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America was founded as a Protestant Christian NationBy God, we will make it one againThis is the foundational truth of America.From the moment Columbus sailed into the Caribbean in search of a faster trade route to Asia in 1492 until the Mayflower Compact of 1620, European attempts to plant real roots in what would become America were abject disasters.Over one hundred and twenty years of ghastly horror. Death by disease, starvation, mutiny, cannibalism, and endless conflict with the many various indigenous tribes people.The Spanish tried first. San Miguel de Gualdape, planted in 1526 on the southern coast, collapsed in a matter of weeks. Hundreds dead, the rest in open mutiny. Hernando de Soto marched six hundred armored men through the Southeast, and hardly any of them survived. In Pensacola, Luna brought over a thousand settlers, only to see a hurricane strip them of everything, starvation did the rest. The French tried in Florida and were butchered by the Spanish. Their northern efforts froze and rotted away. And the English, well, their famous “Lost Colony” at Roanoke simply vanished, leaving nothing.Jamestown managed to cling to life, but only barely. They starved so badly they ate rats, shoe leather, even one another. Of five hundred souls, only sixty survived the winter of 1609.This was the story of Europeans in America for more than 120 years: chaos, ruin, corpses.And then, in 1620, something entirely new appeared on the bleak New England shore. The Puritans, to whom we Americans today owe everything to.They weren’t adventurers chasing gold, nor soldiers building an empire, nor exiles drifting aimlessly. They came as a people, families, congregations, bound together by faith.They had been worn thin in England, hunted for their refusal to conform to an increasingly secular, decadent society, and so they fled to the Netherlands.In Leiden they found freedom, but not home. They scraped by as weavers and brewers, living poor, and they feared their children were becoming Dutch instead of English. They longed to remain a people, English in tongue, Christian in faith, bound to one another and to God.So they struck a deal. London merchants agreed to pay their way to the New World, ships and supplies, in exchange for seven years of labor and profit. They crowded onto the Mayflower, praying and singing Psalms, and in the cramped, stinking belly of that ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean, they made their covenant.What the Mayflower Compact lacked in length it made up for in impact. They audaciously declared they would “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick.” In plain words, they would govern themselves, under God.They pledged loyalty to King James, yes, but their true allegiance was to Christ and to one another. They were no longer subjects scattered and afraid. They were one body, the body of Christ, acting together in common cause to each other and their progeny.And that made all the difference.The effect was astonishing. Within a generation, New England was dotted with towns, not outposts or settlements, each with its meetinghouse, its school, its elected magistrates. Children learned to read so they could encounter the Word of God. Sermons shaped the moral character of the people. Town meetings gave them the practice of self-rule. They lived as if their survival depended on one another, because it did.And from that replication came the foundations of America. In just 156 years, from the Mayflower Compact in 1620 to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Puritan seed became a continent wide tree. The belief that a people could covenant together under God grew into the Declaration of Independence itself.The miracle is plain. For 120 years, Europe had tried to root itself in America and failed in unimaginable despair. But when a people came bound not by empire or gold, but by faith, faith as a super alignment of their community as the living body of Christ, they endured. And so through faith came America.