The future belongs to America. It is difficult for us even to record so a banal and outrageously self-important sentiment here. But it is a one-sentence summary of what some thoughtful scholars have said recently about a foundational belief hidden beneath the surface of American civil religion.

Consider, for instance, Conrad Cherry’s introductory comments in his revised and updated version of God’s New Israel. “The belief that America has been elected by God for a special destiny in the world has been the focus of American sacred ceremonies, the inaugural addresses of our presidents, the sacred scriptures of the civil religion. It has been so pervasive a motif in the national life that the word ‘belief’ does not really capture the role it has played for the American people.” (God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Conrad Cherry, ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998)).

That “motif in the national life” was “pervasive” in the writings of Abel Stevens, a Methodist journalist in the nineteenth century. Even a quick review of a map of the world, he claimed, would reveal the growing power of the Reformation unleashed in the sixteenth century, renewed in the eighteenth century and now on the verge of dramatic triumph in the nineteenth century.

But all depended upon the vast expansion of Protestant giving at this climatic moment in the sweep of Christian history. This “Great Reform” – the title of his essay – was the greatest challenge of all.

Read about it in Resource 4.6 - Abel Stevens, The Next Great Idea.

Something of the same set of beliefs and expectations are evident in Resource 4.2 - Lyman Beecher, Capital Enough to Evangelize the World.