Those who would like for our nation to move further and further from the faith of the founding fathers have an agenda. The agenda is what has been called “revision history”— it is an effort to rewrite history to make it what they want it to be rather than what it is. The revisionists would have us believe the fathers of our country were simply deists who had no convictions about God or the Bible. It is difficult for them to make their case, however, since the name of God and quotations from Scripture are seen in public places throughout our nation’s capital, largely due to the influence of those early Americans. There is no doubt that some of the founders were deists (those who believe in God, but One who gives no revelation, who is not involved in the world), but most were men of faith. For example, John Adams said that men must be influenced by morality and religion because, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence said that religion must be the “foundation for a useful education.” Governor Morris, penman and signer of the Constitution stated: “I believe that religion is the only solid base of morals and that morals are the only possible support of free government.” John Jay, the original Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, affirmed that “the Bible is the best of all books, for it is the word of God.” George Washington believed that “religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.” The battle of modern day radical secularists can misrepresent and misquote founders, but their words of faith cannot be rebutted.
In a similar way, some church leaders take the words of the early preachers of the American Restoration Movement out of context in an effort to make them say what they never meant. For example, some of the men who in the early 19th century began to move away from denominationalism and to make the appeal to be Christians only, the way the Word of God states it, to be members only of the church that Jesus wanted and did establish, and to speak as the Bible speaks, have been misrepresented by present day “church historians.” We have been told that they believed the pious un-immersed were to be accepted into the fellowship of the church just like the immersed, and that the worship of God could be altered to meet the desires of men and not the wishes of God.
Historians must be true to the facts! Any effort to rewrite the history of a nation or the history of the church as our Lord Jesus Christ established it, discredits the historians and assumes that none of us know our history. Despite efforts to the contrary, history cannot be rewritten. ~~ from an article by Jay Lockhart, October 13, 2005