Happy Fourth of July, You Wonderful Country!

As Stephen Waldman writes in his definitive book on the subject, "Founding Faith," the American Revolution was "powerfully shaped by the Great Awakening," an evangelical revival in the Colonies in the early 1700s, led by famous Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, among others.

Townhall

Ann Coulter  "It has become fashionable to equate the French and American Revolutions, but they share absolutely nothing beyond the word "revolution." The American Revolution was a movement based on ideas, painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what would become the freest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world. (Until Democrats decided to give it away to the Third World.)

"The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's storm troopers, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's slaughter and America's periodic mob uprisings, from Shays' Rebellion to the current attacks on White House employees and Trump supporters.

"The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America.

"One rather important difference is that Americans did win freedom with their revolution and created a self-governing republic.

"France's revolution consisted of pointless, bestial savagery, followed by another monarchy, followed by Napoleon's dictatorship and then finally something resembling an actual republic 80 years later. Both revolutions are said to have come from the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, the American Revolution influenced by the writings of John Locke and the French Revolution informed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is like saying presidents Reagan and Obama both drew on the ideas of 20th-century economists -- Reagan on the writings of Milton Friedman and Obama on the writings of Paul Krugman." . . .
(I love Coulter's refined sarcasm.)

Our revolutionary symbol is the Liberty Bell, rung to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to a public reading of the just-adopted Declaration of Independence. The symbol of the French Revolution is the "National Razor" -- the guillotine