Will America Ever Roar Again?

Or, can I ditch my cynicism on America's 250th?

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal, 1945. Public domain. Accessed at Wikimedia Commons.

Dismiss it as luck. Declare it destiny. Just don’t call it an overstatement: Over the last two-and-a-half centuries, America transformed the world.

Consider that in 1775, the number of countries claiming to be democratic republics was zero. None.

Today, seven billion people live in such nations. Pointing to this startling fact, Andrew Wilson adds:

Even those states that have no intention of functioning as democracies feel the need to pretend that they do. This is so commonplace now that we can forget what an astonishing change it represents.¹

And yet the rewriting of the world’s political order captures only one dimension of America’s influence. Scotsman Adam Smith first published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Across the Atlantic, the birth of America provided the ideal testing ground for his ideas. There, free-market energy didn’t have to overcome decaying feudal systems. Entrepreneurship, which European aristocrats continued to sneer at for some time, quickly carved out a place of cultural honor in America.

Democracy. Free markets. From Dallas to Delhi, it’s impossible to imagine the modern world without them. And of course, America’s 250-year roar included an ancient ingredient as well.

I’m thinking of Christianity.

And no, I won’t concern myself here with perpetual handwringing over the precise beliefs of various Founding Fathers. Why get tangled up there, when America’s Christian imprint is so stunningly evident in the lives of millions of ordinary people?

Consider the Methodist circuit riders. For a moment, set aside your theological preferences, and just marvel at what these steely preachers accomplished. Taking to horseback, they intended to reach every settlement on the frontier. And they came pretty close. When Francis Asbury, a catalyst for the movement, arrived from England in 1771, about 2.5% of Christians in the colonies were Methodists. By the 1850s, that figure had climbed to a staggering 34%.

And while the Methodists overachieved, overall church attendance in America likewise grew through the 1800s.²

This wasn’t a passing fad, either. Even in modern, “secular” America, church attendance remains as high as, or higher than, in any other economically developed nation.³

Constitutional democracy, free markets, and Christianity. Those are the influences that defined America as it remade the world over the past quarter-millennium. I want to point, in particular, to the relationship between America’s political order and its religious character. While this dynamic has produced tension at times, the resulting push-and-pull has usually been a creative and beneficial one.

Consider World War II, the conflict that marked America’s arrival as a world superpower. On June 6, 1944, Allied troops landed at Normandy for what became known as D-Day. That evening, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the nation in prayer. The text had been released in advance so everyday Americans could join him. Roosevelt openly wove religious and political themes together, binding them with an unmistakable sense of national destiny:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. . .With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.⁴

And while it might raise eyebrows today, Roosevelt’s rhetoric was squarely within the tradition of America’s presidents. In his first inaugural address, George Washington declared that “the propitious smiles of heaven” made the republican experiment possible. Less than a century later, Abraham Lincoln would cast the Civil War in providential terms. Woodrow Wilson would do the same during World War I.

Against such a backdrop, it should come as no surprise that America’s great fulfillment of its founding promise—the Civil Rights Movement—was a church-driven effort. John Lewis, who participated in that struggle for freedom, put it this way:

I really thought the civil rights movement was an extension of the church and I think you can see that in the leadership up through '68 with the leadership of Martin Luther King.⁵

A Baptist minister, King made calls for civil liberties and scriptural morality that flowed readily into one another. And while the years that followed his assassination were tumultuous, most Americans continued to believe that Christian virtue and the health of the republic were mutually reinforcing. That dynamic, after all, had long held.

But slowly something changed.

Today, when discussing the Civil Rights Movement, left-leaning commentators commonly avoid the subject of Christianity. In this mainstream media podcast from MLK Day 2025, three people discuss King’s legacy for over 40 minutes. The transcript includes zero references to Christianity. Faith gets a single mention via the cliche “faith in the future.” The word “religion” shows up once—in a direct quote from King.

Imagine the same people having a conversation about the Dalai Llama. Do you think they’d neglect to mention his Buddhism?

And while some progressives have long sought to erase Christianity from the Civil Rights Movement, a more recent unravelling of religion and republic has emerged on the right. Among conservatives, Christianity (or at least aspects of it) is still respected. Yet eerily, some on the far right now openly question the value of our constitutional order.

A shattered conservative movement, naturally, offers very different versions of this phenomenon. If you read lots of thick, dry books you might gush about “post-liberalism.” (This phrase anticipates the end of liberal democracy outright, not merely left-wing politics.) Or if you’re among the chronically online (and enchanted by the very worst of the internet), you might share straight-up Nazi memes.

To be fair, some who write about “post-liberalism” view themselves as the phenomenon’s observers, not its cheerleaders. And even those jazzed about the paradigm shift are still usually willing to denounce Nazis.

And yet, it’s still the case that some Americans on the political right now reject the core of the American project. They have, apparently, parted political ways with Abraham Lincoln, who ended the Gettysburg Address with this line:

. . .this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

So could America ever roar again? Could a far-reaching coalition ever stand up for our national virtues again? Could we once again recognize that government by the people is the only appropriate form of government for people made in the image of God? Could we cast off the waking nightmare of recent years and reimagine 21st-century America?

Maybe.

The challenges we face today are obviously not harder than those that our ancestors faced in Gettysburg or Normandy or Selma or countless other places, many forgotten. And overcoming challenges never ultimately depends on our effort or grit, anyway. It relies on the power of the God who overcame death itself.

Speaking of which, churches are growing again. After decades of declining numbers, Americans are returning to worship. A couple of years ago, this uptick was rumored. Now research is able to confirm the anecdotes. Especially encouraging is the fact that younger people are driving this shift.

Could this new chapter of Christian renewal soon spur civic renewal? It’s happened before in our history. Young people were instrumental in the First Great Awakening, which swept through the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. As countless ordinary believers experienced God in a profound way, the status of religious elites was questioned.

Were there echoes of the Great Awakening a few decades later during the American Revolution, as English political elites were cast off? Did Awakening-era preachers like George Whitfield unwittingly forge a shared American sense of identity? Some would argue that connecting the revival to the revolution and the republic is a reach.

But on America’s 250th birthday, it’s a fascinating one to ponder.

1. Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023)

2. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005)

3. Pew Research Center, “How Religious Commitment Varies by Country Among People of All Ages,” June 13, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/

4. “FDR’s D-Day Prayer,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration, June 5, 2019, https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov/2019/06/05/fdrs-d-day-prayer/

5. Interview with John Lewis, November 20, 1973, Interview A-0073, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Documenting the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/A-0073.html