Last night, I was watching a miniseries on American History on The History Channel with my daughter. When they got to the founding of the Plymouth colony, they described the Puritans along the lines of “a group of people looking for religious freedom”. This got me to wondering: How would America be different if it was a community of Jews running to America for religious freedom and establishing the second colony?
How would this have affected America’s values and the quest for Justice? For all the claims this is a “Christian nation”, how different would America be if a non-Christian group had established a colony for religious freedom?
The question came back to me again when I read two articles in today’s paper:
- St. Louis YMCA re-emphasizes Christian roots. This article discussed how some YMCAs are emphasizing the “C”. Now, this is their right, but I was always uncomfortable at the “Y” even with their non-sectarian claims (we don’t have YMHA’s out here in LA).
- How many crosses make a church too “churchy?”. This article discussed the issue of holding public high school graduations in buildings that are heavy with Christian symbolism—which is a form of silent evangelism.
Both of these articles have a theme: evangelism, and the pushing of the Christian religion. I can only imagine how that would be if this were a true Christian nation (remember: we’ve seen it before in countries with official religions—just look at Spain in the 1400s and England in the 1700s). We’ve seen the effect in Islamic nations. I’ll note that Judaism has a “hands off” attitude with respect to conversion: it is not Jewish custom to prosletyze.
So, I’ll ask the question again: How would America’s values be affect had a bunch of Jews searching for religious freedom had established the second colony?
