As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, let us not forget how deeply our Founders believed in the guiding hand of Divine Providence. In the Declaration of Independence, they staked their project on a theological claim, insisting that “we hold these truths to be self‑evident, that all men are created equal, [that] they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” And they entrusted that same project, in the closing line, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,” confident that the new republic was not merely a human construction but stood under the care and judgment of the God who created men equal.
The Declaration’s language is not a throwaway flourish. It reveals the moral predicates upon which they were prepared to risk everything. The Founders did not appeal to a merely human consensus or to transient political fashion. They grounded rights and liberties in a higher source—”their Creator”—and they understood the survival of the experiment to depend on Providence, not merely on their own cleverness.
Contrast that with a recent remark from Senator Cory Booker, speaking in Michigan: “What we need is not from on high!” he exclaimed, pointing upward toward the sky. The line drew cheers, as such lines now do. But it lands in our ears only because we have forgotten how foreign it would have sounded to the generation that pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” under the protection of Divine Providence.
As America’s 250th birthday on July 4th, 2026, inches closer, a few voices are trying to restore this older memory. Dr. Ben Carson, who served as Housing and Urban Development Secretary in President Donald Trump’s first term, is doing his part by reinvigorating the national conversation around the country’s faith‑based origins with a new children’s book scheduled for release near the semi quincentennial. He has spoken bluntly about the lack of real education in our schools, where the intent often seems to be to misrepresent America’s past and to undermine traditional faith and history. He is right to worry: a nation that forgets what its founders believed about God and man will inevitably forget what they believed about liberty.
The Founders themselves could not have been clearer. At the Constitutional Convention, when tempers were fraying and progress had stalled, Benjamin Franklin rose and reminded the delegates that in the early days of the struggle with Britain, the Continental Congress had opened its sessions with prayer and had seen “frequent instances of a superintending providence in our favor.” Without God’s “concurring aid,” he warned, they would succeed in their political construction “no better than the Builders of Babel.”
A decade after independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush looked back on the adoption of the Constitution and drew the same conclusion. Reflecting on the union of the states and the establishment of the new frame of government, he wrote that he was “perfectly satisfied, that the union of the states, in its form and adoption, is as much the work of divine providence, as any of the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testament.” For Rush, the birth of the American Republic belonged not merely to the realm of politics but to the realm of the miraculous and mysterious.
George Washington, not given to religious exaggeration, repeatedly spoke in similar terms. Reflecting on the outcome of the Revolutionary War, he attributed the victory to “the benign influence of the divine Providence,” and in letter after letter he referred to the “all‑powerful dispensations of Providence” that had preserved both his army and the fragile cause of independence. For the commander in chief, as for the physician and the printer‑philosopher, Providence was not a rhetorical ornament. It was an interpretive key to understanding how this unlikely nation had been born.
None of this came cheaply. The work and sacrifice of building a republic were dangerous and hard. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had, in effect, a warrant against his person and property. They faced hanging if caught. They were convicted fugitives in the eyes of the Crown until Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Their affirmation of self‑evident truths “endowed by their Creator” was not a classroom posture; it was a pledge made under real threat of ruin. How many of our leaders today would be willing to take such a risk?
You can verify what a person actually believes by what he is willing to sacrifice. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that a society becomes atomized when it loses shared moral beliefs. When people arrogantly make themselves their own final moral authority, they become isolated from each other and unmoored from any stable moral predicates. The resulting vacuum is often filled not by faith or reasoned morality, but by political identity. We see this in the costly badges of contemporary belonging—the demands of environmental absolutism, the faddish certainties of being “woke,” the compulsory virtue‑signaling of DEI. These become substitutes for the older, deeper, shared convictions that once bound Americans together.
Our problems today are at least twofold. First, we have lost a common moral identity because life has, for many, become too easy. The value of work has been displaced by the quest for entertainment and comfort. Hard work is difficult, but it is virtuous and carries immense value for our families and communities. Being a good mother or father is the most demanding vocation in the world; anything else is less difficult. Yet we regularly disparage such vocations while celebrating lifestyles of consumption and self‑expression.
Second, we have forgotten that meaningful community always has a cost of membership. Until we are willing to embrace the values of our founding, the cost of belonging to a community built on sacrifice and service will be impossible to sustain. The more any organization demands of its members—a church, a school, a business, even a football team—the more its members will sacrifice to participate. A republic is no different. A people unwilling to sacrifice cannot long remain free.
Like our Founding Fathers, we must once again find our moral center and demand more of ourselves. That means recovering the conviction that rights and duties flow from a Creator, and that the health of our common life depends on something indeed “from on high.” If we can do that—if we can once more rely “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” and live accordingly—then the celebration of our 250th anniversary will be more than a birthday party. It will be a renewal.
