Do You Know the Jamestown ‘Firsts’?

by Douglas W. Phillips, Esq., March 26, 2007

This is our birthday year — the anniversary of the founding of what arguably has been the most blessed and distinctively Christian nation in the history of the West. How can we be grateful if we don’t know our history?

Once upon a time, students were required to know the historical significance of Jamestown and to interpret the events surrounding our founding through the lens of biblical Christianity. They could learn, for example, the long lists of providential “firsts” established at Jamestown:

Jamestown was not only the first permanent English settlement, but it was the first colony to be established on an evangelical vision and rooted in a charter which invoked the Great Commission as the basis for building a nation. It was the first location where the leaders officially called upon the settlers to win converts to Christ through a witness of faithful family life. Jamestown was the site where reformation Christians built their first church, experienced the first recorded native conversions to Christianity, and conducted the first baptisms. Jamestown gave America a foundation of biblical unity in Christ when the colonial leadership became the first Americans to formally recognize the legal and theological propriety of “inter-racial” marriage where the couple was spiritually one in Christ. It was the location where republican representative government was first introduced to our land, and where the Christian common law first took root. At Jamestown, Americans first practiced free enterprise economics, a legacy which would bless this nation and allow us to prosper so that we could bless the world.