America turns 250 next year. Most of the country has forgotten the God the founders prayed to. He has not forgotten us. The road back is the road it has always been.
On July 4, 2026, America will be 250 years old. There will be parades. Speeches. Fireworks. The political class will spend the year trying to assert their preferred narratives about what America was, is, and ought to be. Most of those narratives will leave one important figure entirely out: the God to whom the founders explicitly attributed the country's existence.
The Declaration of Independence references God four times. The Constitution doesn't open with His name, but the men who wrote it overwhelmingly did. Read their letters. Read their state constitutions. Read the prayers they prayed in the Continental Congress. The American founding was not a Christian theocracy — and was never intended to be — but it was a deeply, unmistakably, foundationally God-fearing project.
What we have forgotten
John Adams, second president, wrote: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
George Washington, in his Farewell Address: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
These were not throwaway lines. They were the architectural assumptions of the country. The founders believed — explicitly, repeatedly, on the record — that the freedoms they were establishing required a virtuous people, and that a virtuous people required God.
We have spent the last sixty years testing the alternative. The results are in.
What we have produced instead
An epidemic of loneliness. Forty percent of children growing up in homes without their fathers. The collapse of marriage in the working class. Drug overdoses claiming a hundred thousand lives a year. Teenage girls reporting depression and self-harm at rates without historical parallel. A culture that does not know what a man is, what a woman is, or what either is for.
These are not unrelated problems. They are the predictable consequences of removing the foundation the founders said the country needed. Adams was right. The Constitution was not designed for the people we have become. It is straining.
The road back
There is no political solution. The right candidate, the right party, the right policy will not save the country. The founders themselves knew this. The country was not founded on politics. It was founded on a virtuous people who shaped politics.
The road back is the road that has always worked. It starts with one believer in one home praying for one neighborhood. It moves outward in concentric circles — one church, one community, one county. It is slow. It is unspectacular. It does not generate news cycles. And it is the only thing that has ever turned a country around.
There is biblical precedent. "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).
That promise was given to Israel. The principle behind it is older than Israel and applies to every nation that has ever lived. God responds to humility, prayer, and repentance. He has done it before. He can do it again.
Our part
Pray for America. Specifically. Daily. By name — your governor, your representatives, your president, your judges. Pray for revival. Pray for repentance. Pray for the persecuted Christians whose witness is the rebuke our country needs.
Vote your conscience, knowing that voting is not the answer.
Live the gospel where you live. Be a good neighbor. Raise your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Tell the truth. Forgive. Show mercy. Do justice.
And remember whose country this actually is. The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. America belongs to Him. He has not forgotten us. The question is whether we will remember Him in time.