By Zack Strong
July 2, 2026

“The American Union will last as long as God pleases. It is the duty of every American Citizen to exert his utmost abilities and endeavours to preserve it as long as possible and to pray with submission to Providence “esto perpetua”.” – John Adams to Charles Carroll, August 2, 1820 (in James H. Hutson, ed., The Founders on Religion, 15).

Happy Independence Day! Happy Birthday, America! May God grant you 250 more!

The United States, the most blessed and incredible confederation in human history, turns 250 years old this July 4. It has not been a tranquil existence. As military veteran and author Thomas W. Chittum observed, “America was born in blood. America suckled on blood. America gorged on blood and grew into a giant, and America will drown in blood” (Thomas W. Chittum, Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America, 1).

Because we have been an immensely blessed people, we have been targeted by sinister forces that want to pry apart our Union and reduce us to slavery in a high-tech feudal system whose framework has already been built. The Lord’s hand has been over this nation while Satan’s henchmen have assaulted her. As we have grown in wealth, power, and prestige in our short existence, malign forces have studied ways to turn our blessings into curses. As so often happens with mighty societies, our greatness and exceptionalism have led to pride and apathy – to bread and circuses. We have become so wealthy and privileged that we have grown materialistic. As our love of material things has increased, our virtue has dissipated, our morality has decreased, and our devotion to God in all but lip service has wavered.

As our righteousness has waned, Heaven’s protection has gradually withdrawn. Now, the forces of despotism, degeneracy, and disunion are stronger than ever and threaten the overthrow of this wonderful Republic. We should never fall victim to the erroneous idea that “it can’t happen here” – that America could never fall. Our history proves otherwise. It also proves that national morality and faithfulness to Jesus Christ are required to save us from the enemy at the gates.

Our American Union has nearly collapsed several times under attacks from without and within. Its first trials came during the American Revolution when it is said that a third of the people were against Independence, a third supported it, and the remaining third didn’t care one way or the other. With God’s help, the patriot cause prevailed. In the midst of the fighting, General George Washington was so stunned by God’s obvious intervention that we wrote, “The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations” (George Washington to Thomas Nelson, August 20, 1778). After the war, his conclusion was the same,

“The man must be bad indeed who can look upon the events of the American Revolution without feeling the warmest gratitude towards the great Author of the Universe whose divine interposition was so frequently manifested in our behalf—And it is my earnest prayer that we may so conduct ourselves as to merit a continuance of those blessings with which we have hitherto been favoured” (George Washington to Samuel Langdon, September 28, 1789).

Notwithstanding God’s favor, immediately following the Revolution, Americans – who had not been truly united in the Revolution – remained divided as to their worldview and goals, and the Union devolved into anarchy and economic turmoil. The fledgling Republic verged toward disunion and potential civil war and was only salvaged by the miracle at Philadelphia – the God-inspired Constitution. The Constitution is an unparalleled blessing.  It bears the divine stamp of approval of Almighty God and has stood the test of time. Reflecting on the Constitution and the Union, James Madison wrote, “The happy Union of these States is a wonder; their Constn. a miracle; their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world. Woe to the ambition that would meditate the destruction of either!” (James Madison, “Outline,” September 1829, memorandum for the Virginia Constitutional Convention, in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 9, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 351–57)

Forging an empire of Liberty, as Jefferson phrased it, out of despotic Old World thinking and habits, was a challenge. America was then, and remains, a work in progress. The nation was again nearly split during the War of 1812 as New England threatened secession. South Carolina later threatened secession in 1832 over the Tariff of Abomination, to which President Jackson vowed military reprisals. The early Republic was a time of general prosperity, expansion, and optimism, but forces were hard at work undermining Liberty.

The scourge of slavery and the political quarreling it evoked, partly fostered by agent provocateurs operating on behest of European powers, led to the bloody Civil War with 700,000 slaughtered Americans and the near intervention of England to finish the work of disunion. In his April 1863 call for a day of fasting and prayer, Abraham Lincoln correctly identified the causes of the Civil War thus,

“Whereas the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the supreme authority and just government of Almighty God in all the affairs of men and of nations, has by a resolution requested the President to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation; and

“Whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord;

“And, insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

“It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

We need not only a national day of prayer and fasting, but a national movement of repentance, prayer, fasting, scripture study, church attendance, and service. As during the Civil War, America needs the Lord’s clemency for our collective sins.

The Civil War, however, did not end the nation. We survived, though scarred. The struggles of the Progressive uprising and the horrors of two world wars and economic depression did severe damage to the Republic and its constitutional fabric. The communist-inspired cultural upheavals and sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s did further damage that has not been undone – the counterculture became the dominant culture.

Unconstitutional wars, terror attacks, false-flag events, public assassinations, stolen national elections, deception campaigns by the intelligence community, brainwashing in public schools and institutions of higher learning, desensitizing by Hollywood, court opinions that have bludgeoned morality and the family unit, and domestic insurgencies by Marxian radicals have contributed to the rising chaos and greatly diminished faith. From elite pedophile rings in government and Hollywood to the Israeli lobby drawing us into endless wars to assaults on free speech and free thought to the murderous rampaging of Black Live Matter and Antifa to the rise of Wicca and New Age spiritualism to the mental rape of America’s youth through public schooling to the entrenching of jihadists on city councils and in government, America has been hobbled in her progress and is teetering on the brink of ruin. The fact that admitted socialists are being elected and now hold institutional power is a black mark we must confront.

Through it all, though battered and bruised and much transformed in principle and posture, the American Republic stands and possesses boundless potential that we may seize and cultivate if we will. No other nation has such remarkable potential. No other nation has been as blessed and prospered by God. No other people enjoy such mineral-rich land, abundant soil for growing food, and evident geographic advantages as America. The second verse of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” comes to mind,

“My native country, thee,
land of the noble free, thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
thy woods and templed hills;
my heart with rapture thrills, like that above.”

Our nation is so richly blessed. It is stunningly beautiful! I have been privileged to explore the mountains of Alaska and Idaho, the gentle plains and myriad lakes of Kansas and Nebraska, the mysterious bayous of Louisiana and Alabama, the serene beaches of Florida, the endless verdant forests of the South, the shimmering deserts of Arizona, and the tropical isles of Hawaii. While an individual nation-state such as Switzerland, Italy, or Canada may possess exquisite beauty, no nation anywhere has as much variety in its beauty. You could spend your entire life exploring the United States and never see it all.

It is not just in beautiful and abundant land that God has blessed America. The quality of our people and our institutions is unrivaled. Though severely misguided and often ignorant, we are still predominantly a kind people. We help others. We serve. We donate our money and time. We rush to the aid of the distressed during disasters. We want to do the right things. We believe in justice and mercy, God and the Republic. Notwithstanding our many flaws, we are fundamentally good to one another and to strangers, even if we do not win ourselves any points by being sexually immoral and so careless and apathetic that small groups of dedicated crazy people are able to elect wolves in sheep’s clothing to every conceivable position from president to schoolboard to local sheriff.

The World Cup is currently underway in the United States. Tens of thousands of foreigners, especially Europeans, have traveled to the United States for the first time. They have filled the internet with their testimonials about how incredible the United States is, how they were lied to about our nation, and how stunned they are by the kindness of our people, the advanced nature of our society, the abundance of our material blessings, the hugeness of our territory, and the loveliness of our land. Their appraisals are not rosy-eyed “there are no cats in America” style naivety, but honest comparisons of their own sinking societies with ours. If only Americans could capture the same vision and realize what they have and what they risk by allowing it to be polluted by socialists, minorities, illegal invaders, and Republicans and Democrats who lie to get into office and then sell out our birthright to the highest bidder.

We have great potential, wonderful innate talent and resources, and an unmatched heritage of Liberty, but for the reasons outlined above we are now in a precarious situation. From New York to New Orleans and Miami to Chicago, the United States is vulnerable to attack. We have hitherto been spared the types of routine terror attacks perpetrated in Israel or becoming increasingly common in Europe. We do not normally see public beheadings, machete attacks, or car bombings. These are things that happen in London, Paris, Abuja, Damascus, or Tijuana. Apart from a few select ghetto neighborhoods polluted by gangs and uncivilized minorities, we enjoy a general sense of safety throughout the nation even in 2026.

Yet, as America heads into Independence Day, we are more vulnerable than ever because we have backslid in our faithfulness to God, allowed vice to canker our culture, looked the other way as Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other domestic terror groups have grown and spread their networks with the help of elite money, shrugged as DAs, judges, and police have become soft on crime and bastardized justice, and have permitted tens of millions of illegal third-world invaders to swarm our borders and infest our nation with drugs, human trafficking, socialist mindsets, and foreign culture. And we have allowed our government to label anyone who patriotically opposed this wickedness racists, Nazis, white supremacists, right-wing extremists, or domestic terrorists.

There has never been a more open society than the United States. This is one of the things the World Cup visitors love and marvel at. However, because of our openness and tolerance, there has never been a greater opportunity for evildoers to harm the innocent. Only God’s watch-care over us has preserved us from routine attacks and the permanent splitting of this nation into regional factions. However, there is legitimate concern that He is withdrawing His protection.

How can a People that murders 80+ million innocent babies, permits Satanists to parade in the streets, allows men in drag to fraternize with their children in schools, coddles the mentally ill in their transgender and homosexual delusions, normalizes sexual debauchery and pornographic indulgence, permits their national elections to be stolen so blatantly, forces poisoned vaccines upon people in delirium and panic, allows invaders and criminals to swarm across an open border, lets drugs and cartel gangs flood the streets, and be persuaded to hate their ancestors and self-flagellate in offensive white guilt rituals, expect God’s favor and protection? The only thing we can expect unless we repent in sackcloth and ashes is divine wrath.

Jefferson correctly concluded and warned,

“And 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? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever” (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII).

We must finally accept the Biblical truths that “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12) and “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). Accepting them means repenting, and repenting means changing. We must change our habits, exchanging bad for good practices. We must change our way of thinking. We must become righteous, good, and honorable. We must exalt morality and religion in public as well as private. Our schools must teach of God and our public speeches must mention Christ who is the God of this land. We must put the Ten Commandments back in schools and make prayer and fasting popular again. This is and always has been a Christian country. The only way forward that does not involve collapse and civil war is to embrace our Christian heritage and to choose the Lord Jesus for our God.

This Independence Day week as festivities and fireworks happen, keep your head on a swivel. Large crowds present juicy targets for those who would do harm. Be prepared to defend your family and also be situationally aware. Don’t shrug off things that look or feel wrong. Listen to the quiet voice of conscience. And have fun with your family as you teach them the meaning of Independence Day, the glorious heritage of America, the brave heroes of our past, the significance of human Liberty, and the sacrifices it has required and will yet require to preserve and perpetuate Freedom.

Perhaps most importantly, pray. Pray to the Lord for His protection to cover this beautiful nation on the Fourth – on our magnificent birthday. Pray for His watch-care over us as we take time to celebrate our Liberty, remember our gallant forebears, and, hopefully, remember the Lord who made our Independence possible. Pray for big targets like New Orleans, Philadelphia, Boston, and D.C. and that the designs of evil men both in and out of our country to be thwarted. Pray for the security and perpetuation of your own family. Pray for good people everywhere to remain good, and for Christians to live their religion. Pray for personal and national repentance that divine wrath may be turned away. And pray with John Adams “esto pepetua” – that our Union may endure forever.

Happy Independence Day!