This Upcoming Docudrama Shows God’s Hand in America
By Movieguide® Contributor
America is a great nation, but scholar Michael Medved argues it’s not by accident — it’s because of God’s providence.
“One of the things when you start looking for evidence of these illogical happy coincidences, people say the idea of a divine purpose in the United States and things happening that you wouldn’t expect,” said Medved, author of The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic. “For people who say, ‘Well, America’s just lucky. These are just happy circumstances. Happy accidents.’ America’s no accident and a pattern of happy accidents is still a pattern.”
Heroic Pictures is currently turning Medved’s book into a documentary. The doc, THE AMERICAN MIRACLE, will come out sometime this summer.
“That’s what the movie is about — actually finding that pattern which all of our most important leaders have believed in from Washington to Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt,” he explained in an interview with CBN this week. “All of our leaders have understood that America has a divine purpose.”
Medved explained that Washington was 23 years old when he participated in the Battle of Monongahela. There were 69 British soldiers who were wounded or killed, and Washington was the only one who came out unscathed.
“Samuel Davies, in a sermon, welcomed him back…said, “This young man will perform an important service to his country’ — he founded it,” Medved told CBN.
“The most dramatic thing is the worst battle of the entire war,” Medved explained. “[It] was in the summer of 1776. It was after July 4th and the Continental Army in the Battle of Brooklyn lost. They had two generals captured.”
The British also killed or captured approximately 1,000 Americans that day.
“They were trapped with a British fleet with four warships in the East River and the American troops in Brooklyn, and they were about to be captured, killed, and hanged,” Medved stated. “That was the plan for all of the leaders of this revolution, and Washington had this bold idea that we will sneak out. Now, how do you sneak out with an army of several thousand people that they had left in New York going across the river, right by these British Men of war?”
“You don’t. You can’t, except for the fact that God — and they believe that it was God — created this fog that was completely unseasonable. It’s in August, you know. It’s not foggy in New York…They got the Army out safely and were able to continue the war and the British themselves highlighted that they believed that there was something supernatural about the deliverance of the American troops.”
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“Many of the founding fathers were not conventionally religious but they believed deeply in what Washington in his first inaugural address called the ‘invisible hand,’ which was a hand of God in human affairs,” Medved explained.
Medved summed up his perspective with a quote from German Chancellor Otto Van Bismarck: “God has special protection for lost dogs, small children, drunkards and the United States of America.”
In the docudrama, Kevin Sorbo plays young Thomas Jefferson and Pat Boone plays Thomas Jefferson in his older years.
“I think they participated in this film as a labor of love and patriotism and that that was true for a lot of people, some of whom were surprising,” Medved said. “Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss appears in the film and comments about his passion for civics, just to get Americans to appreciate the fact that the country is no accident.”
Medved appears in the doc and includes commentary from historians and professors “so that people don’t think that this is just some cultish or politically motivated [film].”
Other actors in the drama include Daniel Shippey, Cameron Arnett, James Arnold Taylor, Rachel Day Hughes, Nicole C. Mullen and more.
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