and read the Bible, to worship according to conscience, to form one’s own church); political freedom (the right to frame a constitution and form a government); even economic freedom (the right to own one’s own property and keep the fruit of one’s labors) all began with the Pilgrims. And the Mayflower Compact, based as it is on the pattern of biblical covenants, is recognized by scholars as the founding document that led to a whole series of covenants, compacts, and constitutions culminating in the United States Constitution framed in 1787. 
  All this we owe to God, the Bible, and our Pilgrim fathers.
The “First Thanksgiving?”
  They probably had wild turkey, but it was not, strictly speaking, the “First Thanksgiving.” The crops gathered in, the Pilgrim’s celebrated God’s blessings in the autumn of 1621 with a “harvest festival,” an English tradition of games, feasting, and prayer. 
  The Pilgrim’s almost weeklong celebration was a time to “after a special manner rejoyce together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors,” as Mourt’s Relation, a journal of the Pilgrim’s first year, reports.
The 50 Pilgrims who survived the fierce first winter had much for which to be grateful. They were “all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty,” William Bradford wrote in his history Of Plymouth Plantation.
  The Pilgrims were joined in the feasting and games by King Massasoit and 90 Wampanoag men—an exceptional display of good will for which the Pilgrims could also thank God. 
  It is not known whether the Indians also joined in the prayers of thanksgiving that were commonly made at such harvest festivals, but there is no doubt that the Pilgrims were missionary minded. Mourt’s Relation records that “we daily pray for the conversion of the heathens.”
  The tradition of annual fall Thanksgivings took hold in New England by the mid-1600s, but it was not until 1863 that Thanksgiving became a national annual holiday. From Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation on, every President has issued a Thanksgiving holiday proclamation.