On America’s 250th

Eric Metaxas on the American miracle:

There are countless books on America and its history, with many thousands devoted to its founding. Given that in a few weeks America will celebrate its 250^th anniversary, there is no shortage of new titles being released as well. Os Guinness for example has already released 3 of 4 books on the significance of this semiquincentennial. When the set is complete, those four slim volumes will total some 700 pages.

Coming in at 600 pages is the new volume by Eric Metaxas, Revolution (Odysseus Books, 2026). Subtitled, “The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World,” it does to some extent what Guinness has done, discussing how the unique American experiment is inseparably bound to its unique Christian foundation.

Many books of course have looked at this Christian connection with the birth of America, and Guinness and Metaxas are simply following in that important tradition. Readers interested in my reviews of the three Guinness volumes so far released will find them easily enough on my website. The titles are these:

Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (Kildare, 2024).
America Agonistes: America’s 250th and the Restoration of a Nation in Conflict with Itself and Its Past (Kildare, 2025).
A Freedom Like No Other: America 250 and the Restoration of the American Republic (Kildrare, 2026).

But this article will focus on the Metaxas book. My aim is simply to interest you in it, in the hopes that you get it and read it for yourself. To that end, simply quoting parts of it should suffice. The opening paragraphs of his Introduction put it this way:

Once upon a time there was a Revolution.

 

Abraham Lincoln said that the “new nation” born of that Revolution in 1776 was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When we think of a conception we think of a clear beginning—of a spark ex nihilo—so it’s not too much to say that the conception of the country we call the United States of America occurred when the idea of liberty went forth from the eternal mind of God, entering history and time. But when exactly was that?

 

Many of the men of the Revolution—having a view of history involving “providential dispensation”—believed that this first happened when the Israelites made a covenant at Sinai, and that the fire from this initial spark traveled through the centuries, flaring up slightly and briefly here and there in the city-states of ancient Greece and the Roman republic and then mostly went underground again, until after the Reformation it had gathered enough energy to leap across the Atlantic, where in a handful of communities the flame was cherished and carefully guarded until—being threatened—it was seen to burst more generally into view in the events we shall be discussing.

 

So the American nation—“conceived in liberty” and born in 1776—is the geopolitical expression of that Revolution, of that glorious idea from outside this world that came into the world. There has never been another nation like it. Of course, after its birth 250 years ago, it has continued to exist—and not merely to exist but to grow dramatically, ideally developing along the genetic lines established in the moment of conception. But in order for that to happen, it is inescapably vital that the citizens who form that nation are aware of the glorious events of that conception and that birth, so that they may rejoice in them. That is the principal reason for the existence of this book.

 

Although this book might have been titled The American Revolution, it is simply titled Revolution, because the Revolution we often call the American Revolution is the only genuine revolution in the history of so-called revolutions, and therefore stands quite alone, requiring no adjective. Our Revolution set the standard and is the model, such that nothing that has called itself a revolution can seriously compare with it. The French Revolution was ultimately a tragic and failed revolution, and the Bolshevik or Soviet Revolution was the cynical and demonic parody of a genuine revolution. Perhaps the Greek Revolution of 1821 comes closest, although even that cannot really begin to compare with what happened during our own Revolution. As ever, John Adams may have said it best. In a letter to his friend Benjamin Rush in June 1776, he said, “We are in the very midst of Revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.”

 

The Revolution that took place in America in the eighteenth century was a world-changing event and was therefore an international event, one that had never happened before and can never happen again, any more than the Big Bang—or the events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection—could happen again. It was a singularity in world history. Because the nation born of that Revolution was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” it took all of humanity into a new epoch. (xi-xii)

And after 44 detailed and inspiring chapters looking at the history, politics and religion of this momentous event in human history, Metaxas offers his closing remarks in the Epilogue – some of which are worth sharing here. It begins:

Although the war we call the Revolution was over in 1783, the Revolution itself was not over—and to some extent would never be over. To secure what had just been achieved, it must continue, and did. It continues still, so that we are obliged to ask ourselves the same question, in the 250th “Supercentennial” anniversary year of our nation’s birth. What now?

 

Even as they celebrated, those involved in the Revolution knew they had only just begun. Just as John Adams would write Benjamin Rush about “a Revolution before the Revolution,” Rush himself in January 1787 wrote of the Revolution after the Revolution. “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of the American revolution with those of the late American war,” he said. “The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.” This would immediately involve what happened between May and September of that year, when many of the central players gathered in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention…. (p. 566)

Not surprisingly, Metaxas appeals to Os Guinness concerning the paradox of freedom:

The Founders knew that a conundrum or paradox lay at the heart of liberty. The great writer Os Guinness has famously called this idea “The Golden Triangle of Freedom,” and I have written of it in my 2016 book, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty. In a nutshell the Golden Triangle of Freedom is this: Freedom requires Virtue; Virtue requires Faith; Faith requires Freedom. Round and round it goes. So if we wish to maintain the freedoms won in the Revolution— and enumerated in our founding documents—our culture must be one of virtue. And all the Founders believed for virtue to thrive, we must be a culture of robust religious faith. But they understood the critical next part. Faith cannot be mandated by our government, or forced via legislation. Faith must be utterly free and cannot be coerced. The “Establishment Clause” of our Constitution makes this explicit. So the Founders in insisting on Religious Liberty understood that everyone would be free to believe as they liked, or not to believe. The government could have no say in this, which Thomas Jefferson summed up in his letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, in which he speaks of a “wall of separation” between Church and State. So in the culture of our nation we must maintain a culture of virtue and faith, but no law could ever force this. How then do we guarantee this? The blunt answer is that we cannot. The responsibility of “keeping the republic”—of preserving the liberties won in the Revolution —remains entirely up to us, to we the people. Because true freedom must be freely kept. So our responsibility to “keeping the republic” never goes away. It is our responsibility today. If we do not do it of our own accord, the republic and our liberties vanish.

 

John Adams made this point as president in 1798, saying that our government lacked the power to contend “with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.” As obviously important as the Constitution was, it was insufficient. We the people must voluntarily bridle our passions. “Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net,” he said. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” (pp. 567-568)

And one last quote:

It seems impossible that we might sustain the liberty bequeathed to us by the men of the Revolutionary era without a culture as dedicated to faith and virtue as theirs. But the general drift toward a secular view among our own cultural elites in the last century – toward an attitude that in its way mirrors the sneering attitude toward faith and virtue of the British elites of the Revolutionary era – has so successfully encouraged the idea that this is possible, and that America can flourish apart from faith and virtue, that we have rarely dared to ask whether this is indeed true….

 

It seems, at the very least, ungracious and ungrateful to Washington and Adams and the other men of the Revolution that we could so thoughtlessly depart from what they themselves so earnestly believed. Do we not at least feel sufficiently beholden to these great men to take seriously what they took so deeply seriously, to the extent that they risked everything – including their lives – to live it out? To dismiss the views of these great men as quaint anachronisms seems not merely cavalier, but arrogant and intellectually dishonest. We cannot hope to continue their Revolution as they would have wanted us to continue the Revolution – and to “keep the republic” – without returning to their understanding of why and how it began in the first place…. (p. 576)

I realise that sharing a few quotes from this large tome is quite insufficient in terms of highlighting what is found therein, but it might spur you on to grab a copy for yourself and give it a proper reading. Americans at least owe it to themselves and their country to recall afresh just what transpired two and a half centuries ago in this great land.

[1781 words]