Devotional Guide For the Week of July 26, 2009 THIS FREE LAND About the Bible and our culture To Know: ³And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family.² (Lev. 25:10) Alexis de Tocqueville made himself an expert on American democracy. On May 10, 1831 de Tocqueville landed at Newport, Rhode Island and for 41 weeks personally interviewed the generation of our countrymen that shaped our national character. The revolutionary generation fought against the mother country to win the freedoms they believed were denied them by their king. The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights gave rise to the newly created country. It was their children, living when the 19th century opened, who lived out what it meant to be a new kind of people. This was the generation of Americans de Tocqueville interviewed during the 289 days that he traveled through the then 24 states. The critical ingredient in the American character identified by de Tocqueville was faith. ³Liberty, he wrote, cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.² If our liberties do in fact derive from the Christian faith, then our country is under attack as never before in our history. Those who think that to secure individual liberties they must muzzle the Bible will destroy the foundations of the nation. Those who labor to censor the Bible conceal their intent by a torturous interpretation of the anti-establishment clause of the constitution. Our founders did not intend for the Christian faith to be closeted and thus silenced in public. Those that declared independence and _frame_d our constitution never meant for the government to handcuff those who would proclaim religious truth that made ours a free land. To Do: We who are Christians must remember the relationship of the Bible to the culture that produced this land to which so many over the centuries have fled for freedom. We need to understand why it was never necessary to build a Berlin Wall here in order to keep our people from fleeing this nation. 07299$-07159 <š{{{{{{<