While we celebrated our 250th birthday, European visitors to World Cup venues across our nation gave us a great gift: a huge dose of admiration for America. One young tourist, after counting all the gas pumps at Buc-ee’s (117), summed it up this way: “Americans can do anything they think of to do!”
Americans know the challenges of our covenantal Republic but forget the glories of its self-governing nature: innovation, prosperity, mobility, private property, Constitutional liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, opportunity, natural wonders and resources, and, most of all, the foundational principles as an enduring standard by which to measure ourselves.
Maybe the World Cup visitor’s admiration will grow into some further investigation of how this phenomenon of nation-states—the United States—came about? Ordered liberty requires moral and spiritual foundations strong enough to sustain it. Alexis de Tocqueville, another visitor to America, famously described the moral and social habits that sustain liberty as “the habits of the heart”—the internalized virtues and dispositions that help a people govern themselves from within.
A well-ordered liberty depends on internalized moral restraint, shaped by Biblical categories of repentance, obedience, and responsibility as articulated in the Ten Commandments. When those norms erode, bureaucracy multiplies in a futile attempt to replace conscience with compliance. We are reminded in Proverbs 28:2 (ESV): “When a land transgresses, it has many rulers.”1
If the phenomenon of America is traced to its root, there is Christ—the Word and Lamb of God, the only Good that liberates and blesses a people. Without Christ, there would be no America.
Teach the Children!
Carole Adams, President
1American Renewal Project. “The Golden Triangle of Freedom,” July 28, 2026.
