In December of 2023 I asked the Lord, "Is there anything new for 2024?" I immediately heard in my heart, "Save America." I took it very personal but also as a general call going out to every one who loves America that it is time to take a stand. I also knew it was a continuation of the call I received in 2010 to write God back into America's history.
The 2010 call, which I delineate in this article, led to the writing and publication of the above five books on the topic. Since this recent call to "Save America," I have sensed a renewed incentive to get these books into the hands of as many people as possible, especially Christian and political leaders.
If America's future is to be saved, her lost Christian heritage must be recovered, for as George Orwell said in his classic, 1984, "Whoever controls the past, controls the future." I am not the only one addressing this topic, but I think my approach may be unique in that I have emphasized the role of the Great Awakening in both the founding of America and the ending of slavery.
I Thought God Was Through with America
Ever since my commitment to Christ over 50 years ago, I have been a student and proponent of Revival. I wrote the book, 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity, which documents Holy Spirit revival throughout church history, and it is used in colleges and seminaries around the world. In doing this research I had studied the Great Awakenings in America and held out hope of seeing it happen again.
By 2010, however, I had given up hope of America ever seeing another great, national spiritual awakening. The revivals of the 1990s, it seemed, had become self-serving and powerless to stem the cultural and moral decline of the nation. Although I believed there could still be individual and local revivals, I had reluctantly succumbed to the popular eschatological idea that there would not be another great revival. I thought that America’s time in the sun was over and done.
Surprised by the Holy Spirit
That all changed, however, in the fall of 2010 when I experienced a seven-hour visitation of God that completely upended my thinking in this regard. It began on a sunny September day when I began a two-hour drive from Tulsa, OK to Kingfisher, OK where I would be preaching the following day in a Sunday morning service. Without any anticipation of such a thing happening, I suddenly felt enveloped in God’s presence. At the same time, the Holy Spirit began flooding mind and heart with thoughts of hope and faith that America “could” see another great, national spiritual awakening that would impact the culture, stem the tide of secularism, and alter the course of the nation.
As I drove along the highway, I was hardly aware of my surroundings. By the time I arrived at my hotel, my heart was so full I could hardly contain myself. I could hardly wait to open my notebook PC and began writing down the thoughts that continued to flood my mind. That experience lasted far into the night as I sat on the hotel bed and prayed, praised God and wrote.
The Fruit of That Experience
Two significant changes came out of that experience. Firstly, my hope for America was renewed and I knew that God was not finished with her. Secondly, I saw for the first time that the First Great Awakening had a direct bearing on the founding of this nation. I saw that America had had an overt Christian birth.
I knew this had to be put in writing but I also knew there was much research to be done. More than once I was amazed at how I was providentially led to resources to confirm the vision I had seen, and to fill out the historical narrative documenting America’s spiritual birth. After two years of research and writing, I published America’s Revival Heritage in 2012 and it was very well received. When America’s Revival Heritage sold out, and I began an edit for republication, there was so much new material that it soon became obvious that a new book was emerging. As a result, I published Pilgrims and Patriots, which expanded the historical narrative of America’s spiritual birth and showed, in even more detail, the role of prayer and the Great Awakening in her founding. Then came a small 38-page volume entitled 5 Pillars of the American Republic. In 2019 I began sensing a stirring in my spirit to take the research I had done and add a chapter on slavery, showing how the Great Awakening also had a direct bearing on the ending of slavery on this continent. I was again amazed at the historical resources that I discovered to complete this task and it soon became clear that an entirely new book was in the making.
As I was writing, I read about the New York Times' 1619 Project supposedly to honor the 400 year anniversary of the first African slaves being brought to this land in 1619. The producers of this project claimed that America's true founding was 1619, not 1776, and that she was forever defined by slavery and racism.
When I read this I said aloud, "No! No! America was not defined by 1619; America was defined by 1726." That was the year the Great Awakening began, which ignited a powerful anti-slavery movement at a time slavery was accepted and practiced in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and much of the world. I decided to entitle the book, 1726, with the subtitle, The Year that Defined America. Out of this research I then wrote and published a smaller book entitled America's Abolitionist Founding Fathers. Why this is Important
Secularist and Marxist historians have re-written America's history leaving out the prominence of faith and prayer, and painting the founders as evil men who formed America to protect their wealth and maintain slavery. School children are being taught to despise and hate America. This is part of the bigger Marxist strategy for the takeover of a nation without firing a shot, for as Karl Marx said, "People without a heritage are easily persuaded."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a Soviet labor camp and observed how the communists sought to remove the Russian people from their Christian past, wrote, "To destroy a people you much first sever their roots." And the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Carl Sandburg, said, "When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from."
These books are a stark reminder of where we came from as a nation. These books will help us reclaim our Christian heritage and dispel the lies that are being propagated about America's origins. They will also stir our hearts to pray and believe for another Great Awakening to sweep across the land.
These books, and more, are available from Amazon and our website at www.eddiehyatt.com. I have also created an exciting PowerPoint presentation about America's birth out of a Great Spiritual Awakening. If you would like to schedule me to present this at your church, school or event, send an email to dreddiehyatt@gmail.com.
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