Actor Nick Searcy: America Was Built on Faith, Religious Freedom

Mount Rushmore, in Keystone, S.D., in June 1995. Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

After observing the COVID-19-related lockdowns and restrictions on religious gatherings in the United States, actor Nick Searcy set about delving into the nation’s origins and history to gain an understanding of events currently unfolding across the country, with the goal of producing a documentary that would shed some light on the truth.

During the process, Searcy and filmmakers working on the documentary, which premiered last month, realized that America is built on faith, and they “were really making a movie about religious liberty,” he said.

The people who settled in America were pilgrims who came for religious freedom and sought  “to be able to worship God in the way they wanted to, without being controlled by the government of England,” Searcy told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” program

His film, “America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee,” which features Searcy conducting interviews, “tries to build the case, or remind people of the case, that the Bible was the inspiration for the Constitution,” he said.

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“These Christians founded America on an Old Testament basis, largely,” radio host Dennis Prager says in the documentary. “They took the great ideas of the Hebrew Bible and made them universal.”

The late Herman Cain, a businessman, author, commentator, and former presidential candidate, when interviewed by Searcy in the film, cites the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which says, “We hold these truths be self-evident that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator—with certain unalienable rights.”

“It didn’t try to name any one particular creator, it gave everybody the luxury,” Cain says in the movie.

Actor Nick Searcy arrives for the premiere of National Geographic's "The Hot Zone" at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, Calif., on May 9, 2019. Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images

The American Revolution was grounded in a bottom-up idea of government, in which “the people had the power to elect the officials that they wanted to elect,” but at the same time,  America was a godly nation “that respected the authority of a higher power than the government,” Searcy said.

By contrast, the French Revolution that occurred shortly after, as well as all socialist and communist revolutions, were informed by the concept that “the government is the highest source of power,” Searcy said.

That’s why they had to “remove any vestige of a belief in a higher power, or as much as they can,” he said.

“They don’t want to have any, any authority higher than the almighty state,” he continued, because “if you have a population that believes that their power comes from God and not the government, they can’t be controlled.”

Searcy says the reason he produced a documentary about religious liberty was to explore the root cause of the recent clashes in the United States over religious freedom. He cited as examples New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo threatening to close synagogues that didn’t comply with lockdown rules and California Gov. Gavin Newsom fining churches for opening amid prolonged lockdowns imposed in response to COVID-19.

What Went Wrong?

Searcy said the filmmakers wanted to explore when things changed in America. He noted that one of the reasons was the institution of slavery, which “became a stain on the country that had to be corrected.”

“The mechanism to correct it was built into the Constitution” because the people who designed the document knew that slavery was a “terrible institution and it would have to be someday removed and done away with,” Searcy said.

The country fought a war to end slavery because Americans knew it was wrong, he said.

That stain was then exploited by the country’s enemies—the enemies of freedom and individual liberty—who “have been able to use [the stain] to try to turn people against the country,” Searcy said.

The idea that “America is a racist country, and it was built on sin and slavery is a tactic used by the left to sort of demonize the entire country ... to make it easier to disassemble, because what they’re really trying to do is destroy the country and replace it with something else,” he said.

“The great battle in America right now is not Republican–Democrat, it’s not white–black, it’s not male–female, it’s not even left–right, it’s good versus evil,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, said during an interview in the documentary by Searcy. “And, in a greater sense, our battle is not political, it’s spiritual.”

Over the years, “the left has been able ... to chip away at the idea that really what this country is based on is a faith in God and in individual liberty under that God and that we answer to no higher power than God,” Searcy said.

However, “America is the only government in the world that is a self-correcting government that the people can actually change, rather than just having a dictator change its mind,” he added.

Joshua Philipp contributed to this report.