Honoring America is a bedrock value among the working-class faithful in New York City. The joyous patriotism is obvious at Tabernacle of Victory Deliverance Church, 1770 Broadway, Pastor Francis Windley. Almost every working-class church that we have visited has relatives in the armed services of the United States.
The United States was conceived with systematic liberty from God as the principle of the nation. This was so clearly framed in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Here is an excerpt as copied from the original document:
In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
Abraham Lincoln said that the nation’s duty is to fully institute the liberty to all guaranteed by God. At the end of his speech at his second inauguration in 1865, he concluded:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wound, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphans; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
