OPINION:
What happens when a nation continues to speak the language of freedom but forgets the truth that made freedom possible? It’s a defining question of our age, and America’s 250th anniversary is an ideal moment to reflect upon it.
Our country was not founded on freedom alone but on the truth that freedom comes from God. That is what makes our freedoms inalienable. That is why government has no authority to touch them because government did not invent them.
Our founders called that truth “self-evident.” But is it still?
It was self-evident to the founders because, even though they were not uniform in their beliefs, they inhabited a world shaped by Scripture and natural law. That is not the case today, where faith has been in decline in the culture and under attack in the law. Many people, including those who write and interpret our laws, do not believe our rights come from God.
The consequences of losing sight of this once-self-evident truth are all around us.
We have a government that treats rights as privileges. We have states harassing pregnancy centers for supporting women and their children, censoring counselors who speak truth about how we are created male and female, and punishing faith-based schools for teaching God’s word. We have a government that turns lies into laws: the lie that sex can be changed or that unborn life doesn’t count.
We can’t say our founders didn’t warn us.
Patrick Henry once asked, “[How] can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”
John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Neither was arguing for government-enforced religion, but they did believe that freedom of religion was the first freedom. They believed it mattered to everyone, believers and nonbelievers alike. They knew that it created space to seek truth, speak truth and form the virtue that enables self-government.
Compare that to the modern understanding. Many Americans today, especially young people, have been taught that freedom of religion means freedom from religion. They hold the view that true liberty requires liberation from every limit: from family, faith, work and even from the truth about what it means to be human.
But a freedom detached from truth leaves people adrift, not liberated. When this happens in one life, it is a tragedy. When it happens across society, it is a crisis.
That crisis plays out in both our culture and our courts, which reinforce each other in a vicious cycle. Courts impact the culture because the law is a teacher. What it protects, people learn to honor. What it permits, people learn to accept. And the culture, in turn, shapes our laws because it determines who we will elect to write them and how hard we will fight to defend them.
Preserving religious freedom, and all freedom, requires replacing the vicious cycle with a virtuous one. It requires people who will fight in court when the government violates the God-given rights it was created to protect. And it requires citizens, parents, pastors and educators to use those rights, dearly protected, to defend and advance truth in the culture.
It’s true that our founders’ time was different from our own, in its scriptural foundation and otherwise. But it was also similar in many respects. Their challenges were not so different from our own. They, too, faced a threat to inalienable truth theirs from a tyrant an ocean away. The threat in our time is in our own backyard and in our hearts. But the fight is much the same.
We cannot return to 1776, but perhaps we can reclaim its spirit, its belief in truth and its willingness to fight for it. The clarity that made the American experiment possible: that freedom comes not from government but from God.
Doing so will determine whether our rights can endure today and, by God’s grace, for 250 years more.
• Kristen Waggoner is CEO, president and chief counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom. Follow Kristen on X @KristenWaggoner or follow ADF @ADFLegal.
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