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 wasnt 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” â a phrase that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution â 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 dont 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.
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.
