“It’s not just fireworks and freedom—it’s a summons to remember our God-given rights and moral responsibility.”
As grills fire up and parades march down hometown streets, Americans celebrate the birth of our nation. But how many reflect on the deeper meaning behind the fireworks? July 4th was never meant to be a holiday of nostalgia alone. For John Quincy Adams—and the founders he revered—it was a day of remembrance and recommitment to enduring principles rooted in divine truth.
Adams’ Independence Day speeches are rarely studied today, but they powerfully illuminate what the Declaration of Independence was truly declaring. It wasn’t just a breakup with Britain. It was a bold statement of theological, philosophical, and political conviction—one that declared America as a nation under God, not just under government.
A Nation’s Founding: Not Just Political, But Providential
Dr. Matthew Spalding of Hillsdale College reminds us in this July 4th lecture that Adams saw America’s birth as divinely orchestrated and its liberty rooted in God’s moral order. Drawing from speeches Adams gave in the early 19th century, Spalding helps us rediscover the soul of the Declaration: national sovereignty, individual rights, and civic virtue—each grounded in “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”
The Declaration Begins with God—and Ends with Responsibility
The very first paragraph of the Declaration invokes “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” emphasizing that both nations and individuals derive their rights from a divine Creator—not kings, not Congress, and certainly not cultural whims. Thomas Jefferson’s iconic phrase—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—was not just a rhetorical flourish. As Spalding notes, the use of “we hold” signifies a shared moral conviction rooted in theological and philosophical education.
John Quincy Adams taught that independence meant more than freedom from tyranny. It meant aligning governance with virtue and viewing happiness not as personal pleasure, but as the fruit of moral discipline and godliness. Quoting Aristotle, Locke, and the Scriptures, Adams believed the pursuit of happiness was ultimately the pursuit of virtue—a concept as alien to today’s political discourse as it was foundational to our republic.
Civic Education and Biblical Virtue: America’s True Safeguard
Our modern understanding of freedom often collapses into personal autonomy and self-gratification. But Adams warned against such distortions. Without virtue, freedom cannot stand. Without civic and theological education, the principles of liberty dissolve into license.
So how do we honor our Independence Day rightly?
-
By returning to the actual text of the Declaration and the Scriptures it echoes.
-
By educating our children in the “greatest texts” of Western and biblical civilization.
-
By remembering that freedom under God is the only freedom that lasts.
Final Warning and Call to Action
Let us not be the generation that forgets why America was founded. As cultural elites strip God from our institutions and redefine our founding documents through secular lenses, we must return to the original vision: a nation under God, pursuing virtue, and governed by moral law.
“The happiness of society is the end of government… and that happiness consists in virtue.” — John Quincy Adams, 1776
