Customer Reviews

Never Before in History: America's Inspired Birth (Pandas publications)

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an excellent book about the founding of America. I am an early American history nut and I didn't make a lot of the connections that Gary Amos and Richard Gardener tied together for me. They tell about the Reformation in Europe and how it led to "revolutionary" thinking in many people. The Christian reasons for beginning a New World with a system of freedom of beliefs not connected to the government. The education of our founding fathers was based on ministry and that spread into their political lives later. The specific wording of the Declaration and Constitution was religion based. I wish this was a textbook for school!

This is a very interesting and useful read. Mr. Amos cut quickly to the core issues, presented both sides, supported his arguments with undeniable facts, exposed the mythology of false viewpoints, and did it with an admirably informed understanding of both history and theology.

It is very sad that many of his critics choose to merely spew ad hominem attacks and perpetuate myths without even responding to the specific arguments that Mr. Amos makes. I guess that the truth hurts. More Americans need to understand that those who hate the absolute truth of Christianity do not fight fairly. Consequently, they misrepresent world history in order to blame Christianity itself for the abuses of the heretical Pre-Reformation church hierarchy, failing to note that true Christianity was what Luther, Knox, and others demonstrated in beginning to liberate individuals to find God, truth, freedom, and, eventually, a new land in which to boldly enact and protect the very truths of God's word. The enlightened Bible-based renaissance that is the legacy of Luther was carried into practice by men such as Washington, Jefferson and Adams. This is the untold story for which Mr. Amos deserves great thanks.

Well done, friend. Agape, grace, and peace to you.

Today's secular world view teaches us half-truths as to America's founding. Our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and even the Founding Fathers themselves are called or are alluded to as being "Godless." Nothing could be further from the truth. I read this book and now know just how profound Christianity's impact was on this early period in America's history. This information should have been taught to me decades ago. It needs to be taught today. Today's rush to remove religion from the classroom has also eliminated even the teaching of "historical" facts. Who we are as a nation is detailed exquisitely in this book, going back to Martin Luther, and tracing Christianity's profound impact on the thinking and founding documents which all peoples of all races and religions enjoy today in this nation. Don't cheat yourself another day, buy this book, read it, and pass it along so the whole history of America's beginning can be known. It's time to get back to basics in this country...this book will help you get there!

This book should be required reading for every high school senior in the United States. After reading this book you will have a better appreciation for the founders of this country and what made the United States the strongest country in the world.

I am a history teacher and I bought this book as a curiosity. I read volumes of history to expand the content of class lessons. This book surprised me because of the direction it takes in the presentation of our early formative years. It is more philosophy than the typical classroom history text. It should be used as a seperate text to compliment any early American History course.

The resource references are worth many hours of independent research and will help bring credibility to the premise of Christianity being the foundation of our nation. I am well satified with the investment and will promote its use. Very well done.

Frankly turned off by the title ("Never Before in History"-- smacks of the myth of American exceptionalism) and generally unaccustomed to reading high school textbooks, I might well have hestitated to open this book. This would have been to my great loss, because this is easily the best thing I have read so far this year. In fact, I was amazed to find that among all of the reading I've done while completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in American history this book ranks as the best work I have ever read on the colonial and revolutionary periods. Simply masterful from start to finish, Gardiner and Amos artfully fashion a wonderful portrait of the genesis of our nation. Leaving aside the superficial and the cliche so characteristic of such works, the authors penetrate to the roots of the American experience and gently expose and deflate a whole lot of bloated revisionists history in the process. This book will revolutionize its readers understanding of the origins of America. Beware, this book will have the unintended result of getting you angry at your high school and college history teachers- you'll feel certain that they either lied or were criminally ignorant. My advice: buy this book and read it. Then buy a copy for your favorite teenager and bribe him or her to read it too. This is one of those rare books that reminds me of why reading is so wonderful. I just can not conceive of a better written, more thoughtfully crafted, better illustatrated or packaged book of its kind.

I was not expecting much when I started the book was frankly inspired and grateful for such a clear, well-documented, pithy work on our early beginnings and where they began earlier in Europe. I am thankful to have this quick but powerful read to share with my teenagers. Understanding roots is important and this book has roots in spades.

This book claims to be a high school level textbook. While it would not serve well as a general survey of early American history, it is a nice introduction to the more narrow field of the influence of Christianity in early American history. In this capacity, it would be a good supplementary text for a course in U.S. history.

I also enjoyed reading through it in its own right. It is in this regard light, but pleasant, reading with some interesting points not often seen. The presentation is beautiful with many pleasing and appropriate pictures.

This book has tons of really useful information regarding the founding of America. Excellent source of historical data. The text could be hard to read on a few pages (of course I'm a bit older). I would still recommend this book.

"It is now widely assumed that religion played a minimal role in forming America's Founding ideals. America's Founders, it is said, consciously rejected religious principles and borrowed their best ideas about law and politics from the ancient Greeks and Romans in addition to Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers. This view is common throughout most history textbooks today. Although Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and Enlightenment sources were important, their influence has been overemphasized, while the influence of religion has been seriously understated."

This paragraph from the Foreword of Never Before in History sounds like a reasonable thesis and one for which I have great sympathy. Unfortunately, this book never quite lives up to its thesis due to a combination of poor scholarship and sloppy reasoning.

For example:

-John Calvin was never the mayor of Geneva, as the book asserts (p. 46) - he wasn't even a citizen of Geneva until shortly before his death.

-Slavery in the south could not have troubled the northern Puritans, as is asserted on p. 119, as letters are available in which the northern Puritans discussed which races made the best slaves.

-The authors, throughout the first part of the book, champion "consent of the governed" when discussing the colonies' break with England. But when they reach the writing of the US Constitution, however, they claim that it was a "permanent bond that could only be broken by death."

-In order to prove the Puritan influence on the Founders, the authors try to tie the major characters of the Revolutionary era to the Puritans through various tenuous connections, e.g. Samuel Adams was a Puritan because he went to Harvard, which was founded by Puritans.

This last point is, I think, the most egregious error of this book. It flattens over a century of colonial history into a one-dimensional picture, so that the authors can equate any one who believes in God in the 18th century with the Puritans of the 17th century. Surely the Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Deists of the 18th century had little in common with their Puritan forbears of the 16th century. Attending a college founded by Puritans over 100 years earlier hardly made one a Puritan.

If you are interested in the thesis that this book begins with, a far better source is A Theological Interpretation of American History by C. Gregg Singer.

Like Amos and Gardiner, Singer believes that we can identify Christian influences in the founding of our nation, but we must look beyond the founders to the Puritans. Writing over 20 years before NBIH, Singer, accurately describes the problems apparent in the later book:

"That the Jeffersonian democracy was founded on Christian principles and simply reflects the social implications of the Gospels is one of the most deadly, and at the same time one of the most persistent errors of contemporary America. The reference to God in the Declaration of Independence, and the apparent submission to his will, should not blind us to the tragic misuse of biblical ideas to convey Deistic principles for the realization of a society which would be essentially humanistic and anti-supernaturalistic in character."

"Many sincere evangelicals are unwilling to accept this fact, apparently in the fear that in so doing they are conceding too much ground to those who, in our own day, wish to carry this process of secularization to even further excesses than occurred in the early days of the Republic. Their motives are most worthy, but the ground they have chosen on which to defend the evangelical cause, and the cause of a truly biblical conception of the American state, is faulty. They must choose higher ground and that higher ground is the Puritan conception of our destiny, the Puritan Dream for America. Puritanism did not lack for defenders and while their voices were stilled to a great degree during the excitement and full bloom of the Revolution, they would still be heard, and that Puritan heritage would rise again to give health and vigor to the new nation under the Constitution, for in the Convention of 1787, it would gain a hearing that it had been denied in that earlier assembly. An evangelical strategy which overlooks the clear testimony of history in regard to the nature and purposes of Jeffersonian democracy in the interests of preserving the essential elements of a Christian patriotism is doing a great disservice both to the Gospel and to the very patriotism it is seeking to preserve." (pp. 41-42)

Singer explains the difference: "The Puritans held to a very different conception of liberty from that which is so prevalent in contemporary thought and governmental theory. For the Puritan, liberty was in no way associated with the doctrine of natural law and natural rights, but found its origin and meaning in that covenant which God had made with his people. Liberty was not a natural right, but a God-given right and privilege to be zealously guarded from despots, to be sure, but also subject to precise Biblically-defined limits." (p. 17)

"The whole conception of government that would later be proclaimed by John Locke and others, which placed the sovereignty in the hands of the people and which found the origin of government in a human compact was utterly unknown to the Puritans." (p. 18)

These two very different ideas are simply flattened into one by Amos and Gardiner and labeled "Christian." Although history does need to be somewhat "simplified" for children, it should certainly not be simplified beyond usefulness. This is what I think Amos and Gardiner have done, to the detriment of our students.