Before the pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower seeking religious freedom, they created a pact. They had arrived on these shores in 1620 eager to create a shining City upon a Hill. They were strangers. They pledged to work together.

They set up parishes, installed ministers as the head of the parish and created rules for representation and voting. A man had to be a member of the church to be able to vote. To be a member, he had to have a direct experience of God and testify to it in front of the elders.

This was not particularly difficult for those who arrived on the boat. Religious persecution tends to connect one to seeking outside spiritual assistance. Within the first generation, however, this requirement began to unravel. Children of the original parishioners and others were unwilling or not able to testify. In time, this requirement was lifted.

And thus the liberalization of the American experience and less strict religious fealty began. 

By the time the Declaration of Independence was written, there was a deep separation of church and state, and later, in the Constitution, a careful deliberation to separate power through checks and balances. The democratic experiment was enshrined in the colonies.

The first textbooks, a series of six volumes known as the McGuffy Readers, were created in 1836. Along with phonics, word use and sentence structure, the authors interpreted the goals of public schooling in terms of moral and spiritual education, and attempted to give schools a curriculum that would instill the early Presbyterian Calvinist beliefs and manners in their students. These goals were considered suitable for the relatively homogeneous America of the early- to mid-19th century, though they were less so for the increasingly pluralistic society that developed in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

According to a citation in Wikipedia, “the content of the readers changed drastically between McGuffey’s 1836–1837 edition and the 1879 edition. The revised readers were compiled to meet the needs of national unity and the dream of an American melting pot for the world’s oppressed masses. The Calvinist values of salvation, righteousness and piety were excluded from the later versions, though they had been prominent in the early readers. The content of the books was secularized and replaced by middle-class civil religion, morality and values. McGuffey’s name was featured on these revised editions, yet he neither contributed to them nor approved their content.”

The liberalization of knowledge and the commons continued with discoveries of science and a more secular society has emerged.

Which is all to say that throughout the history of our country, we have been systematically moving toward a less religious understanding and experience of our daily living.

America has always been this mixed and eclectic bag. It is an ideal. It’s an experiment. It’s a concept of liberty and justice for all that we never quite live up to. It’s our pledge at our baseball games, in our school buildings and at our government meetings. 

It is in that pledge that we maintain a common understanding that we work together. It is in that pledge that we recall the words of  Ben Franklin as he signed the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Happy Fourth to you all.