Glenn Beck's Ecumenical Travesty and the true Christian founding of early America

I wish Chris Pinto would write a book or somebody would write one using his material. We need his correctives to American history to sort out what was Christian in our history and what was not, and the historical perspectives he's dug up that show the REAL dimensions of the Antichrist Church of Rome. Pinto not a historian, as he's made clear, but a documentarian who accumulates his historical facts in the service of his films. We are starved for historical truth, thanks to such deceitful "histories" as David Barton has fed us over the last few decades, so historian or not Pinto's work is much needed.

Today's radio show, Restoring Love or Blind Delusion? is about Glenn Beck's latest attempt to blur the lines between Christianity and Mormonism and all other religions, his "Restoring Love" rally. Early colonial Governor John Winthrop was apparently made an excuse for Beck's ecumenical travesty, as the love he wrote of in his Model of Christian Charity is misused by Beck to foster acceptance of all religious beliefs as equal, whereas of course as a true Christian Winthrop would never have treated anything but the Biblical gospel as the true Christian faith, certainly not the false religion of Mormonism -- or Catholicism, or Islam etc. etc. etc. Pinto shows the antichrist nature of Beck's selective quoting of Winthrop.

Since I've been defending The Harbinger recently, I noticed that the Winthrop article has implications for this purpose. The book is often criticized for claiming that America is in covenant with God, or for supposedly equating the American covenant with God's covenant with ancient Israel.* Well, here is John Winthrop's affirmation that he did indeed believe "we are entered into covenant with" God and he does base it on God's covenant with Israel and the Mosaic law. Here is the last part of Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity which refers to this covenant:

Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Tomorrow's show, more revelations of the true nature of America's founders, who were far from the spirit of the Christian colonial leaders of 150 years earlier: Jefferson was a racist and intentionally excluded blacks from the phrase "all men are created equal."

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*The Harbinger doesn't say that America is "in covenant" with God though there is definitely a special relationship with God implied. But since the critics keep accusing Cahn of making some kind of equation between America and ancient Israel's covenant with God, it seems to me, based on the Winthrop statement in preparation to found a colony in America, that if Cahn had actually made such an equation he wouldn't have been wrong, so the critics' complaints don't hold either way.