Dismount!

The Biblical concept of a “Chosen People of God” is a major theme running through the history of the United States. The Pilgrims were Bible-loving, Bible-centered, Bible-reading people. They took this concept right out of the Old Testament and applied it to themselves: the new “Chosen People.” They used the phrase, “Aaron into the wilderness” (from the Book of Exodus) to describe what they saw as their mission in America’s wilderness: to conquer it and to develop it as the new “Chosen Nation of God.” In 1630, long before the War of Independence, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop said, “The God of Israel is among us. We shall be a city sat on a hill.” And you find this in other statements of the Seventeenth Century Pilgrims. In the eighteenth century, the clergy picked it up. The War of Independence was the American Exodus, the American Passover. George Washington was the American Moses. Some more modestly called him “our Joshua”! John Adams captured the…