If we can't see the cost of our remoteness from America's origins, it is only because we choose not to.

Come out from among them, and be ye separate.

— II Corinthians 6:17

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he story does not begin in 1776. It does not begin with Concord, the Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution. It does not really even begin in the Dutch city of Leiden, where a colony of English Christian nonconformists settled after its members decided upon the spiritual necessity of separating themselves from the Church of England and hence, the times being what they were, with the English state. From King Henry II and the martyr Thomas à Becket to King Henry …