The words I quote in the headline above were spoken during a sermon by Pastor Manasseh Cutler on August 24, 1788 at the just established settlement of Marietta, Ohio, founded only six months previously by a small group of New England pioneers, with the goal of beginning the settlement of the American west now available following the end of the war of independence against Great Britain.

It may be emphatically said that a new empire has sprung into existence, and there is a new thing under the sun. By the Constitution now established in the United States, religious as well as civil liberty is secured.

Some serious Christians may possibly tremble for the Ark, and think the Christian religion in danger when divested of the patronage of civil power. They may fear inroads from licentiousness and infidelity, on the one hand, and from sectaries and party divisions on the other.

But we can dismiss our fears, when we consider the truth can never be a real hazard, where there is a sufficiency of light and knowledge, and full liberty to vindicate it.

Cutler’s words come from David McCullough’s 2019 history, The Pioneers, describing the effort of Cutler and a small group of New Englanders to re-create a new New England in the wilderness north of the Ohio river.

Not surprisingly, McCullough’s book is quite readable, as are all his works. What made it a revelation to me is that it revealed an aspect of this early American settlement of the west that I had been ignorant of. It wasn’t just any old Americans moving west to found new communities. At the beginning it was specifically the descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England, actually organizing consciously to repeat the same thing as their ancestors, sending a group of God-fearing religious families west to build a new city on a hill, for the future of America and for their children.

Cutler himself had been crucial in lobbying Congress to establish the laws necessary to allow these first first settlers to buy land and begin settlement. He and a group of former revolutionary soldiers from New England had worked up a plan, and sent Cutler to New York and Philadelphia to convince Congress to pass the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, establishing the legal framework for settling the vast territories now open to American north and west of the Ohio river. Cutler himself wrote much of that bill, making sure it included articles requiring freedom of religion and no slavery.

In the early spring of 1788 the first group of twenty-two settlers arrived, and within a very short time they had established a town and community. By the time Cutler arrived in the late summer, the colony was so well established that families were arriving to build their own farms.

McCullough outlines this history most clearly, focusing on the specific individuals in this community who came with few skills and ended up becoming noted artists, architects, doctors, farmers, and politicians. And while Marietta would never become a major city, it certainly prospered as it laid the groundwork for the larger settlements that soon sprung up along the Ohio and in the interior.

Its founders however succeeded magnificently in one aspect much more important than size or wealth: They made sure that the same concepts that established the New England colonies would be sustained in this new western world: family, freedom, and moral commitment. Ohio and the states to the north and west all became free states, preventing the spread of slavery and making sure the north was strong enough to win the Civil War and end slavery forever.

For the next two centuries that groundwork sustained the United States, taking it through that civil war that ended slavery forever to make it a world power that freed Europe twice from power-hungry tyrants while becoming the most prosperous nation ever in the history of the human race. It became so prosperous it could send men to the Moon and back, and hardly blink an eye.

The Constitution: The framework for rebuilding America

Reading Cutler’s quote today (at the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century), I fear the fears he dismissed so calmly are finally coming true. Today America is torn by sectarian factional warfare, and the Judeo-Christian beliefs that founded it are no longer dominant. Worse, licentiousness and infidelity have become culturally supreme. It might have taken more that two centuries, but it now appears that a large percentage of Americans not only no longer believe in the basic values of the Bible and western civilization, they are fundamentally hostile to it.

Can we recover our nation and culture? I think we can, but only if we are bluntly honest about our failures now, and are boldly willing to face the hideousness required to force change. It will not be a pretty thing to push back against the ugliness of our time, of the many people who now believe it perfectly okay to invade a church during Sunday services, to attack and even kill anyone who disagrees with them. Such people cannot be reasoned with, and for reason and rationality to once again be dominant in America we will have to fight much harder than rational and reasonable people like to do.

But it must be done. Cutler and his generation knew the cost, fought the Revolutionary War to win their rights, and were willing to do what was necessary to maintain them. As Cutler noted in the quote above, they set their work in stone by writing the Constitution so that the rights of future generations would be protected. And by doing so they made it it possible to Americans to do great things for the next two centuries.

We can do no less, so that future generations will have that same chance. We need only use the tools that Cutler and his generation gave us.