(b.1951), an American radio talk show and television host. His radio program reaches approximately 20 million listeners a week and his syndicated TV show covers nearly 99 % of America. He is the author of The Way Things Ought to Be, 1992, and See, I Told You So, 1993, and the publisher of The Limbaugh Letter. Born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Rush Limbaugh ascended from being a Top–40 deejay, to a successful radio talk-show host at KFBK in Sacramento, California, to being heard in over 616 markets across the country.
In regard to our national heritage, Rush Limbaugh stated:
Well, folks, let’s allow our real, undoctored-American-history lesson to unfold further. If our schools and the media have twisted the historical record when it comes to Columbus, they have obliterated the contributions of America’s earliest permanent settlers—the Pilgrims. Why? Because they were a people inspired by profound religious beliefs to overcome incredible odds.
Today, public schools are simply not teaching how important the religious dimension was in shaping our history and our nation’s character. Whether teachers are just uncomfortable with this material, or whether there has been a concerted effort to cover up the truth, the result is the same. Kids are no longer learning enough to understand and appreciate how and why America was created.
The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century (that’s the 1600’s for those of you in Rio Linda, California). The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs.
A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community. After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences.
On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of their new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.
The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.
But this was no pleasure cruise friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.
And the sacrifice they made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims—including Bradford’s wife—died of either starvation, sickness, or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod, and skin beavers for coats. Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper!
This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments.
Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.
Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. …
“This had very good success,” wrote Bradford, “for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Bradford doesn’t sound like much of a Clintonite, does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980’s? Yes. Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph’s suggestion (Gen. 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20 percent during the “seven years of plenty” and the “Earth brought forth in heaps.” (Gen. 41:47). In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the “Great Puritan Migration.”
Now, let me ask you: Have you read this history before?3922
But guess what? There’s even more that is being deliberately withheld from our modern textbooks. For example, one of those attracted to the New World by the success of Plymouth was Thomas Hooker, who established his own community in Connecticut—the first full-fledged constitutional community and perhaps the most free society the world had ever known. Hooker’s community was governed by the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which established strict limits on the powers of government.
So revolutionary and successful was this idea that Massachusetts was inspired to adopt its Body of Liberties, which included ninety-eight separate protections of individual rights, including: “no taxation without representation,” “due process of law,” “trial by a jury of peers,” and prohibitions against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Does all that sound familiar? It should. These are ideas and concepts that led directly to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims and Puritans of early New England are often vilified today as witch-burners and portrayed as simpletons. To the contrary, it was their commitment to pluralism and free worship that led to these ideals being incorporated into American life. Our history books purposely conceal the fact that these notions were developed by communities of devout Christians who studied the Bible and found it prescribes limited, representative government and free enterprise as the best political and economic systems.
There’s only one word for this, folks: censorship.3923
This brings us to our Founding Fathers—the geniuses who crafted the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. These were men who shook up the entire world by proclaiming the idea that people had certain God-given freedoms and rights and that the government’s only raison d’etre was to protect those freedoms and rights from both internal and external forces. That simple yet brilliant insight has been all but lost today in liberalism’s relentless march toward bigger, more powerful, more intrusive government.
Don’t believe the conventional wisdom of our day that claims these men were anything but orthodox, Bible-believing Christians. They were. And they were quite adamant in stating that the Constitution—as brilliant a document as it is—would work only in the context of a moral society.
“Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people,” stated second president John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other.”
George Washington, the father of our country, was of like mind. He said: “Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
James Madison, primary author of the Constitution, agreed: “We have staked the whole future of the American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future … upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
The eighteenth-century Irish statesman and orator Edmund Burke, some of whose precepts formed the core of conservatism, eloquently stated in his 1791 “A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly”:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. … Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
… As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at the time of our Constitution’s fiftieth anniversary in his masterpiece, Democracy in America:
“In New England every citizen receives the elementary notion of human knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution … ”3924