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As America reaches a major milestone this July 4th, there will be elaborate fireworks, long parades and plenty of speeches about what this nation has accomplished and endured. All of that is worth celebrating.
But if we’re honest, the more pressing question isn’t what we’re commemorating, it’s what we’re handing down. What we teach the next generation of Americans will determine what this country looks like at its next great milestone.
Right now, we are in danger of handing them a version of America that has been stripped of the very thing that made it extraordinary in the first place: faith.
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Let me start with something that gets 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 brave leaders who quoted Scripture and opened the Constitutional Convention in prayer.
America’s coming 250 years depend heavily on the faith we pass on to the next generation. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)
America wasn’t born out of a desire to eliminate religion and become some sort of aimless, secular utopia. Instead, our founders built a nation where no single church would be compelled by the state, precisely because they believed faith was too important to be weaponized by government.
The Declaration of Independence references God four times. Our rights are described as endowments from a Creator. These rights don’t come from a king, a parliament or a constitution. They come from God. Government doesn’t grant them. Government is merely charged with protecting them.
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This is where we have lost the plot.
Over the last several decades, we’ve allowed “separation of church and state” — a phrase that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution — to be wielded as a crowbar to pry faith out of public life entirely. We’ve taught a generation of young people that patriotism and faith don’t blend, that loving America means setting religion aside and that the public square must be scrubbed clean of anything that looks spiritual or sounds like a prayer.
The result? A generation of people who are ashamed of their country and unmoored from their God.
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I’ve learned a lot in 30 years of working with girls, many of whom left the Girl Scouts because of the ways the organization has stripped faith and God-given identity from its program, as so many other organizations have over the years. When a young woman doesn’t know who she is in Christ, she won’t know what to make of her country either. She’ll be told by one group to love America uncritically, and by another to be ashamed of it. She’ll waffle between identities, trying to figure out which version of herself is acceptable in which room.
That is not freedom. It’s confusion dressed up as progress.
Genuine freedom — the kind our Founders recognized and Scripture promises — isn’t something any government invented. It existed before the Constitution was drafted, before the Declaration was signed, before anyone fled Europe for this continent. It’s woven into how God made human beings. America’s genius was not that it created freedom. It was that it acknowledged freedom as something already bestowed by God, and built a government designed to protect it.
The Declaration of Independence references God four times. Our rights are described as endowments from a Creator. These rights don’t come from a king, a parliament or a constitution. They come from God. Government doesn’t grant them. Government is merely charged with protecting them.
That distinction matters, especially for the kids we are raising right now.
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If we want America to look like America at its next great milestone, 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 confidently rooted in her faith, who knows she is first a citizen of heaven and second a citizen of this republic, is exactly the kind of person a free nation needs. She doesn’t need the government to tell her what is true or good. She can hold the complexity of her nation’s history, the beauty and the scars alike, without being shaken, because her foundation isn’t the nation, it’s the God who placed her in it!
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America’s birthday parties will be spectacular this July 4th. 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, celebratory spirit of this time of year. But when the fireworks fade, the real work will be the same work it has always been, which is raising children who know the God who made them free, and who understand that freedom comes with the responsibility to pass it on.
That is how we commemorate 250 years. And that is how we earn the next.
