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No apology required: Celebrate Jamestown!
Jamestown: A call to celebrate America's 400th birthday
Date published: 5/13/2007
JAMESTOWN--One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged the people of America to celebrate the blessed providence of God through our founding as a nation at Jamestown in 1607.
He was joined by the great thinkers of his generation, including Booker T. Washington, William Jennings Bryan, and Mark Twain. One of every 29 Americans responded by traveling to the Jamestown Tercentenary.
Now for the quadricentennial of our founding as a nation, some officials are telling Americans that it is inappropriate to celebrate.
In fact, they've banned the use of the term "celebration" from the state-sanctioned remembrances. Rather than rejoice in our heritage on this--the anniversary weekend of the founding of Jamestown in 1607--we have been urged to "express regret" for the coming of Christianity to the New World.
Why this call for apologetic angst?
Leftist advocates such as Mary Wade of the Virginia Council of Indians have convinced the official Jamestown 2007 Committee that we "can't celebrate an invasion." And the political rhetoric is flying. Official quadricentennial event panelists, including speakers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Otis Moss, have labeled our settlement as a nation a "holocaust" and a "lynching."
These sentiments have been repeated by other featured spokesmen like Ken Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi tribe, who characterized Jamestown's legacy as one of "annihilation [and] Holocaust"--an "atrocity."
For the first time in American history, our officials are embarrassed about our heritage on a landmark anniversary. For America's 400th birthday, the official Jamestown "commemoration" has become a homage to revisionist historiography and unsubstantiated "oral traditions."
The politically correct thought police have had their way.
And the revisionist message is clear: Christian settlers were vicious savages, genocidal murderers, and environmental terrorists. In contrast, native pagans were noble, civilized, and peace-loving. The providential history of America's founding is a national embarrassment. Children should hate their forefathers.
THE REMARKABLE MEN
But there is another Jamestown that American boys and girls can remember for their 400th birthday party. It is the same Jamestown that has been honored and remembered on historic jubilee and centennial celebrations spanning the last 200 years.
It is the real Jamestown--the story of imperfect but remarkable men who were instruments of a sovereign Creator to establish a nation of law and liberty under God.
That story really begins in the 16th century with a visionary named Richard Hakluyt. A prolific author, cartographer, and ordained minister, Hakluyt is the man primarily responsible for persuading the monarchy and a generation of explorers that Virginia was the best place for carrying out the Great Commission.
His vision of discipleship and dominion was formally enshrined in the Virginia Charter of 1606.
The men who arrived at Jamestown inaugurated their settlement with the planting of a cross, thanksgivings to God, and followed with daily prayers. They would build the first church in American history, disciple the first Indian converts, and perform the first Christian baptisms.
| Douglas W. Phillips is executive producer of the WWII documentary "The League of Grateful Sons" and founder of the Jamestown Quadricentennial. |
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Date published: 5/13/2007
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