By Dr. Rick Chromey
The Israelites gathered twelve stones from the Jordan, then Joshua said…
“When your children ask their fathers and grandfathers in the future,
‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them the story of God’s deliverance…” – Joshua 4:20-22
America has reached a milestone in world history.
On July 4, 2026, the nation will celebrate its 250th birthday with fireworks, parades, speeches, and patriotic exhibitions. Politicians will glorify our past. Historians will recite the story. And journalists will document the memorials.
However, anniversaries are more than celebration. They’re also for reflection.
In Joshua 4, God commanded Israel to build a twelve-stone monument. These rocks weren’t for the current generation but for future ones, as a reminder to recount God’s miracles of deliverance, provision, and protection. Ready for the moment a child asked, “What do these stones mean?”
America’s 250th anniversary should provoke the same question.
But not about stones in a stream. Rather, about our “holy days” (or holidays). Why do we celebrate? What do they mean? And we better get the story right.
Especially Independence Day and Christmas.
We need to know why a former founding generation of Americans – who experienced their own miraculous deliverance from British tyranny – believed America’s liberty was “indissolubly linked” to the Christian foundations that produced it.
It’s an urgent question for modern America.
In a study of historic world empires, historian Samuel Arbesman discovered the average empire survives about 220 years.1 The United States surpassed that mark in 1996, the same year Americans embraced satellite television, email, Fox News, and the internet. By 2000, cultural research revealed “social anxiety” as Americans’ greatest concern due to the nation’s moral/ethical/religious decline, 24/7 news/internet, violent media, mistrust of institutions, hyper-consumerism, and sexualization of kids.
Arbesman noted that empires didn’t collapse from a loss of military strength, but rather their inability to remember. They forgot who they were, what they believed, and why they existed. And eventually they forgot what made them free.
That’s why this conversation matters. The issue isn’t whether America will celebrate its 250th birthday.
The real concern is whether America will exist on July 4, 2076.
Christmas in July
Today “Christmas in July” is a marketing gimmick disconnected from the real Christmas. Yet for early American generations, there was a profound relationship between Christmas and Independence Day.
Not because of Christmas trees and fireworks, Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, or festive foods unique to their celebrations.
Nineteenth-century generations saw a connection because they believed the liberty of Independence Day ultimately rested upon truths proclaimed on Christmas.
Few Americans expressed that conviction more clearly than John Quincy Adams. On July 4, 1837, speaking in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Adams reflected on Independence Day with a question to his audience: “Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the world, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day?” 2
That sentence is shocking.
Today, Americans consider Christmas and Independence Day entirely unrelated holidays. Yet Adams’s audience understood his meaning exactly. Then he asked a second question: “Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior?” 3
Not loosely connected. Not vaguely associated.
Indissolubly linked.
Adams believed America’s experiment in liberty was not born in a philosophical vacuum. The Declaration’s affirmation that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights rested upon a worldview shaped by Christianity.
To Adams and early America, Christmas announced a revolutionary message for mankind. Christmas is when Jesus entered history on a mission to liberate humanity. God wasn’t distant, as the deists of their day believed. He was actively involved. Why? To show our value and to reveal the “right to life, liberty, and happiness” was from God, and not kings, governments, or democratic majorities.
Independence Day then celebrated the political application of this theological truth.
Whether one agrees with Adams is beside the point. This belief was common among the early American generations. The Lewis and Clark Expedition, for example, celebrated only two holidays religiously: Christmas and Independence Day.
Religion, virtue, liberty
In fact, modern readers might be surprised by how frequently our Founders linked Christianity’s themes of virtue and liberty.
John Adams wrote, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.” 4 A few years later he was blunter: “Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company: I mean hell.” 5
Benjamin Rush, one of the most influential and under-appreciated Founding Fathers, argued constitutional (republican) government could only survive if Americans possessed moral character, through biblical education: “The only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government is the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible.” 6
Patrick Henry preached a similar theme, describing “virtue, morality, and religion” as “the great pillars of all government and of social life…[and] the armor…that renders us invincible.” 7
Noah Webster – the schoolmaster, lexicographer, and author whose textbooks educated generations of Americans – penned: “The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles. This is genuine Christianity and to this we owe our free constitutions of government.” 8
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story echoed: “I verily believe that Christianity is necessary to support a civil society.” 9
Notice the pattern.
These Founders differed in theology, temperament, politics, and personality. Yet they repeatedly returned to the same essential idea.
Liberty requires virtue.
Virtue requires moral formation.
Moral formation depends upon religious truth (namely Christianity).
Again, whether modern Americans agree with their linking moral virtue with Christianity doesn’t matter. The historical question is whether THEY BELIEVED IT.
And that answer is overwhelmingly YES.
The spirit of religion and freedom
Perhaps the strongest witness to this linkage of liberty and virtue wasn’t even an American.
When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States in 1831, he came to study prisons. What this Frenchman discovered instead was America. More specifically, he discovered the remarkable “indissoluble link” between Independence Day (liberty) and Christmas (religion).
In France, religion and freedom often appeared as enemies. The French Revolution had produced fierce conflict between church and state. Tocqueville expected to find similar battles in America, and had he arrived in 2026, he would have.
But he found the opposite: “Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.” The longer Tocqueville stayed, the more convinced he became that Christianity exercised enormous influence upon American society. He noted in his homeland “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom” were oppositional and combative, but in America “were intimately united.” 10 Tocqueville concluded that, “Religion in America must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.” 11
Notice what Tocqueville did not say.
He didn’t say America had a national church. He didn’t suggest clergy controlled government. He didn’t claim every American was a sincere Christian.
Instead, he observed how religious belief helped cultivate the moral habits necessary for self-government.
Americans governed themselves (through republican-democracy) because they FIRST governed themselves. 12
That distinction matters.
The Founders feared concentrated power. They believed freedom could survive only if citizens possessed enough virtue to restrain themselves without constant governmental coercion. Religion supplied that restraint. Christianity served that virtue. And virtue sustained liberty.
This is why John Quincy Adams could speak of Christmas and Independence Day as being “indissolubly linked.” The connection was not primarily theological. It was civilizational.
Christmas represented the source.
Independence Day represented the fruit.
Christmas proclaimed eternal truths about God, human dignity, morality, accountability, and purpose. Independence Day celebrated a society attempting to build political institutions upon those truths.
The real question facing America today is not whether every Founder was an orthodox Christian, nor if America has perfectly applied these professed ideals. Clearly we have not. The same Daniel Webster who praised the Pilgrims in an 1820 speech also condemned the slave trade as “odious and abominable.” 13
Lady Liberty has often failed to reach her highest virtues.
But does modern, secular America even care to participate in that vision?
Joshua’s memorial stones existed because memory is fragile.
A generation that forgets its story eventually forgets itself. And with a half century of secular revisionism contributing to the amnesia, America stands at the crossroads.
Can Americans celebrate Christmas without Christ and Independence Day without the moral foundations of independence? Can we enjoy the fruits while neglecting the roots? Can we inherit blessings without remembering their origins?
The last American generation?
It’s why the Jordan stones still ask the question: What do these stones mean?
The generation that crossed the Jordan knew exactly what God had done. Their children did not. Their grandchildren knew even less. Without intentional remembrance, the story eventually disappears.
America faces a similar challenge on its 250th birthday.
The question is not whether we still possess the symbols of our national story. We do. The flags still wave. The fireworks still explode. The patriotic songs still play. The holidays remain on the calendar.
But do we understand what they mean?
That is why I write this column. We must tell the truth about our past, interpret history honestly, and navigate culture wisely.
Can America remain free while abandoning the Christian virtues that helped create and sustain its liberty? The secularist says yes. Founder Jedidiah Morse answered no:
“To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom and political and social happiness which mankind now enjoys… Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government—and all the blessings which flow from them—must fall with them.” 14
As America celebrates 250 years in 2026, our children are asking what Independence Day means. How will we answer? With fireworks, barbecues, and flag-waving? Or with an understanding of the ideas, beliefs, sacrifices, and virtues that produced this nation?
Has our founding story become little more than a fable? Are the Declaration of Independence and Constitution becoming as neglected as the Bible itself? Can we still explain why generations of Americans believed liberty and virtue were inseparable?
The answers to those questions will determine whether future generations inherit merely the memory of America – or the reality of it.
America is divided, confused, and increasingly ignorant of its founding story.
Yet we cannot allow our generation to become the last American generation.
No empire lasts forever. America will fall someday. The question is whether it happens because we surrendered the very principles that made us free.
Like Paul Revere’s ride, it may feel like midnight.
Or perhaps, like the birth of Christ, a new dawn is just beginning.
SOURCES:
1 Samuel Arbesman (2011): The Life-Spans of Empires, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 44:3, 127-129
2 John Quincy Adams, An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their Request, on the Sixty-First Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1837 (Newburyport, MA: Charles Whipple, 1837), 48.
3 Adams, An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, 48.
4 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), 13:292-294.
5 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856), 10:254.
6 Benjamin Rush, “A Defence of the Use of the Bible as a School Book,” in Essays, Literary, Moral & Philosophical (Philadelphia: Thomas & Samuel F. Bradford, 1798), 112.
7 Patrick Henry to Archibald Blair, January 8, 1799, in William Wirt Henry, ed., Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 2:592.
8 Noah Webster, History of the United States (New Haven, CT: Durrie and Peck, 1832), 300.
9 Joseph Story, March 24, 1801, in Life and Letters of Joseph Story, vol. 1 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 92.
10 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: George Adlard, 1839), 307.
11 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 307.
12 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 304.
13 Daniel Webster, A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1820 (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1821), 39-40.
14 Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Exhibiting the Present Dangers and Consequent Duties of the Citizens of the United States of America, Delivered at Charlestown, April 25, 1799, The Day of the National Fast (MA: Printed by Samuel Etheridge, 1799), 9.
Dr. Rick Chromey is a historian and theologian who speaks and writes on matters of religion, culture, and history. He’s also a Lewis and Clark historian for American Cruise Lines (Columbia and Snake Rivers). Rick and his wife Linda live in Star, ID. www.rickchromey.com.
