Consider this: The very freedoms and rights that we have taken for granted for hundreds of years in the United States did not even exist in Asia—the most populated part of the world—prior to World War II. Asian states and societies were all autocratic, with people at the top having the power and privileges and people at the bottom having neither rights nor much in the way of freedom. After the Allied powers’ victory, however, democratic self-government was granted to India and Japan in 1947, and it spread from there, however imperfectly.
Freedom could have potentially extended to mainland China if the U.S. had not been weary of war. In addition, the U.S. State Department and its military leadership in China was not committed to supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, having been compromised by various diplomatic individuals both sympathetic to the CCP and naïve about Mao Zedong. That failure led to communist takeover of the most populated country in the world. Even now, the freedom of Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and even our homeland of the United States are threatened.
No matter the odds against freedom today, we can take heart and resolve from our history. In the first few years of the War of Independence, George Washington’s undertrained, underequipped, and underfunded Continental Army was only half the size of the highly trained professional British army and their allied German Hessian mercenary troops. The naval mismatch was even greater. The Continental Navy had about twenty-five converted merchant ships while the British naval power was more than ten times greater, with 270 dedicated warships concentrated around east coast colonial ports. Things looked grim for the American cause.
However, the courage, determination, and godly faith of the founders made the difference. The last sentence of the Declaration of Independence before the space allotted for signatures reads, “…for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protections of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
Indeed, July 4 for those founders was a serious and somber occasion. General George Washington was in New York preparing its defense, when on July 6, 1776, a courier from Philadelphia arrived to deliver a copy of the Declaration of Independence that had been agreed upon by delegates of the Continental Congress just two days before. There were just two signatures on that document: John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, and Secretary Charles Thomson. Because the odds of prevailing against the British were so low and the penalty for treason was death, it had been decided not to reveal the identities of the other fifty-four who had voted for the Declaration.
In the summer and fall of 1776, Washington would encounter defeat and retreat after losing all three major battle campaigns in New York, at the cost of 4,100 men killed or taken prisoner. Less than two months later, however, Washington had two victorious successive surprise attacks, defeating a Hessian garrison in Trenton, New Jersey the day after Christmas 1776 and then routing the British in nearby Princeton eight days later. The Continental Congress perceived these back-to-back wins as a turning point in the War of Independence. So in January 1777, they released and distributed the Declaration to all the colonies, complete with all fifty-six signatures.
As it turned out, Washington would lose more battles than he won in the next five years, but he persisted with unwavering faith in God and in the cause of freedom. A myriad of developments that only Providence could have arranged made Washington’s 1781 victory at Yorktown possible, bringing Great Britain’s final and total surrender. In retrospect, even more remarkable than the reversal of odds resulting in the American military victory was the spiritual power of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that followed; this spiritual power established that the rights of the people come from God and not the state and that the sovereign powers of the state would be shaped and limited by those people.
When secular forces hastened, driving God out of America’s culture some sixty-plus years ago, that void was filled with false idols and divisive spiritual influences. Little wonder that average Americans today feel demoralized and confused about the self-destructive direction of the country. A corrupt ruling elite in America seems to have neither respect for the people’s welfare and rights, nor for the Constitution that served previous generations of Americans so well.
