Although America’s 250th birthday is still one year away, there is a fun, unique, and mathematical fact about this year's 249th birthday that will help illustrate just how young America is as a nation.
To do that, we can start with the age of President Thomas Jefferson on the day he died — significantly enough, on the day America was celebrating its 50th birthday: July 4, 1826. Jefferson was 83.
Just three 83-year-olds living back-to-back-to-back takes you to the year our nation was founded.
As an interesting aside, our third president was not the only commander in chief whose life was historically tied to America's birthday. President John Adams also died within five hours of Jefferson on July 4, 1826. Five years later, on July 4, 1831, our fifth president and founding father James Monroe also passed away.
Not to be too maudlin, one president was actually born on the Fourth of July. In 1872, Calvin Coolidge came into the world and would grow up to become America's 30th president.
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So what does Jefferson’s age of 83 have to do with this year’s national birthday celebration? Well, if you find an 83-year-old person living in America and go all the way back to the year he was born, you would find yourself in 1942. Now, in 1942, find a person who was born 83 years in the past, back to 1859. Finally, find a person born 83 years before that, and you arrive at ... 1776!
Just three 83-year-olds living back-to-back-to-back takes you to the year our nation was founded.
And while we're pondering this age business, it's also fun to look at the relative youth of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, keeping in mind that 56 delegates representing the 13 original colonies actually put their very “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” on the line when they signed their John Hancock on the document (and, yes, one of them was indeed John Hancock).
Also, with present-day controversy in mind, it is worth noting that none of the representatives signed using an auto-quill.
The average age of the document’s signers was 44 years, which happened to be George Washington's age at the time. And Washington's nemesis across the pond, the other George, King George III of England? He was 38.
The oldest signer of the Declaration was (no surprise) Benjamin Franklin, age 70.
Finally, by now you have probably done the math to figure out the age of Thomas Jefferson — the document’s chief author — when he signed: 33.
Now, enjoy the celebrations and get ready for the biggest one of all, next year’s 250th!
Editor's note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.
Ken Burns has built his career as America's memory keeper. For decades, he's positioned himself as the guardian against historical revisionism, the man who rescues truth from the dustbin of academic fashion. His camera doesn't just record past events — it sanctifies them.
For nearly five decades, Burns has reminded Americans that memory matters and that history shapes how a nation sees itself.
Jefferson's 'Nature’s God' wasn’t a placeholder. It was a real presence. He sliced up the Gospels but still bowed to the idea of eternal moral law.
Which makes his recent performance on Joe Rogan's podcast all the more stunning in its brazen historical malpractice.
At the 1-hour, 17-minute mark, Burns delivered his verdict on the Founding Fathers with the confidence of a man who's never been wrong about anything.
They were deists, he declared. Believers in a distant, disinterested God, a cosmic clockmaker who wound up the universe and wandered off to tend other galaxies. Cold, clinical, and entirely absent from human affairs.
It's a tidy narrative. One small problem: It's so very wrong.
The irony cuts so deep it draws blood. The man who made his reputation fighting historical revisionism has become its most prominent practitioner. Burns, the supposed guardian of American memory, has developed a curious case of selective amnesia, and Americans are supposed to pretend not to notice.
Now, some might ask: Who cares? What difference does it make whether Washington believed in an active God or a divine absentee landlord? The answer is everything, and the fact that it's Burns making this claim makes it infinitely worse.
This isn't some graduate student getting his dissertation wrong. This is America's most trusted historical documentarian, the man whose work shapes how millions understand their past. When Burns speaks, the nation listens.
When he gets it wrong, the mistake seeps like an oil spill across the national story, quietly coating textbooks, classrooms, and documentaries for decades.
Burns is often treated as an apolitical narrator of history, but there’s a soft ideological current running through much of his work: reverence for progressive causes, selective moral framing, and a tendency to recast American complexity through a modern liberal lens.
Burns isn't stupid. One assumes he knows exactly what he's saying. If he doesn't — if his remarks on Rogan's podcast represent genuine ignorance rather than deliberate distortion — then we have serious questions about the depth of his actual knowledge. How does someone spend decades documenting American history while missing something this fundamental?
The truth is that Americans have been lied to about the Founders' faith for so long that Burns' deist mythology sounds plausible. The secular academy has been rewriting these men for decades, stripping away their religious convictions, sanding down their theological edges, making them safe for modern consumption. Burns isn't breaking new ground. He's perpetuating a familiar falsehood.
Let's start with George Washington, the supposed deist in chief. Burns would have us believe the general bowed not to God, but to a kind of cosmic CEO who delegated all earthly duties to middle management. But at least one contemporary account attests that Washington knelt in the snow at Valley Forge — not once, but repeatedly.
He called for the national day of "prayer and thanksgiving" that eventually became the November federal holiday we know today. He invoked divine Providence so frequently you’d think he was writing sermons, not military orders.
His Farewell Address reads more like a theological tract than a retirement speech, warning that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity. Does that sound like a man who thought God had checked out?
John Adams, another Founder often branded a deist, wrote bluntly that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”
Adams saw the American Revolution as the outgrowth of divine intervention. As he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were ... the general principles of Christianity.”
And what of Jefferson? By far the most heterodox, even he never denied divine order. His “Nature’s God” wasn’t a placeholder. It was a real presence. He sliced up the Gospels but still bowed to the idea of eternal moral law. Whatever his quarrels with organized religion, he did not believe in a silent universe.
Some of these men were, philosophically at least, frustrated Catholics. They couldn’t fully accept Protestantism, but they had no access to the Church’s intellectual infrastructure. The natural law reasoning that permeates their political thought — Jefferson’s “self-evident truths,” Madison’s checks and balances born of man’s fallen nature — comes straight from Aquinas, filtered through Locke, Montesquieu, and centuries of Christian jurisprudence.
The Founders weren’t Enlightenment nihilists. They weren’t secular technocrats. And they certainly weren’t deists. They were men steeped in a moral framework older than the American experiment itself.
Burns, for all his sepia-toned genius, has a blind spot you could drive a colonial wagon through. His documentaries glow with progressive reverence — plenty of civil rights and moral reckoning, but the Almighty gets the silent treatment. God may have guided the Founders, but in Ken’s cut, he barely makes the final edit.
I mentioned irony at the start, but it deserves more than a passing nod. That's because the septuagenarian's own cinematic legacy contradicts the very theology he now peddles on podcasts.
His brilliant nine-part series "The Civil War" captured the moral agony of a nation tearing itself apart, and it did so in unmistakably religious terms. Here Burns treats Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — haunted, prophetic, bathed in biblical cadence — with reverence, not revisionism.
The series understood something essential: Americans have always been a biblical people. They see their history not just in terms of dates and treaties, but in terms of sin, sacrifice, and redemption. Sacred story, divine purpose — this was the language of American reckoning.
The Founders weren’t saints, and they weren’t simple. They read Greek, spoke Latin, studied Scripture, and debated philosophy with a seriousness that puts modern politicians to shame. But they weren’t spiritual agnostics, either.
They were men of imperfect but active faith, shaped by the Bible, steeped in Christian moral tradition, and convinced that human rights came not from government but from God.
They didn’t build a republic of personal preference. They built one grounded in enduring truths that predated the Constitution, anchored to the idea that law and liberty meant nothing without a higher law above them.
Burns may deal in memory, but his treatment of religion reveals something else entirely. He doesn’t misremember. He reorders. He filters faith through a modern lens until it becomes unrecognizable.
Memory isn’t just about what’s preserved — it’s about what’s permitted. And when the sacred gets cast aside, what’s left isn’t history. It’s propaganda with better lighting.
In response to widespread rioting and domestic disorder in Los Angeles, President Trump ordered the deployment of National Guard units. More than 700 U.S. Marines from the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms were also mobilized on Monday to protect federal property around the city.
As expected, critics pounced. They claim Trump’s orders violate American tradition — calling them anti-constitutional, anti-federal, and an authoritarian misuse of executive power. They say Trump is turning the military into a domestic police force.
In moments like this, the republic must defend itself.
But that argument isn’t just wrong — it’s nonsense on stilts.
The U.S. Army Historical Center has published three comprehensive volumes documenting the repeated and lawful use of federal military forces in domestic affairs since the founding of the republic. From the Whiskey Rebellion to civil rights enforcement, history shows that federal troops have long been a constitutional backstop when local authorities fail to maintain order.
Certainly, the use of military forces within U.S. borders must be limited and considered carefully. But the Constitution explicitly grants this authority. Article IV, Section 4 states: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.”
That clause isn’t a suggestion — it’s a command. A republican government exists to safeguard life, liberty, and property. The First Amendment protects the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government, but it does not shield acts of arson, looting, or assault. When rioters threaten the public, federal intervention becomes not just permissible but, in this instance, necessary.
Article II empowers the president, as commander in chief of the Army, Navy, and National Guard (when called into federal service), to act decisively against both foreign and domestic threats. That includes quelling insurrections when state leaders fail to uphold public order.
The National Guard is not the “militia” the founders discussed. That distinction was settled with the passage of the Dick Act in 1903, which clarified the Guard’s federal identity in relation to state control. Since then, the Guard has operated under dual federal and state authority — with federal control taking precedence when activated. Once federalized, the National Guard becomes an extension of the U.S. military.
Congress codified this authority in 1807 with the Insurrection Act. It authorizes the president to use military force when ordinary judicial proceedings fail. This provision enabled presidents throughout history to deploy troops against domestic unrest. During the 1950s and ’60s, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy used it to enforce desegregation orders in the South.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush relied on the same statute to deploy Army and Marine forces alongside the California National Guard during the L.A. riots following the Rodney King trial verdict. That was done without sparking cries of dictatorship.
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Those accusing Trump of violating norms by acting over a governor’s objection should revisit 1957. After Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus (D) defied federal orders to desegregate Little Rock Central High School, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne Division. Democratic Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia decried the move, comparing the troops to Hitler’s storm troopers — a reminder that hysterical analogies are nothing new.
Americans have sought to limit military involvement in domestic life. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was designed to do just that — restrict the use of federal troops in civil law enforcement without explicit authorization. But even that law has historical nuance.
The concept of “posse comitatus” comes from English common law. It refers to the authority of sheriffs to summon local citizens to restore order. In early American history, federal troops often supported U.S. Marshals. They enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, stanched the bleeding in Kansas, and helped capture John Brown at Harpers Ferry.
After the Civil War, the Army played a key role in enforcing Reconstruction and suppressing the Ku Klux Klan under the Force Acts. Southern Democrats opposed this use of federal power. But by the 1870s, even Northern lawmakers grew uneasy when soldiers were ordered to suppress railroad strikes under direction of state and local officials.
The Army eventually welcomed Posse Comitatus. Being placed under local political control compromised military professionalism and exposed troops to partisan misuse. Officers feared that domestic policing would corrupt the armed forces.
I’ve long argued for restraint in using military power within U.S. borders. That principle still matters. But lawlessness, when left unchecked, can and will destroy republican government. And when local leaders fail to act — or worse, encourage disorder — the federal government must step in.
President Trump has both the constitutional and statutory authority to deploy troops in response to the violence unfolding in Los Angeles. Whether he should do so depends on prudence and necessity. But the idea that such action is unprecedented or somehow illegal has no basis in law or history.
If mayors and governors abdicate their duty, Washington must not. The defense of law-abiding citizens cannot hinge on the whims of ideologues or the cowardice of local officials. And in moments like this, the republic must defend itself.
When woke mobs began chasing off guest speakers from college campuses and elite institutions started investigating scientists over minor infractions against gender orthodoxy, a certain class of moderate progressives realized its reign was ending. Figures like Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shermer weren’t conservatives by any stretch. In the George W. Bush or Barack Obama years, they would have qualified as mainstream progressives. But they couldn’t keep pace with the radical left.
These disaffected progressives needed a new label. But they couldn’t bring themselves to align with the “backward” conservatives they’d spent careers ridiculing. Venture capitalist Eric Weinstein coined the term “Intellectual Dark Web,” which Weiss attempted to popularize in the New York Times. But most settled on “classical liberal” to describe their stance. The problem? They had spent years rejecting classical liberalism.
Disillusioned progressives are not conservatives. They’re not classical liberals, either. They don’t get to define the future of the right.
“Classical liberal” serves as the ideal label for repackaging Obama-era liberalism in a way that reassures Republicans while keeping a safe distance from the woke left. It sounds moderate compared to identity politics. It evokes America’s founders — Washington, Jefferson, Adams. If you want to appear reasonable to conservatives while shielding yourself from attacks on your right flank, aligning with the founders is a smart move.
Whether the branding strategy was intentional remains debatable. What’s not in question is how badly this self-description distorted classical liberalism.
Some members of the Intellectual Dark Web drifted right. Most did not. They held tightly to progressive instincts. Many were atheists. Some had built careers in the New Atheist movement, penning books mocking Christianity and debating apologists for sport. Several were openly gay, and most championed same-sex marriage. These were not defenders of tradition — they spent decades undermining it.
They didn’t oppose the revolution. They led it — until the mob turned on the parts they still cherished, like feminism or science.
When the Intellectual Dark Web embraced the “classical liberal” label, it did so to defend free speech. Most of these disillusioned progressives had been canceled — for “misgendering” someone, for not parroting the latest racial orthodoxies, or for refusing to bow to ideological litmus tests. They longed for an earlier version of progressivism, one where they still held the reins, and radical activists didn’t dictate the terms of debate.
This shared frustration became the rallying point between conservatives and anti-woke liberals. Free speech offered common ground, so both sides leaned into it. But classical liberalism involves far more than vague nods to open dialogue.
Some trace liberalism’s roots to Machiavelli or Hobbes. But in the American tradition, it begins with John Locke. Much of the Declaration of Independence reads like Thomas Jefferson channeling Locke — right down to the line about “life, liberty, and property,” slightly rewritten as “the pursuit of happiness.”
In “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” Locke argued for religious toleration among Christian sects. He even entertained the idea of tolerating Catholics — if they renounced allegiance to the pope. But Locke drew a hard line at one group: atheists.
“Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God,” Locke wrote. “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist ... [they] undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.”
For Locke, atheism was social acid. It dissolved the moral glue holding a nation together. A silent unbeliever who kept to himself might avoid trouble — but even then, Locke saw no reason to trust such a man with power. Atheism, in Locke’s view, posed a civilizational threat.
Now, consider the irony. Many of today’s self-declared “classical liberals” rose to prominence attacking religion. They led the New Atheist crusade. They mocked believers, ridiculed Christianity, and wrote bestsellers deriding faith as delusion. These weren’t defenders of liberal order. They launched a secular jihad against the very moral foundation that made liberalism possible.
Their adoption of the “classical liberal” label isn’t just unserious. It’s either historically illiterate or deliberately deceptive.
It’s a mistake to treat America’s founders as a monolith. They disagreed — often sharply — and those disagreements animate much of the "Federalist Papers." But one point remains clear: Their understanding of free speech and religious liberty diverged sharply from modern secular assumptions.
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Even after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified, several states retained official churches. Courts regularly upheld blasphemy laws well into the 20th century. Some state supreme courts continued defending them into the 1970s. Blue laws, which restrict commerce on Sundays to preserve the Sabbath, remain on the books in several states.
John Adams put it plainly: The Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The founders, and the citizens they represented, expected America to function as an explicitly Christian nation. Free speech and religious liberty existed within that framework — not apart from it.
So when non-woke liberals claim that “classical liberalism” demands a secular or religiously neutral government, they misrepresent history. That idea would have struck the founders as absurd. The Constitution was not written for New Atheists. Adams said so himself.
Faced with these historical facts, critics usually pivot. They argue that America has morally advanced beyond its founding values. Today, we tolerate non-Christian religions, recognize women’s rights, and legalize same-sex marriage. These changes, they claim, bring us closer to “true” American principles like freedom and equality.
Classical liberalism was a real political tradition — one that helped shape the American founding. It deserves serious treatment. Watching it get paraded around by people who reject its core values is exhausting. If Locke or Adams saw progressive atheists wearing classical liberalism like a skin suit, they’d spin in their graves.
The secular liberalism of the 1990s and early 2000s is not classical liberalism. It isn’t even an ally of conservatism. The non-woke left served as useful co-belligerents against the radical fringe, but they were never true allies — and they should never be allowed to lead the conservative movement.
Some have earned respect. Carl Benjamin, Jordan Peterson, and others have taken real steps to the right, even toward Christianity. That deserves credit. But let’s not kid ourselves. Many who still fly the “classical liberal” banner don’t believe in the values it represents. They reject its religious foundation. They rewrite its history. They co-opt its label while advancing a worldview its founders would have rejected outright.
Disillusioned progressives are not conservatives. They’re not classical liberals, either. They don’t get to define the future of the right. And they certainly don’t get to lead it.
In a Rose Garden ceremony on May 1, the National Day of Prayer, President Donald Trump announced the creation of a Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty. Even though I couldn’t be there, I knew about the commission because I have the honor of being one of its members.
I can hardly say how much religious liberty means to me, and I was thrilled to know we have a president who understands its vital importance — and sees how scandalously it has been under attack in recent years.
This is the very soul of our republic: a nation grounded in God-given rights, moral clarity, and the enduring belief that freedom begins with the liberty of conscience.
But one is hardly surprised the secular left did not respond well to the announcement, carping that the commission was formed for ulterior motives, hidden agendas, and division.
The folks at Politico, for example, accused the president of “brushing aside separation of church and state,” thereby trumpeting their willful misunderstanding of the famous phrase.
Of course, “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution, but it does appear in a letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Baptist congregation in my hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802. It represents an utterly central idea about religious liberty, one that is precisely the opposite of what secularists have been twisting it to mean for decades.
Religious liberty means that churches must be protected from the state, not that the state needs to be protected from churches. Jefferson was reassuring the Danbury Baptists that the government would never interfere with their right to worship — nor banish religion from public life.
But secularists persist in pretending that it means the opposite.
The Constitution itself says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This idea underscoresthe centrality of the “exercise” of religion in public life and clarifies that government cannot mandate what kind of religion people practice.
It is that simple.
Far from erasing religion from public life, or preventing believers from shaping public policy or living out their faith in society, the Constitution protects these things.
The origins of our country tell a beautiful story: It was founded as a safe haven from government-mandated worship.
Those who seek to denude our country of religious influence are at odds with our history, our Constitution, and our founders’ vision. Fundamentalist secularists put forth a destructive distortion of our founders’ vision and undermine precisely what has made our country a beacon of hope and justice for people of every faith.
This commission’s goal is to strengthen the liberty of every single American — regardless of that person’s faith and even of whether that person has any faith. It also aims to restore those liberties attacked by hostile and misguided secularists.
Our Declaration of Independence states that our liberties come from God — not from government. It says that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and “among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
What could be clearer?
In my book "If You Can Keep It," I discuss how the founders understood that self-government and liberty presupposed a virtuous citizenry, a virtue that comes from religious faith. Power corrupts, so without faith and virtue, freedom would eventually turn on itself.
The idea is this: While the government must never mandate faith, it must vigorously preserve religious liberty so that faith is not crushed by government power.
Trump's Religious Liberty Commission gets this right. Government must be kept out of religion. His EO declares: “It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law.”
This is not about establishing any religion but about protecting the freedom to believe, to speak, and to live according to one’s conscience. Nowhere does the EO limit what religion this is to be.
America has been and must continue to be a haven for freedom of speech and thought, which is exactly what the founders envisioned: a country where “religious voices and views are integral to a vibrant public square,” where “religious people and institutions are free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or hostility from the government.”
This vision stretches back to the early settlers: Pilgrims, Quakers, Baptists, and others who fled Europe to escape religious persecution. They sought a land where they could freely choose, follow, and express their faith.
The Religious Liberty Commission honors their legacy by safeguarding that right.
The goal of the Commission is to protect:
These are not just Christian issues. These are human liberty issues. They apply to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and those of any or no faith.
Unsurprisingly the biggest concern of the legacy media is the LGBTQ agenda, which, of course, is markedly at odds with many religions. Sharia law reserves some of its harshest punishments for same-sex relationships. So why do these critics describe the commission as a “Christian nationalist” exercise other than as a cynical and calculated smear?
As I’ve written about in several of my books, it was the silence of the churches in Germany in the 1930s that led to the rise of Nazis and opened the door to unspeakable evils. The Religious Liberty Commission simply allows a platform for religious voices to be heard, and it reaffirms that America is a nation where faith can thrive without government interference.
The founders made that promise back in 1791, and while it’s tragic that we’ve come to the point where we need our president to reaffirm this, we must support his action.
The Religious Liberty Commission fulfills what the founders envisioned — a nation where faith is not censored but celebrated. A place where believers are not exiled from the public square but welcomed as full participants in our democracy.
This is the very soul of our republic: a nation grounded in God-given rights, moral clarity, and the enduring belief that freedom begins with the liberty of conscience.
This commission is not merely constitutional. It’s courageous. And it’s exactly what America needs.
I, for one, am immensely humbled that I can work alongside President Trump and the magnificent members of this commission to ensure the religious liberty of every American can be protected so that it can thrive. I pray that our society would lean into our heritage, that we would follow God first, and that liberty would continue to thrive.
May God continue to bless our nation for His purposes in history.
If Americans are taught by foreigners (and their children) to hate the men and ideals that birthed liberty, they will never fight to protect it when the next settler immigrant tries to take it away.
Whether through Supreme Court precedent, statutes, or even constitutional amendments, ours is a parental rights moment that demands action to allow parents the right to do their duty and raise their children.
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Last week, unelected District Court Judge Brian Murphy told the Trump administration that it must bring back an illegal alien who was deported because, according to Murphy, the alien needs due process — and the Trump administration buckled. In court filings on Wednesday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said it would bring back the illegal […]
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