One morning, the summer after I turned eleven, I walked out of my summer camp cabin in Big Lake, Alaska, surveyed my surroundings and had a life-changing realization. It’s one of the wonderful things about Alaska: When you’re there, you’re never without inspiration. All you have to do is step outside and look around at the majestic peaks, the midnight sun, the wild waters and wildlife.
I’d done it dozens of times before, but somehow that morning was different. I walked outside, looked out at the Chugach Mountains to one side and Mt. McKinley to the other and it hit me: if God knew what He was doing when He created Alaska, then He certainly had some ideas in mind when He created a speck like me. It was then that I realized that surely God has a purpose for all of us—and He expects a lot from us! From that day forward, I put my life in God’s hands. Feeling reborn, I moved forward, finding out that not only will faith get you through tough times, but it will also guide you in the good times.
Relying on a foundation of faith, I’ve always believed each man is created with a purpose. And it’s when we are calm and still that we can sense our true calling. For me, the thing tugging at my heart was a desire to be of service to others—my neighbors, my community, my state, and eventually my country. That desire pointed me in the right direction (some would say the “right” direction). It provided me with what has become my life’s work.
For the past twenty years, since I’ve been in public life, I’ve thought a lot about how my faith relates to my service. Unlike in Western Europe, where religion is viewed as strictly a private affair, faith is an active and sometimes complicated presence in America. Religion is at once deeply personal and inescapably public here. We cherish our freedom to worship—or not worship—as we choose. We rightly regard what is conventionally known as our Constitution’s “establishment” clause separating church and state as one of the pillars of our democracy. But at the same time we see faith’s power to transform lives and organized religion’s benefit to society. I know from my time as Alaska’s governor, for example, that volunteer clergy in prisons and law enforcement provided an invaluable service. For this benefit and for more personal reasons, we seek leaders and institutions that reflect the morality of our faith, and we rely on faith to make our free and open society function properly.
Does that mean we’re a Judeo-Christian nation, solely because most Americans believe in Judeo-Christian tenets? No. But it does mean that the faith of our Founding Fathers shaped our nation in critical ways. They created a country that, in George Washington’s words, relies on faith as an “indispensable support.” They explicitly disavowed government establishing any particular religion, but they unmistakably relied on religion to produce the kinds of citizens that could live successfully in a state of political freedom. And this, I firmly believe, is one of the things that has always made us an exceptional nation.
When I was growing up, John F. Kennedy was a model that many looked back to when it came to religion and public life. It happened before I was born, but I later learned about Kennedy’s 1960 campaign for president in which his status as a Roman Catholic subjected him to smears and religious bigotry. It seems incredible today that this was even an issue, but it was highly controversial at the time. Catholicism had long been held in suspicion by the Protestant majority, who feared that a Catholic president would secretly take orders from the Pope. Even in 1960 many people didn’t believe that a Catholic could—and many didn’t believe a Catholic should—be elected president.
JFK gave a famous speech in Houston trying to put the issue to rest. I remember being taught that Kennedy’s speech succeeded in the best possible way: it reconciled public service and religion without compromising either. All candidates had to do, the conventional wisdom now dictated, was what Kennedy did. They could hold fast to their religion and not worry about the press or the voters.
But what was it, exactly, that JFK did? As an adult I’ve revisited Kennedy’s famous speech and have discovered that it is actually quite different from the way it is often described. Instead of reconciling his religious identity with his role in public life, Kennedy entirely separated the two. “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he said unequivocally. In the best American tradition, he nobly defended religious tolerance and condemned official governmental preference of any faith over any other. But his language was more defensive than is portrayed today, in tone and content. Instead of telling the country how his faith had enriched him, he dismissed it as a private matter meaningful only to him. And rather than spelling out how faith groups had provided life-changing services and education to millions of Americans, he repeatedly objected to any government assistance to religious schools.
In fairness, Kennedy was speaking at a different time. His repeated assertions that he would heed no “instruction on public policy from the Pope” may very well have been politically necessary in an America that had had only one previous (and unsuccessful) Catholic nominee for president, New York governor Al Smith. Still, his vaunted speech didn’t represent a successful reconciliation of faith and public office, but an articulate and unequivocal divorce of the two. It is perhaps not surprising, in light of this fact, that his brother Ted Kennedy would go on to have a long career advocating positions directly at odds with his Catholic faith (which was by all accounts sincere).
In any case, JFK’s famous speech did not resolve the issue—perhaps because it dodged the crucial question—and it is still very much with us today. Thus in the 2008 Republican primary, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith was likewise perceived as an issue by some voters. Claiming that many would be reluctant to pull the lever for a person of his beliefs, some pundits and political advisors urged him to “do a JFK.” Just give a speech, they told him, and reassure the voters that your faith will have nothing to do with your presidency. To his credit, Mitt refrained from “doing a JFK.” Instead, he gave a thoughtful speech that eloquently and correctly described the role of faith in American public life.
Unlike JFK, who essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are, Romney declared that our religious liberty is “fundamental to America’s greatness.” And he spoke openly of “how my faith would inform my presidency, if elected.”
Like Kennedy, Mitt praised all Americans’ freedom to worship as they choose. Like Kennedy, he also declared that “no authority of my church, or of any other church, for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions.” But unlike Kennedy, he spoke out strongly for America’s religious heritage, and how it continues to define us as a nation:
America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we are troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family. . . .
There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams’ words: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.”
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
Mitt went straight back to the words of the Declaration of Independence—that we are all men who “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—to describe a “great moral inheritance” we all share that is not unique to any religion or denomination.
We believe that every single human being is a child of God—we are all part of the human family. The conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life is still the most revolutionary political proposition ever advanced. John Adams put it that we are “thrown into the world all equal and alike.”
The consequence of our common humanity is our responsibility to one another, to our fellow Americans foremost, but also to every child of God. It is an obligation which is fulfilled by Americans every day, here and across the globe, without regard to creed or race or nationality.
Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government. No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty.
The difference is striking: where Kennedy seemed to want to run away from religion, Mitt Romney forthrightly embraced it. The contrast is attributable not just to the political distance between the two men, but to the distance our country has come since 1960. We are blessed to live in a land that is reawakening to the gift of our religious heritage. To be sure, there are still lots of voices that reject this gift and regard it as somehow divisive. Where we see tolerance, they see intolerance. Where we see wholesome purpose, they see a sinister agenda. Violence and bigotry committed in the name of religion surely exist in the world. To this extent, the modern critics of religion have a point. We are rightly appalled, for example, at the stoning of adulterers and the domestic abuse of women that still occur in some Muslim societies. Too many also justify their political hatreds and deflect blame for their backwardness by abusing religion. But the critics are wrong to turn these admitted excesses into an indictment of religion per se. For in America, faith has been central to a strikingly different result: the most prosperous, generous, peace-loving, and free nation in history. We fail to acknowledge this profound historical truth at our peril, and that of future generations. For as Mitt correctly said, “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.” This stirring quote is taken from a letter John Adams wrote to the officers of the Massachusetts militia in 1798, at a time when the United States was on the verge of war with France. With antireligious fervor on the rise in Europe, and France still staggering from the bloody horrors of its own revolution, Adams, who had been a leading participant at the Constitutional Convention, reminded the officers that our founding documents were uniquely unsuited for a similar uprising. Instead, they took for granted the existence of abiding habits of decency and civility that were in turn firmly grounded in religious faith:
. . . we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Adams wrote these words more than twenty years after the Declaration and more than ten years after the Constitution was drafted. But even before these great and enduring Charters of Liberty were drawn up, faith played a decisive role in the creation of America.
One of the more overlooked aspects of our history is the significant role that the clergy played in the Revolutionary War. Ministers were usually the most educated people in colonial American towns. And they had a captive audience once a week. Not only did they preach revolution, they also organized militias and fought in the war. For daring to reject the European belief in the “divine right of kings”—the notion that power flows from God to the king or queen, who then decides what rights to grant the people—American loyalists dubbed the black-robed patriot clergy the “Black Regiment.”
The Library of Congress’s wonderful exhibit on “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic” features one of the more prominent members of this Black Regiment, the Reverend John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg of Woodstock, Virginia. Muhlenberg was the son of a German immigrant, and is considered the founder, along with his brother Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, of the Lutheran Church in America. The story goes that Reverend Muhlenberg preached a particularly heated sermon to his congregation one Sunday in January 1776. In his conclusion, he is said to have quoted Ecclesiastes:
The Bible tells us there is a time for all things, and there is a time to preach and a time to pray—but the time for me to preach has passed away, and there is a time to fight, and that time has come now. Now is the time to fight!
With that, Muhlenberg threw off his clerical robes to reveal the uniform of a Virginia military officer. Then the good Reverend marched off to join the Continental Army. He served with distinction, commanding a brigade that successfully stormed the British at Yorktown, and eventually rose to the rank of major general. His brother, also a pastor, at first opposed the idea of a man of the cloth serving in the military—until the British army burned down his church! After the war Frederick became a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention and was the first person to sign the Bill of Rights. He later served three terms in Congress and became the first speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Another member of the Black Regiment—a hero of the American founding who may have been overlooked because he combined faith with patriotism—was John Witherspoon, the only member of the clergy to sign the Declaration of Independence. He also signed the Articles of Confederation and took part in ratifying the Constitution. This largely forgotten figure is most known today for being the direct ancestor of the actress Reese Witherspoon. But at a critical point in American history, he contributed mightily to the fight for independence. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian pastor, an outstanding educator, and a practiced politician. As president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), he mentored a generation of young men who would go on to lead the Revolution and dominate the political life of the young republic, including James Madison and Aaron Burr. He later served in Congress and advised Alexander Hamilton on public finance. He also personified what John Adams meant when he said, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”
Here is part of a sermon Witherspoon preached on Thanksgiving Day, 1782:
It is a truth of no little importance to us in our present situation, not only that the manners of a people are of consequence to the stability of every civil society, but that they are of much more consequence to free states, than to those of a different kind. In many of these last, a principle of honour, and the subordination of ranks, with the vigour of despotic authority, supply the place of virtue, by restraining irregularities and producing public order. But in free states, where the body of the people have the supreme power properly in their own hands, and must be ultimately resorted to on all great matters, if there is a general corruption of manners, there can be nothing but confusion. So true is that, that civil liberty cannot be long preserved without virtue. A monarchy may subsist for ages, and be better or worse under a good or bad prince, but a republic once equally poised, must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty. (emphasis mine)
In other words, tyranny can thrive whether people are good or bad, but preserving freedom takes preserving virtue. You can look, but you would have trouble finding an American from the founding generation who didn’t share this belief. This sentiment, so controversial today, was simply taken for granted at the time. The Founders deliberately and self-consciously constructed a government based on the belief that religion was at the root of the personal and public virtues necessary to sustain freedom. And they weren’t just being pragmatic. Despite the identification of many with Enlightened Deism, an eighteenth-century belief that strove to reconcile religion with reason, they all had genuine faith and genuinely believed that following its dictates was for the better, both in this life and the next.
In his wonderful book George Washington’s Sacred Fire, Peter A. Lillback writes about the deeply held faith of our first president and how it left an indelible mark on America. The very first thing Washington did as president was to offer a prayer to God to secure the liberties of the new nation, and his inauguration set two religious precedents that endure to this day. Washington, like all subsequent presidents, put his hand on the Bible as he was sworn in. And he added the words “So help me God” to the presidential oath described in the Constitution. Every president since that time has also ended the oath with “so help me God.” (I ad-libbed “so help me God” every time I was sworn in as an elected official, so Washington’s addition struck a chord with me.)
Washington’s most famous evocation of religion—a point John Adams would repeat when he succeeded him as president—came in his Farewell Address. To understand the impact of Washington’s words, it helps to bear in mind that he had, even then, earned the title Father of His Country. He was so admired that some wanted him to be made king. But the American experiment was based on the notion that only a freely elected government was consistent with the revolutionary idea that our natural and political rights ultimately derive from our Creator. In his Farewell Address, Washington reminded Americans that a people made sovereign by their creation in the image of God could not be ruled without their consent. Nor could they long retain their freedom without the morality and good character that are created and supported by religion.
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
Washington clearly believed that religious faith is the basis for all the virtues on which republican government depends. The private oaths men swear in the conduct of their business, no less than the public oaths they swear before the courts, are worthless without an underlying conviction in the existence of right and wrong. But Washington goes further, asserting that morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious belief. This is not a politically correct notion today. But it remains as true now as it was then.
If you look for it, you will find this sentiment echoed throughout the words of the Founders. Even Thomas Jefferson, widely regarded by contemporary historians as one of the least religious of the Founders, wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
I love those words—and there are echoes of them throughout Jefferson’s voluminous writings. Calvin Coolidge, in his famous Fourth of July speech, said that Jefferson in fact acknowledged that his “best ideas of democracy” had come to him at church meetings.
One of my favorite stories of early Americans turning to God for guidance comes from 1774, when war with Great Britain was looming. The First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia as British ships filled Boston Harbor and British troops occupied the city. The feeling that they would soon be engaged in war consumed the delegates. One of them suggested that they pray for guidance. But some of the delegates objected. There were members of various religious denominations present. Who would lead the prayer?
Then Sam Adams rose and ended the disagreement. The idea he expressed on that day in 1774 remains as valid now as it was then. According to a letter John Adams wrote to Abigail describing the scene, Sam stood up and “said he was no Bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.” I love the simple, straightforward rejection of religious bigotry in these words. And like most Americans today, I feel exactly the same way. Despite differences in the denomination you may belong to, if you love both God and country, I’ll be happy to pray with you, too. Yes, Sam Adams was correct. So when I recently spotted my nephew, Payton, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo “I’m thinking Sam Adams, not drinking Sam Adams,” I had to grin.
But it wasn’t just the words of our Founders—as important as they are—that demonstrate the high value they placed on religious faith. It was their deeds as members of the new government as well.
One of the best compilations of explicitly religious official acts of the Founders that I’ve come across comes from Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. It appears in one of his famous dissents, in a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Ten Commandments could not be displayed at the McCreary County Courthouse in Whitley City, Kentucky. After mentioning Washington’s addition of “so help me God” to the oath of office, Scalia goes on to explain:
The same week that Congress submitted the Establishment Clause as part of the Bill of Rights for ratification by the States, it enacted legislation providing for paid chaplains in the House and Senate. . . . The day after the First Amendment was proposed, the same Congress that had proposed it requested the President to proclaim “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed, by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many and signal favours of Almighty God.” . . . President Washington offered the first Thanksgiving Proclamation shortly thereafter, devoting November 26, 1789, on behalf of the American people “to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that is, that was, or that will be . . .” thus beginning a tradition of offering gratitude to God that continues today. . . . The same Congress also reenacted the Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, 1 Stat. 50, Article III, of which provided: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” . . . And of course the First Amendment itself accords religion (and no other manner of belief) special constitutional protection.
. . . Nor have the views of our people on this matter significantly changed. Presidents continue to conclude the Presidential oath with the words “so help me God.” Our legislatures, state and national, continue to open their sessions with prayer led by official chaplains. The sessions of this Court continue to open with the prayer “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” Invocation of the Almighty by our public figures, at all levels of government, remains commonplace. Our coinage bears the motto “IN GOD WE TRUST.” And our Pledge of Allegiance contains the acknowledgment that we are a Nation “under God.”
Justice Scalia makes the point that it is not just in their diaries or personal letters that the Founders made the linkage between freedom and religion but also in their official acts and pronouncements as governmental figures. Both as creators and leaders of the new nation, the Founders understood our political freedom as resting on the indispensable support of religious faith. As men of their time, they simply couldn’t foresee a future when that wouldn’t be the case.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America more than thirty years later, he saw the same thing. The America he observed was no longer a nation struggling to be born, but a strong, young republic. He was struck by how firmly Americans and American clergy believed in the separation of church and state, and yet how decisively religion shaped their politics and supported their freedom.
Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion—for who can search the human heart?—but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society. . . .
Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.
What the Founders made explicit in their words and deeds, Tocqueville was able to observe simply by traveling around the country and talking to ordinary citizens. America was—and is—an exceptional place, a place where religion and freedom march in the same direction.
Traveling around the country today, I know I’m not alone in my own reliance on faith. I meet so many Americans who have the sense of unique purpose that comes with belief in a loving and powerful God. Some see this confession of faith as dangerous. They regard religion itself as inherently divisive. They seem intimidated and frightened somehow, as though any discussion of the religious roots of America’s social and constitutional order is somehow manifestly intolerant. This viewpoint seems to assume that acknowledging the importance our Founders placed on religious faith is like saying that only a certain kind of people are welcome in America. In fact, precisely the opposite is true.
The Founding Fathers were serious students of history. They had seen what centuries of state-sponsored religions and sectarian struggle had done to Europe, and they were determined that the same thing not happen here. Men such as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were well aware of the wars spawned and the tyranny perpetuated when government takes the side of a particular religion rather than protecting the freedom of people to practice (or not practice) all religions.
Reading about the faith roots of America in Matthew Spalding’s book We Still Hold These Truths, I learned that, from the very beginning, our Founders expressed a profound belief in religious tolerance. Thus at the same time that George Washington was setting aside November 26, 1789, as a day of prayer and Thanksgiving, he was reaching out to different religious faiths to assure them of their equal and protected place under the new government. (Now we celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November, but November 26 is personally significant to me because it is my sister Molly’s birthday. We say a prayer of sincere thanksgiving as we eat cake!) Early in his presidency, Washington wrote letters to the United Baptists, the Presbyterians, and others in which he congratulated Americans on creating a government “which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requir[ing] only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” And he wrote one more letter, writes Spalding, to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, representatives of “one of the most persecuted religious minorities in all history”:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it were the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.
Religious intolerance and discrimination on the part of believers and nonbelievers alike would certainly exist in the new republic. But the position of the government was clear. As Spalding explains, in America, having rights was not connected with any particular religious faith or any faith at all. Everyone’s religious freedom was protected by the government. All that was asked of individual Americans was that they obey the laws of the land.
This is the kind of exceptionalism that Tocqueville would describe forty years later. Thanks to leaders such as Washington, America became a place where freedom and religion are not at odds but actually support and complement each other. There is no religious test for citizenship. You need not be a good Catholic, a good Pentecostal, or a good Muslim, just a good American. In America, there is no presumption that God is on the side of anyone or anything but freedom. No government of man can legitimately claim to represent the will of God, and no government in America can force its citizens to respect such a claim.
Abraham Lincoln is a wonderful model for Americans trying to navigate contemporary life with tolerance for others while remaining true to their religious faith. On the north wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington is inscribed what many believe is Lincoln’s greatest speech, his Second Inaugural Address. It is just 703 words long, yet it mentions God 14 times and quotes the Bible twice. But it is no blustering sermon. Lincoln did not presume to know which side God favored in the Civil War. Even though the conflict was still raging and passions were high, he sought to heal the nation, not to judge. And despite his belief that slavery was a great moral wrong, he resisted the temptation to invoke God in support of his cause. Instead, his expression of deep faith in the most difficult circumstances imaginable was a profound statement of tolerance and healing.
Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we will be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . .
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
That morning years ago in Big Lake, I discovered a wonderful truth: like all God’s creatures, I have a purpose in the world. We can spend a lifetime trying to find that purpose, and we may come close, but I don’t know many who have ultimately found it. Like most people, I join them along the path in searching, and endeavoring to appreciate each step along the way.
I believe my country, too, has a purpose: to be a shining city on a hill, a beacon of liberty and hope for all the peoples of the earth. Our country was created by believing men and women to be a good and virtuous place, a nation capable of producing people fit to exercise the gift of freedom. And for those who fear that people of faith desire to rewrite the Constitution and the laws on the presumed authority of God, let me be clear that I don’t believe any of us can claim to know the mind of the Creator who gave us life and liberty. We can only seek His guidance, His protection, and His love.