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Celebrating America’s 400th Birthday
By Remembering God’s Providence, We Can Persevere

by Douglas W. Phillips, Esq., February 8, 2007

Wee shall by plantinge there inlarge the glory of the gospel, and from England plante sincere religion, and provide a safe and a sure place to receave people from all partes of the worlds that are forced to flee for the truthe of Gods worde.[1] —Richard Hakluyt, Jamestown Founder

America’s first published author was Captain John Smith[2] who described the arrival of the Jamestown settlers in 1607 as an act of providential goodness. America’s spiritual “first family,” the Mathers of New England, authored numerous works on Providence.[3] America’s first charter as an independent nation, the Declaration of Independence, announced that our ability to persevere as a nation rested in our “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.”[4] Just weeks before the Declaration was signed, America’s first great political mentor, the Rev. John Witherspoon (himself a signer of the Declaration and the tutor to one sixth of the members of our Constitutional Convention) authored “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men.”[5] Even America’s first president regularly invoked the God of providence in his writings.[6]

It is fair to say that there is no Western nation in history with a legacy of nation-builders more firmly committed to the doctrine of providence than the United States. That doctrine is stated in the Westminster Confession:

God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy.[7]

Thus, gratitude to the sovereign God for His many providential blessings is not only biblical, it is richly American.

There are two great providential landmarks to the dawn of American liberty. The first is Jamestown and the second Plymouth. Both were birthed out of evangelical zeal to see the spread of Christianity. Both involved intrepid men who risked much in the hope of blessing generations yet to be born. Of the two, Jamestown was the first. To the legacy of Jamestown, Americans owe many of their most noteworthy principles of self-government.

Her founding in 1607 resulted in North America’s introduction to the ancient Christian common law with its origins in the Law of Moses and the Magna Carta. This common law would later be incorporated by direct reference into the United States Constitution.[8] To Jamestown we owe America’s first great experiment in republican representative government, a model that would later be adopted by the Founding Fathers as the basic construct of civil government in a free society. Jamestown gave the American people their first Protestant Christian worship services, church buildings, and baptisms. America’s first interracial marriage took place in Jamestown between America’s first baptized, Christian convert, Pocahontas, and a devout farmer named John Rolfe.

For two hundred years, Americans have recognized the importance of commemorating the providential goodness of the Lord through our birth at Jamestown. In 1807 for the two hundredth, 1857 for the 250th, 1907 for the three hundredth, and then again in 1957 for the 350th anniversary celebration of America’s birthday at Jamestown, our nation was enthusiastically reminded of these glorious acts of Divine Providence.

But for America’s four hundredth birthday, what should be a celebration of gratitude to the Lord may be devolving into an homage to revisionist historiography and political correctness. In fact, officials in Virginia have decided to ban the use of the word “celebration” in the official quadricentennial events.[9] That would be insensitive, according to Mary Wade, secretary for the Virginia Council of Indians and a member of the Monacan Indian Nation. She explained in an interview with Voice of America Radio that paying tribute to the founding of Jamestown is inappropriate because “you can’t celebrate an invasion” in which “whole tribes were annihilated.”[10]

A recent New York Times article diminished the value of the quadricentennial and described Jamestown as “a town which disappeared into the mud.”[11] Even the Virginia Gazette published an article entitled “Jamestown not worth it,” which bemoaned, “For a whole year or more we shall celebrate the fact that a bunch of British buffoons who knew nothing of what they were doing colonized a swamp for the sake of Christianizing Indians.”[12]

And herein lies the rub: The imperfect, but nonetheless overtly Christian worldview of the architects behind the Jamestown settlement and the founding of America is an offense to modern day humanists. Their answer: Reinterpret it, forget it, or denounce it—but whatever you do, don’t celebrate it.

If such forces are successful, ours will be the first generation in the history of America at the time of a landmark historical celebration to officially and publicly despise our birthright and the providential hand of God in the life of our people. Because the Bible clearly teaches that those generations which forget the great deeds of God in the lives of their fathers are condemned to hopelessness (Ps. 78:8), Christians are duty-bound to consider our response.

For America’s four hundredth birthday, Vision Forum Ministries is hosting the Jamestown Quadricentennial in the Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown triangle on June 11-16, 2007. This national celebration will include orations by some of America’s leading Christian historians and teachers, Faith and Freedom mini-history tours, dramatic reenactments, fife and drum music, boat and balloon rides, a memorial dedication, and more. The week-long event will culminate with a large celebration event on the grounds of Fort Pocahontas (part of the ancestral estate of John Tyler who keynoted the 250th anniversary celebration of Jamestown).

It is our prayer that thousands of families will join us for this once-in-a-lifetime event as we raise rocks of remembrance and Ebenezers of hope to the memory of our faithful forebears.

But God the guider of all good actions, forcing them by an extreame storme to hull all night, did drive them by his providence to their desired Port.[13]—Captain John Smith

It is the duty of the Christian community to offer perspective to America so that we can persevere as a people. George Washington, whose motto was “persevere,” understood this duty. He wrote, “Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.”[14] I believe it will do wonders in ours.

Article abridged and reprinted with permission from Vision Forum, Inc.

1. Collected by Richard Hakluyt and Edited by Edmund Goldsmid, The English Nation to America, (Edinburgh: E. & G. Goldsmid, 1889), p. 268

2. Smith was “the first American author who wrote in English. The literature of the United States begins with his work.” As noted by Thomas and Dorothy Hobbler, Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth of the American Dream (Somerset, NJ: Wiley, 2005), p.

3. Increase Mather, “The Doctrine of Divine Providence” (1684) and “An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences” (1684); Cotton Mather, “Memorable Providences, Witchcrafts, Possessions” (Boston, 1689).

4. The Declaration of Independence closes with these words, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

5. On May 17, 1776, the same day the Continental Congress declared a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, Reverend John Witherspoon delivered a sermon at The College of New Jersey (Princeton) entitled “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men.” As noted by William J. Federer, America’s God and Country (St. Louis, MO, Amerisearch, 1999), p. 703

6. On January 14, 1776 George Washington would write to Joseph Reed, “If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it.” As cited by David McCullough in 1776 (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 79

7. Westminster Confession of Faith 5:1.

8. The Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (part of the Bill of Rights) reads as follows, “In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”

9. Avi Arditti of Voice of America noted the following in a May 28, 2000 news story, “Officials in Virginia have decided to stop using the word ‘celebration’ in connection with the four-hundredth anniversary of Jamestown. Established in 1607, Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the New World. It’s an event that descendents of the Native Americans who were already here — and the African slaves who came later — find hard to celebrate.”

10. When the steering committee changed their name from “Celebration 2007” to “Jamestown 2007” in response to pressure from American Indians, Mary Wade — one of their leading activists — explained the reason why in a radio interview with Voice of America’s Avi Arditti, “You can’t celebrate an invasion...[The Indians] were pushed back off of their land, even killed. Whole tribes were annihilated. A lot of people carry that oral history with them, and that’s why they use the word ‘invasion,’ because it truly was an invasion, and I’m sure some of the Indian people will probably want to tell that as a part of the story of 400 years.”

11. Sam Roberts, “If Winners Write History, New York Trumps Jamestown,” New York Times, May 25, 2006

12. Lew Leadbeater, “Jamestown not worth it,” Virginia Gazette, July 8, 2006.

13. Captaine John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England & The Summer Isles, Together with The True Travels, Adventures and Observations, and A Sea Grammar Volume I (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1907), p. 88

14. George Washington to Phillip Schuyler, August 20, 1775. As cited by David McCullough in 1776 (New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 41

About the Author

Doug Phillips is the director of Vision Forum Ministries, a discipleship and training ministry that emphasizes Christian apologetics, worldview training, multi-generational faithfulness, and creative solutions whereby fathers can play a maximum role in family discipleship

“[T]here is no Western nation in history with a legacy of nation-builders more firmly committed to the doctrine of providence than the United States.”

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