‘A more perfect union’: How some use faith to prompt reflection on America’s ideals
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 38/100
| Interfaith Council of Ft. Collins Participants in the faith250 gathering discuss the moral core of America's founding documents, and the achievements and faults of American democracy over the 250 years of its history, in Fort Collins, Colorado, June 9, 2026. Loading...
In mid-May, a group of local pastors, churchgoers, and community members gathered in Fort Collins, Colorado, to discuss what many of them consider to be America’s original sin: slavery.
As part of a monthly interfaith gathering called “ faith250 ,” the audience knew this would be a challenging, but necessary conversation. They invited a local actor and activist, Michael Anthony Tatmon, to give a dramatic reading of Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech, “ What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? ”
Douglass embraced the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence, but indicted American society for failing to live up to them. One imagines Mr. Douglass’ audience, the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, pondering Douglass’ challenge to explain what “all men are created equal” meant if it did not, in fact, include all men, or indeed, women.
Faith played an important role in America’s birth, even as the Founding Fathers rejected the idea of a state religion. Today, many Americans are turning to their churches and receiving guidance that ranges across the political spectrum.
While praising America’s Founding Fathers as “great men,” Douglass told his audience, a decade before the Civil War, that America’s Independence Day was not a time of celebration for him.
As many Americans proudly mark the nation’s 250th birthday, some, such as the participants of faith250, are using the anniversary to reflect on the nation’s founding principles of liberty and justice and how far or close we are to living up to those ideals. And one of the places where Americans are gathering to reflect on these questions are their churches, synagogues, and other places of faith and worship.
Faith has played an important role since the earliest days of the American republic. The 19th-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville said religion in America acted as “a political institution” that supplied the moral consensus the new country needed amid continuous political change. In times of war and tumult, America’s leaders used religious imagery for encouragement, while maintaining the separation of church and state as outlined in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
AP/File Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, shown here in an undated photo, embraced the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence, but indicted American society for failing to live up to them. But, just as Northern churches pushed for abolition of slavery in the first half of the 19th century, and Black and white churches collaborated to push for civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s, many Americans are turning to their churches in 2026 for moral guidance on some of today’s toughest subjects. A May 2026 Pew Research Center poll found that two-thirds of U.S. adults who regularly attend religious services have heard their clergy speak about at least one political or social issue in the past few months, including abortion, U.S. support for Israel, homosexuality, and immigration.
Randall Balmer, a historian of religion at Dartmouth College, says that by raising political issues with a deep moral context, churches are behaving just as the Founding Fathers had hoped they would.
“The founders recognized the utility of religion in forming the new nation,” Professor Balmer says. But, he adds, they knew religion lay at the heart of issues “that had consumed Europe and England,” and “they wanted to avoid that.”
Even so, he says, by using the pulpit and the religious language that many Americans hold in common, churches have weighed in on prominent social issues, from both sides of the political spectrum.
“When it comes to movements to promote equality for people of color, certainly women, Native Americans,” he says, “those were conversations prompted by churches and by religious people who were speaking from the margins, not from positions of power.”
In May, the conservative-leaning Freedom 250’s gathering on the National Mall to “rededicate America as One Nation under God,” for example, featured politically conservative speakers such as the Rev. Franklin Graham, Liberty University chancellor Jonathan Falwell, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Cissie Graham Lynch, daughter of the Rev. Franklin Graham, told attendees America derives its strength “when we humble ourselves before God.”
Courtesy of Joel Charny Joel Charny, a representative of his synagogue on the Interfaith Council, said that the consistent theme of the faith250 discussion sessions has been that while Americans are flawed, they are “still aspiring to live up to the founding documents” of their country. “Today, 250 years into this American story, the same call comes to us,” she said. “The question is not whether God will be faithful to America. He has. The question is, will we be faithful to him?”
Ryan Burge, a professor of practice at the John Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, says that religion can play a profound role in shaping how Americans think about the way their country should be, and recognizing how it actually is.
“I always love that phrase, ‘in order to form a more perfect union,’” says Professor Burge. “Perfection means you can’t get more perfect. But we said, ‘No, we can become more. We’re great, but we can always be greater.’ The impetus behind all this discussion is very healthy.”
America’s discussion about itself is like a pendulum that swings from not critical enough to too critical, he adds. “I think the pendulum, for a long time, especially in academic circles, was definitely in the direction of ‘America is a terrible country.’” That, he says, has driven a wedge between liberal and conservative people of faith.
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