SECRETARY MARCO RUBIO DECLARES AMERICA’S SOUL ROOTED IN CHRISTIAN FAITH — NATION REDEDICATED TO GOD AS FOREBEARS DID CENTURIES AGO
Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a powerful message on America’s foundational identity.
“On this day, two and a half centuries ago, our forefathers gathered for the second time in as many years for a national day of fasting and prayer. The resolution of the Continental Congress called on the 13 colonies to humble themselves in preparation for the coming war, with true penitence of heart and the most reverent devotion publicly to acknowledge the overruling providence of God. In three and a half months’ time, the colonists would be in open revolt against the most powerful empire in the history of the world. Many on both sides of the Atlantic thought their cause was a suicide mission.
The founders were not naive men. They knew their lives were on the line. That was the premise of Benjamin Franklin’s dark joke after signing the Declaration of Independence where he said, “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” They had no guarantees of victory. They knew that what they were trying to do had never been done before in human history. But with the dark storm clouds of war looming on the horizon, they did what Christians have always done, across place and time for 2,000 years. They turned their eyes to heaven and placed their fate in the hands of God.
It is no coincidence that America from the very beginning has occupied a unique and exceptional place in world history. Before the Christian West, most societies and civilizations for that matter thought in stagnant cycles — the flooding of the Nile, the return of the rains, the cycle of the harvest. History for them was a wheel to nowhere. It turned and turned only to end up back where it began. But our faith calls us outwards into the limitless darkness of the unknown. It tells us to go forth and preach the gospel to the world as a witness unto all nations unto the ends of the earth. From that command came America. Our nation, more than any other in history, was shaped by this Christian idea. We saw it at work already in 1630, more than a century before the revolution, when John Winthrop stood on the deck of the Arbella in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and preached a sermon to his fellow Puritan colonists: “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” he told them, “the eyes of all people are upon us.”
That same faith pushed America further to new frontiers. It was the engine of westward expansion. “Who will respond to the call from beyond the Rocky Mountains,” one reverend wrote in a public message to the American churches in 1833, calling for a wave of missionaries to leave the comforts of civilization and spread the gospel in the wilderness. Countless Americans answered that call.
It was the same faith that was at work when Samuel Morse sent the first long-distance telegraph message in 1844. His message was a verse from the Book of Numbers: “What hath God wrought?” And on Christmas Eve of 1968, three American astronauts orbited the moon. They were the first men in history to witness an earthrise from lunar orbit, to look back at the blue marble of our home from a quarter-million miles away. The world was watching. It was the largest television audience in the history of the world up to that point. And what did they say? They opened the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
This is who we are. It is who we have always been. America is still a young nation measured against the record of history. And from the beginning, we have carried the belief that our country represents something new in the world. But the soul of our nation has always been rooted in an ancient faith.”