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As America reaches a major milestone this Fourth of July, there will be elaborate fireworks, long parades, and many speeches about what this nation has accomplished and endured. All of this is worthy of celebration.
But if we are honest, the most pressing question is not what we are commemorating, but what we are transmitting. What we teach the next generation of Americans will determine what this country will be like in its next great milestone.
Right now, we are in danger of facing a version of America stripped of what made it extraordinary in the first place: faith.
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Let me start with something that is misquoted almost daily in our culture. The First Amendment does not say that God has no place in American public life. It says Congress shall make no law establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. It was written by courageous leaders who cited Scripture and opened the Constitutional Convention in prayer.
America’s next 250 years depend largely on the faith we pass on to the next generation. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)
America was not born out of a desire to eliminate religion and become some kind of aimless, secular utopia. Instead, our founders built a nation where no church would be condemned by the state, precisely because they believed faith was too important for the government to use as a weapon.
The Declaration of Independence refers to God four times. Our rights are described as endowments of a Creator. These rights do not come from a king, a parliament or a constitution. They come from God. The government does not grant them. The government is simply charged with protecting them.
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This is where we have lost the plot.
For the past several decades, we have allowed the “separation of church and state” (a phrase that appears nowhere in the Constitution) to be used as leverage to rip faith out of public life entirely. We have taught a generation of young people that patriotism and faith do not mix, that loving America means putting aside religion, and that the public square must be cleansed of anything that looks spiritual or sounds like prayer.
The result? A generation of people who are ashamed of their country and disconnected from their God.
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I have learned a lot in 30 years of working with girls, many of whom left Girl Scouts because of the ways the organization has stripped faith and God-given identity from its program, as so many other organizations have done over the years. When a young woman doesn’t know who she is in Christ, she won’t know what to do with her country either. One group will tell you to love America uncritically and another to be ashamed of it. She will waver between identities, trying to figure out which version of herself is acceptable in each room.
That is not freedom. It’s confusion disguised as progress.
Genuine freedom, the kind our Founders recognized and the Scriptures promise, is not something any government invented. It existed before the Constitution was written, before the Declaration was signed, before anyone fled Europe for this continent. It is woven into how God created human beings. The genius of America was not that it created freedom. It was that he recognized freedom as something already given by God and built a government designed to protect it.
The Declaration of Independence refers to God four times. Our rights are described as endowments of a Creator. These rights do not come from a king, a parliament or a constitution. They come from God. The government does not grant them. The government is simply charged with protecting them.
That distinction is important, especially for the children we are raising right now.
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If we want America to look like America in its next big thing, we have to teach the next generation that their identity as Christians and their identity as Americans are not in conflict. They are complementary. A girl firmly rooted in her faith, who knows that she is a citizen of heaven first and a citizen of this republic second, is exactly the kind of person a free nation needs. You don’t need the government to tell you what is true or good. She can hold the complexity of her nation’s history, the beauty and the scars alike, without being moved, because her foundation is not the nation, it is the God who placed her in it!
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America’s birthday parties will be spectacular this 4th of July. I hope they are. My own backyard will be filled with family, friends, and more food than any hostess should prepare. I love the joyful and festive spirit of this time of year. But when the fireworks die down, the real work will be the same as always: raising children who know the God who made them free and who understand that freedom comes with the responsibility of passing it on.
This is how we commemorate 250 years. And that’s how we win the next one.