America will be two hundred and fifty years old next summer. The country that began with a Continental Congress that opened in prayer, that ratified a Declaration appealing to "the laws of nature and of nature's God," that sent its presidents to be sworn in with their hands on a Bible — that country will mark a quarter-millennium of existence. And much of it will mark the day having forgotten almost entirely the God to whom the founders so frequently appealed.
I want to write about that carefully. America is not the church. The Constitution is not the Bible. The flag is not a holy object. The Christian's first allegiance is to a kingdom that does not have a flag and was never voted into existence. Anyone who has confused America with Christ has gotten Christianity wrong, and probably gotten America wrong too.
And yet. A nation cannot be understood apart from the spiritual currents that gave it shape. And ours, despite the recent attempts to deny it, was shaped — substantially, identifiably, undeniably — by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as worshiped through His Son, Jesus Christ, by a population that, in 1776, was overwhelmingly Protestant.
What the founders said
I am aware that the founding generation included deists, skeptics, and a few outright unbelievers. Thomas Jefferson cut up his New Testament with scissors. Benjamin Franklin held God at a deistic distance. Thomas Paine wrote a book mocking the Bible. The picture is not as simple as some Christian outlets pretend.
But the broader picture is also not as simple as the secular textbooks pretend. George Washington proclaimed national days of thanksgiving and prayer in language that would get him fired from a modern public school. John Adams said our Constitution was "made only for a moral and religious people, [and] is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." The first Congress voted to print Bibles for the public schools. Patrick Henry said it would be "a monstrous fallacy that this great nation was founded… on religions of any kind, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ." The vast majority of the men who put their signatures on our founding documents were members of Christian churches — and several were ordained ministers.
The founders did not establish a state church. That was a deliberate, biblically-informed choice — a recognition that faith coerced is faith corrupted. But they assumed, and frequently said, that the experiment would not survive without the moral formation a generally Christian population would bring to it. Adams was not asking for a theocracy. He was asking for a populace that still feared God.
Where we are now
That populace is much smaller than it was. Church attendance is half what it was in 1965. Bible literacy is collapsing. The percentage of Americans who can name the four Gospels is in the thirties. Fewer than half of Gen Z professes any religious affiliation at all. The cultural ballast that the founders assumed would steady the ship has been thrown overboard, more or less consciously, over the past sixty years.
And the consequences are exactly what the founders said they would be. A government that no longer trusts its people. A people who no longer trust their government. Cities that have priced families out of existence. A drug epidemic that buries one hundred thousand Americans a year. A loneliness crisis the surgeon general has formally declared a public health emergency. A generation that cannot tell you what a man or a woman is. A political class so cynical that the words "Christian" and "values" appear in the same sentence on a campaign bus and disappear the moment the cameras turn off.
America is not collapsing because we have forgotten the founders. America is wobbling because we have forgotten the One the founders, even at their most flawed, kept appealing to.
The road back
If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14
That verse has been quoted to a fault on Christian radio for forty years, and we have, by and large, ignored it for the same forty. Read it carefully. Notice who the road back belongs to. Not the politicians. Not the cultural commentators. Not the Christian celebrities. My people, who are called by my name.
The healing of a land begins with the humbling of its church. Not the chastening of its enemies. Not the election of its preferred party. Not the reform of its school curriculum. The humbling of its church.
Humble themselves
That is, frankly, the part the American church has been worst at. We have built brands. We have hosted conferences. We have starred in podcasts. We have told the world how it ought to live and rarely paused to consider how we ought to live. Humility is the doorway. Until we walk through it, the rest does not start.
Pray and seek my face
Not seek a political outcome. Not seek a return to the 1950s. Not seek influence. Seek my face. God Himself. The American church has, in some quarters, traded the face of God for the face of a candidate. We will not be revived until we are willing to want Him more than we want any of the things we have been asking Him for.
Turn from their wicked ways
That is the part that is going to sting. Because the wicked ways the verse is talking about are not just out there in San Francisco or up there in the New York Times. They are also in here. In our consumerism. In our gluttony. In our pornography. In our gossip-fueled small groups. In our racial pride. In our political idolatry. In our refusal to forgive the family member who hurt us in 2009. Repentance starts at the altar of God's house, not in the public square.
What I am praying for
America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday should not be a triumphalist parade. We are not in a position to brag. It should be a national day of humility. A day where the church of America, on her knees, asks the God who blessed our founders to be merciful to us in ways we no longer deserve.
I do not know if that will happen on July 4, 2026. But I know what God will do if His people, in any quantity, get serious about the conditions of 2 Chronicles 7:14. I will hear. I will forgive. I will heal. That is His promise. He has not retracted it.
The God of our fathers is still on His throne. He has not abandoned this country. He has, at points, allowed her to feel what it would be like if He did, in the hope that the experience would bring her, sober and weeping, back to His feet.
Pray for America, beloved. Not in slogans. In tears. The road back is the same road it has always been — through the door of repentance, into the embrace of a Father who has been watching the road for a long, long time.