From CBNNEWS.COM. Paul Strand
Did you know?
30 Million Americans Descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims from only 51 people?
They Wanted to Obey the Bible, not man's laws.
Our Declaration & Constitution: came from the Mayflower Compact.
Pilgrims Didn't Mistreat theNative Indians and actually bought the land they settled on from the Indians at the price the Indians came up with?
'Obedience to God Means Resistance to Tyrants'
The Pilgrims didn't just give America Thanksgiving celebrations. They believed religious freedom and liberty were worth dying for. They made the Bible America's most-read guide to life. And the Pilgrims' covenant with God and man in 1620 and the form of self-rule they pioneered would eventually shape America's Constitution and the entire government.
"2022 is the 402th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth. I think that's a huge milestone. It's a great milestone in human history," said Christian historian Jerry Newcombe, producer of the documentary, "The Pilgrims."
"The Pilgrims" looks at how those 51 surviving Pilgrims not only lived through their first brutal Massachusetts winter but went on to influence their future nation.
"This small, small group casts a very large shadow," Newcombe told CBN News.
30 Million Americans Descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims
In Newcombe's documentary, Pilgrim reenactor Leo Martin, founder of Plymouth's Jenney Museum, asks, "Did you know today that 10 percent of the population of the United States are Mayflower descendants? 30 million people from 51."
"The Pilgrims founded America for all intents and purposes," argues Prager U founder Dennis Prager in the documentary.
In those days, England demanded all its citizens belong to the Church of England and conform to its beliefs…or face harsh punishment.
They Wanted to Obey the Bible, Not the Church of England
"You will worship as they say you worship," Plymouth Rock Foundation founder Paul Jehle told Newcombe. "And so to do this illegally meant you could be arrested. If you continued, you could be put to death. In fact, some of the friends of the Pilgrims were killed in the Tower of London."
So the Pilgrims fled.
"They just wanted to worship Jesus and the purity of the Gospel, and the king wouldn't let them do that. He was ruling over their conscience. That's why they fled," Newcombe explained to CBN News.
They'd come to believe in radical ideas they found in the Bible: like they had rights given by God, and that He wanted them to be free, to govern themselves from within.
The Most Precious Cargo was the Ideas
"The Mayflower was a cargo ship. But the most precious cargo that was carried across the Atlantic were the ideas in the hearts of the Pilgrims that were drawn from the Bible," Jehle says in "The Pilgrims."
He continues, "You see the seeds of liberty – both religious liberty and civil liberty – and the idea of self-government and rule from within, all these are within that body of Pilgrims."