RealClearWire—As fireworks light the sky this July Fourth and we mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, we celebrate more than a birthday. We honor the most successful experiment in human freedom the world has ever known—an experiment that delivered unprecedented abundance, opportunity, and dignity to ordinary people. No nation in history has lifted the average citizen to the standard of living enjoyed by everyday Americans. Our system of liberty and limited government created wealth and mobility unmatched anywhere on Earth. Despite being a young country by global standards, the United States has produced more patents and technological breakthroughs than any other nation in history. That is the fruit of a culture that rewards merit, risk-taking, and individual initiative. It is why people from every corner of the globe still see America as the land of freedom and opportunity—the place where they can build a better life for their families through hard work and faith in tomorrow. I know first-hand what makes America exceptional because I’ve lived it. I grew up in the slums of Harlem and a trailer park in Oklahoma. Neither of my parents graduated high school. I delivered pizzas to put myself through college, served as an officer in the U.S. Army, built a successful business career, and raised five children alongside my wife of 40 years. I’m not exceptional; I’m a citizen of an exceptional country, and I serve an exceptional God. My story is not unique because it is extraordinary. It’s unique because this could only happen in the United States. The American dream saved my life. It’s why I’m running as the only Republican-endorsed candidate for governor of Minnesota. I want my grandchildren, and every child in our state, to have the same opportunity to succeed through hard work, personal responsibility, and freedom. America is the greatest country in the history of the world. But we are a nation under attack from within. Take my home state of Minnesota. It used to be a state on the rise, named one of the best places to live in the United States. But that’s not the case anymore, as corrupt politicians and a concentrated group of Somali immigrants who hate everything this country stands for stole billions of dollars from American taxpayers. Over the years, we have watched crime overtake the Twin Cities, and our schools continue to decline in free fall. Today, many of the institutions that shared our American greatness have become “the enemy within.” For decades, socialists and Marxists have comprised roughly 40% of the faculty in American colleges and universities. They have infected three to four generations of students with Marxist, anti-American ideology. Tragically, these same students have not received a holistic education of our nation’s virtues and achievements. The result is predictable and devastating: only 19% of Americans aged 45 and younger can pass the U.S. citizenship test. Our young people have been taught America’s sins in exhaustive detail while hearing almost nothing of its unmatched virtues. Consequently, we now have the least patriotic generation in our history. We also face the lowest church attendance in our republic’s history. A secular worldview has displaced the biblical understanding of human nature, rights, and responsibility that shaped our founding. The consequences are everywhere: the lowest marriage rates and birth rates in American history. Young people are willing to dismiss the First Amendment to stifle debate and discussion. At the same time, we are absorbing large numbers of immigrants who show little-to-no interest in assimilating into the language, culture, and values that made America exceptional. That approach is not sustainable. A nation cannot remain itself if it stops requiring newcomers to become Americans in more than name only. Our public schools deliver the lowest academic performance in generations. Vocational education has been devalued. And the United States now suffers the highest rate of children living in single-parent households in the entire world—a crisis that drives more social, academic, and economic disparity than any other single factor. Worst of all, Western civilization itself—the source of individual rights, the rule of law, and the scientific method—is under relentless cultural attack from within our own institutions. This cannot continue. To restore America to its foundational strength, we must take decisive action. We must reaffirm the teachings of the Founding Fathers and the founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—and recover their clear Judeo-Christian orientation regarding human dignity, limited government, and ordered liberty. We must require every student to pass the U.S. citizenship test at three critical junctures: the transition from elementary to middle school, from middle school to high school, and as a condition of high school graduation. Civics ignorance is a national security issue. We must purge woke indoctrination from public school curricula, restore robust vocational education in our high schools, and implement school choice nationwide so parents—not bureaucrats—decide what is best for their children. And we must change state and federal policy to financially incentivize marriage and stable two-parent families instead of subsidizing fatherless households. The data could not be clearer: The collapse of the family is the greatest threat to opportunity and social mobility in America today. This July Fourth, as we celebrate 250 years of American independence, we do not gather in despair. We gather in resolve. The same principles that summoned ordinary farmers and merchants to defy an empire still live in the hearts of millions of Americans. The same God who blessed our founding can bless our renewal—if we humble ourselves, remember who we are, and act with courage. That belief is what inspired me to run for governor. I will fight every day to preserve the freedoms, values, and opportunities that made my own story possible. I know what this country is capable of. Minnesota can once again be a place where families thrive. The American story is not over. Its greatest chapters can still be written. But only if we choose, right now, to defend the inheritance we received and to pass it on, stronger and more faithful, to the generations that follow. Happy 250th Birthday, America. Let us make the next 250 years even greater. This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Freedom is a word that is too easily thrown around. America was built on freedom. The colonists’ freedoms were being infringed upon, so they rose against Britain to get them back. They won the freedom to govern themselves—and to do so in a way that was more aligned with their inalienable rights. Unfortunately, freedom has become one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. Knowing what true freedom is and how to avoid the false notion of freedom is imperative for us to move America into the brightest future possible. In common usage, someone is free if he can do whatever they wish. The more we are able to do whatever we want, with whomever we want, whenever we want, the freer we are. This type of freedom has been called unhindered liberty or even licentiousness. Under this conceptualization of freedom, all restrictions are bad. The more we are “free” to do as we please, the happier we will become—or so we are told. In reality, this vision of freedom often ends in slavery to sin. There is another view of freedom, though. In the Catholic understanding, there are two types of freedom: freedom for license, which I have just described, and authentic freedom. Where license is freedom from something, authentic freedom is a freedom for something. We are given free will by God for a purpose: to love. We are fulfilled not when we do as we please, but when we do what we ought. Unhindered liberty is built on selfishness, ego, and anti-religious philosophies. It sets the person up as his own god. This is the core of all sin. Just as in the Book of Genesis, it is the misconception that we can become gods and arbitrarily determine what is good ourselves. Every sin is an attempt to make ourselves into gods. License is tempting because commands can be restricting. We often think that God’s laws are an attempt to take away our freedom. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, unhindered liberty is a form of enslavement. The person consumed with self-centeredness is not truly free. He is shackled by selfish desires; he simply cannot help themselves. This comes at the detriment of the most important relationships and responsibilities. Authentic freedom is built on faith. It is the understanding that freedom must be placed at the service of love. “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Love can never be forced; true love must be freely given and received. Therefore, the view we have of freedom heavily impacts how we view faith. For God will not and cannot force us to love Him. We must choose to be in a relationship with Him. Choosing to worship Him above ourselves means handing over our self-centeredness and pride to Him. Our choice to live for Him and for love of others, though, leads to the freedom of true happiness. It is then that we become people of love, justice, and virtue. It is then alone that we are able to flourish as human beings who were made for true and authentic freedom. This is the freedom that we should celebrate on every Independence Day. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Those who wish to purge Christianity and the Bible from American public life often trumpet the third president, Thomas Jefferson, as a champion of the “wall of separation between church and state.” Yet Jefferson was far from a secularist hero. As America celebrates the 250th anniversary of his most influential work, the Declaration of Independence, it seems fitting to revisit Jefferson’s relationship with public religion. 1. The Letter to Danbury Baptists On Jan. 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote the phrase secularists love to quote. In referring to the First Amendment’s religion and establishment clauses, Jefferson wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church & state.” The “establishment” of religion forbidden in the First Amendment applied to the federal government, not the states—many of which had established churches long after the Constitution’s ratification. This “establishment” involved directing tax money to support churches, and forbidding it did not mean excising references to the Bible from public places. Furthermore, the letter itself reveals a religious motivation for this declaration. Jefferson wrote, not intending to purge the public square of religion, but intending to protect the Baptists’ religious freedom. Immediately before the “separation” passage, the president stated his belief “that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his God, that he owes account to none other for this faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions.” He ended the letter by stating, “I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.” Jefferson did not intend to force religion out of public life—he explicitly grounded his respect for the establishment clause in his own high esteem for God and religion, and he stated his intention to pray for the Baptists. 2. Church Service in the Capitol Two days after Jefferson sent that letter, he attended a Christian worship service at the U.S. Capitol. Rep. Manasseh Cutler, a Federalist member of the House of Representatives, noted Jefferson’s attendance in a Jan. 4, 1802, letter to Joseph Cutler. Margaret Bayard Smith, a writer and social critic, wrote that “Jefferson during his whole administration was a most regular attendant” of Capitol worship services. Whatever Jefferson meant by the “separation of church & state,” he took no objection to the notion of worship services in federal government buildings. 3. The Declaration of Independence Any close reader of the Declaration of Independence would not come away with the opinion that its author wanted religion excised from the public square. The declaration doesn’t just mention God four times; it credits God for giving the moral foundation of good government. The declaration cites “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” for the notion that Americans have the right to assert their independence from Great Britain. The document states that “certain unalienable Rights” are “endowed” by our “Creator.” The signers appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the world” to vouch for their righteous intentions, and declare their “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” Jefferson wrote the document to represent the members of the Second Continental Congress, so he doubtless made compromises to represent the entire group, but he still grounded America’s fundamental rights in God, not in government. 4. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which the Old Dominion’s General Assembly passed in January 1786. While the statute disestablished the Church of England in Virginia, it explicitly grounded the right of religious freedom not in secular government but in man’s duty to God. The statute declares that “Almighty God hath created the mind free” and that “all attempts to influence it by temporal punishment… are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who, being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either.” In fact, the document frames the disestablishment of Anglicanism as a way to protect religion, warning that establishing a religion “tends only to corrupt the principles of that religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will eternally profess and conform to it.” No Secularist Hero As an American Christian, I am grateful to Jefferson for stating the principles that founded our country. I also acknowledge that Jefferson was hardly an example of Christian orthodoxy—he did cut up the Bible to remove passages describing miracles, after all. However, the idea that Jefferson would have championed the secularist removal of symbols such as the Ten Commandments from government buildings is utterly contrary to his documented history. Let’s set the record straight: Jefferson was no secularist hero, and his “separation of church & state” is a far cry from the modern secularist agenda.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Sami Winc: So Victor, I guess the first question maybe we could discuss is how have we made it in 250 years, this republic, a rare thing historically that a republic could go for so long?   Victor Davis Hanson: Well, the secondary reasons are—we had not the primary, but I’ll get over very quickly review the secondary. We had a huge North American continent.  It was richly endowed with natural resources, farmland, etc. We didn’t fragment into European warring states, but we were the size of Europe, but we were one complete nation thanks to people like James K. Polk and [Thomas] Jefferson and other people who saw that we needed to have the whole continent or end up like Europe.  Number two, we had two oceans, so we were protected from what was going on in Asia and Europe. But that is secondary to the Constitution. So we took the Spartan, Cretan and then Roman idea of mixed constitution—a legislative, executive and judicial branch. But unlike some of the mixed constitutions, we put a number of checks and balances in.  So the whole point of it was to slow down radical changes through the president’s power to veto legislation, the Congress’s power to impeach him, the president’s power to pick judicial appointments, the Congress not to approve them, and the judiciary to strike down laws as unconstitutional. And they can impeach—the legislative body can impeach judges. The president cannot appoint people he thinks would be bad judges. There’s—it’s all intricate checks and balances.  Number two is we were the only country to really have a Bill of Rights, so there were certain issues in other countries that have never been up for—I mean, they’re nuances, and everybody reinterprets them, but they’re not up for discussion as far as eliminating them.   The Bill of Rights—the ability not to have your house searched and seized, the right to bear arms, the right not to have to testify against yourself, the right of habeas corpus—that’s all documented.  And then with the amendment system, we have further rights. The other things are more intangible, but that revolution was never a French Revolution.   Sami Winc: One moment, though, just to clarify for the audience, that the Bill of Rights for the United States is the first 10 amendments, and then they flow after that.  Victor Davis Hanson: There are 17 other ones that followed, and they’re very hard to pass. You need a two-thirds vote of Congress, and then you need three-quarters of the state legislatures. So unless it’s something like the 18-year-old vote or women’s suffrage or repealing prohibition, it’s very hard to do—to get an amendment.  Sami Winc: And you were saying that it’s not like the French Revolution either.   Victor Davis Hanson: No, it’s not like the French Revolution because it was limited. In other words, the colonists were not objecting to British free market capitalism. They were not objecting to the language. They were not objecting to the role of religion.  They were not rejecting—claiming that they wanted the poor to take over from the rich. They were not angry at both the British colonialists and the large landowners like Washington and Jefferson.   So it was basically a one-dimensional political revolution, and it said we want autonomy and to be self-governed.  We do not want to be a colony of Britain and have no say in taxation or representation, et cetera, et cetera. That was a much easier revolution.   But what I’m saying is it kept intact the strengths of the British system, the British Enlightenment. And so when we became a nation, there was Christianity, there was Anglicanism—there was all these religions.  They were all tolerated. Nobody had gone out in the countryside and lynched nuns or beheaded priests as had happened in the French Revolution. There was no year zero. There was no renaming the months, the days. There was no god called Ratio that everybody bowed down to.  There was nothing like—I mean, Thomas Paine was the most radical of the founders, but he was nothing like the Robespierre brothers.  He wasn’t even like [Georges] Danton. He was a much more reasonable person in comparison. So that was a big step—that we kept the traditions of the Anglosphere, except political.  And then there were cultural things that were embedded from the beginning. One of them was that there was no peasantry.  There was no serfdom. Those were European ideas. So Jefferson especially said the country was based on the nuclear family and the independent agrarian—the farm—and that person was self-sustained.   He was autonomous, self-supporting. He could feed his own family from his farm. He could control his own destiny, and these were the ideal citizens then to be entrusted with voting and making their own laws and directing their own affairs.  So it was a republic of virtue, and that stayed through—that in the United States, nobody—I’m not Sir Hanson. You’re not Lady Sami. And we have no class distinctions formally. We have a fluidity of classes. Wealthy people have children that are bad seeds, or they don’t want money, and they get poor. Poor people have children, and they become millionaires.  So there is fluidity, but we are not based on class. We’re not based on race. We champion the middle class, but we don’t institutionalize it. Nobody asks in America, “Where was your father born? How many acres does your grandfather have? What was your parents’ education?” Maybe the East Coast or West Coast elites do, but that’s not American tradition.  And then finally, we’re a nation of emulation, not envy. So we’re not like the British. I’ve said that before in this broadcast. It was the old maxim that if you go to Britain and somebody sees a Bentley, they want to kick it in.  And they come to America, they want to know how much a Cadillac—or maybe now it would be a BMW or something—costs and how you finance it.  And I can remember, when I was a young person, we had no money. We lived in a 1,100-square-foot home. My mom stayed home with us. My dad was a high school teacher initially, and then a junior college teacher, but he was a coach, and he tried to farm on the side.  But we would get in cars when we went to Disneyland or we went up to San Francisco, and my mom insisted we drive through wealthy neighborhoods and not say, “Oh my gosh, look at that. Look at how much money the Gettys have.”  She would say, “Oh wow, I love those cypress trees, the way they’ve done that. That’s a good idea. When we get home, let’s plant some. Or then she would say, I love those colors—that gray and white. I like that match.”  Or she’d say, “Wow, some of those Victorians are tacky. They’re overdone with that gingerbread cut. I don’t want that.” In other words, that was a very common thing.  That’s why the Wall Street Journal has one of its most popular features, Mansions USA, because people love to go in there and look at these beautiful lakes and tennis courts and gables. But then they look at the price—Montecito, 30 million.  It’s not that they can ever buy it, but they get little ideas. So say that they’re in Fresno with a 1,500- or 1,600-square-foot tract house, and then they go there and they look at these places and see how they park their car there. Maybe I can make a little version of it.  So in Europe, I don’t think that would be the reaction. That would be the aristocracy, and you’d say that we should burn those houses down.   And I’m kind of worried because that is sort of the attitude of Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades—not that this was a great asset to have these beautiful homes, but, “Oh, they lost their home. Too bad. Let’s not rebuild them.”  When we get to be an envious country, we won’t succeed.   And by the way, when we used to nation-build, or any country used to nation-build, they never said to Iraq or Afghanistan or South Korea or Vietnam or Europe itself after World War II, “We’ve got a really good system for you. It’s called a Senate, a lower house, a Supreme Court, a president and a Bill of Rights, and here’s how you do it with a two-party system.”  No. They have a parliamentary system because it’s much easier.  Ours is a very complicated system. It’s very hard to reproduce. It’s designed on one principle: people are no blank good.  And I think many of the founders said if we were angels, we wouldn’t need a constitution. But it assumes that unlike the French Revolution, Rousseau—you know, we’re all born into chains—that we’re not.  We’re all born evil, bad, fallen—the Christian notion—and we need to be redeemed. We need to curb our appetites and our excesses, and one of the things we have to curb is the desire to power and to tyrannize others.  So we’re going to make a constitution where you cannot have a dictator. And they can say all they want about Trump. The closest we’ve ever had was FDR. He had four terms, but he did things that are just unthinkable.  You know, go to The New York Times and say, “If you write another bad op-ed about me, I’m going to pass antitrust legislation or inheritance taxes that’ll ruin your family.”  So it’s a wonderful system, but it’s very intricate and complex, and it requires an educated populace, and we don’t seem to have that to the degree sufficient anymore.  So I’m kind of worried. That’s how we survived for 250 years. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Texans, hide your kids—or else they’ll be forced to hear that “love is patient, love is kind.” Yes, the radicals on the Texas State Board of Education have decided that public school students in the Lone Star State should become just a little familiar with the work that arguably influenced American history and Western literature more than any other. How dare they. On Friday, the state education board approved a new list of mandated readings for students. The list, which was passed with a 9-5 vote and included classic works as well as the Bible, will start to be implemented in 2030. “We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” said board member Brandon Hall, a Republican and a pastor, according to CNN. Two-thirds of Texans are Christian, and about 6% practice other religions, including Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, according to Pew Research Center. Besides the oh-so-controversial 13th Chapter of First Corinthians, students will also be expected to read the Beatitudes, Psalm 23, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, two chapters from Exodus, and several chapters from the Book of Job, according to a draft circulated before the vote. Fourth graders will have to wrestle with Luke 14:7-11, where Jesus recommends people not start by sitting in the highest-status seat. (Perhaps the school cafeteria social scenes will never be the same.) Sixth graders, in an era where adolescent mental health seems more fragile than ever, will have to cope with Matthew 6:25-34, which pushes the radical message that God will take care of people and worrying is unnecessary. Yet, of course, there is still outrage from the expected quarters. “A mandatory public school reading list should never function as a Bible lesson,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in a statement. “Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought.” Never mind, apparently, that American history is dominated by figures highly influenced by Christianity, from the Founding Fathers to Martin Luther King Jr. You simply can’t understand our nation’s history without some grasp of Christianity—but you can grasp our nation’s history without an understanding of Islam or atheism or Hinduism. Gaylor’s view is also an outlier in Texas. A 2024 Texas Public Policy Foundation poll found that 64% of Texans approved of putting religious stories into the public school curriculum. Of course, reading the Bible doesn’t mean that public school students have to assent to Christianity. In high school, when I was homeschooled and using a Catholic Great Books program, I read portions of the Quran. I was reading to try to understand where Muslims came from and how this book had shaped their history, not because I believed the Quran. Atheists, Muslims, Hindus, etc., can do the same when it comes to reading the Bible in Texas. Ultimately, reading the Bible will help give Texas students a deeper understanding of the ideas that form the foundation of our culture. As Julie Pickren, a Republican on the education board, told The Texas Tribune, the readings will give “important insight into the moral and philosophical traditions that have shaped Western civilization.” A draft of the readings included classics such as William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl,” and C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” “A classical approach to education, one that emphasizes the careful study of primary historical documents, plays a vital role in developing strong critical thinking skills in students,” Pickren added. “When students engage directly with original writings, speeches, sermons, and foundational texts, they can evaluate ideas and develop a deeper understanding of the principles that have shaped the USA and Texas.” Preach it. In the TikTok era, where students are far more likely to spend hours watching inane reels than poring over a tome that changed the course of history, it’s critical that students be forced in school to actually engage with ideas. And by ideas, I don’t mean some emotional rant in a 30-second video, but a reasoned argument that has resonated for decades or centuries or millennia. Students should read the Bible—and the Founding Fathers, and Shakespeare, and Plato, and so many of the thinkers that profoundly affected the course of Western civilization. Some young Americans may still decide to reject the values of their ancestors. But at least it will be done after actually having some understanding of those values and ideas’ origins, not just seeing a few social media posts talking up socialism or atheism and arguing against straw men. Thankfully, Texas isn’t the only state to realize students need to engage more deeply with the works that influenced America. “Utah students will be required to analyze specific Bible passages referenced or ‘alluded to’ in U.S. historical documents,” in the future, thanks to legislation passed earlier this year, reported The Salt Lake Tribune. “Oftentimes, where Texas goes, other states will follow, right? So, this is a pretty substantial move that I could imagine other states picking up and moving forward with as a possibility,” Antero Garcia, a Stanford University professor and the president of the National Council of Teachers of English, told ABC News. Hopefully, more states and districts will follow—and provide future voters with a better understanding of the history of the country they live in.