OPINION:
The American experiment was built on a radical premise: that a moral and self-governing people, guided by faith and personal responsibility, could live in freedom without tyranny. The Founders believed liberty was inseparable from virtue and virtue was sustained by religion. John Adams warned, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Nearly 2½ centuries later, that foundation is eroding. The moral and spiritual convictions that once anchored our republic are being replaced by an expanding government that seeks to do, through bureaucracy and regulation, what faith and community once did through conviction and compassion. As America grows more secular and dependent, the balance between freedom and responsibility that defined our national character is fading.
The framers never envisioned a theocracy, but they understood liberty cannot long survive without moral order and that moral order depends on belief in something greater than the self. From the nation’s earliest days, churches formed the backbone of civic life. They built schools, hospitals, orphanages and networks that met the material and moral needs of their communities. Charity was not merely distribution but also dignity: help given person to person, rooted in the belief that every soul carries inherent worth.
Over the past century, that model has been steadily replaced by the state. Beginning with the New Deal and accelerating through the Great Society, government has assumed many roles once held by faith-based institutions. Public welfare spending that once measured in single digits of gross domestic product now consumes more than one-fifth of the economy. Scholars Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde found that as government welfare expands, religiosity declines. When the state provides the security once offered by churches, people’s reliance on religion weakens. As social spending rose during the 20th century, church membership fell from about 70% in 1950 to less than 50% today. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans now claim no religious affiliation at all.
What churches once provided and what the government offers differ not just in scale but also in spirit. Religious charity connected help with meaning. It invited accountability, belonging and transformation. Government assistance, by contrast, is transactional, an entitlement that is detached from the community. It can mail a check but not offer purpose. It can build housing but not a sense of home. It can redistribute wealth but cannot cultivate virtue. The welfare state is a synthetic substitute for what faith once authentically supplied: hope, belonging and the moral habits necessary for a free society.
As the government has grown, public trust in it has collapsed. In the 1960s, about 70% of Americans said they reported trusting the federal government to do what was right most of the time. Today, that number hovers near 20%. The irony is stark: As faith in God has declined and faith in government has risen to fill the void, we have found government itself unworthy of such devotion. The more it promises to do, the less capable it appears to be of doing anything well. Having traded spiritual faith for political faith, we now find ourselves with neither: a people searching for meaning in an institution that cannot provide it.
This erosion of faith parallels another quiet revolution: the decline of marriage, family and birth rates. Fewer people are marrying or having children, and fewer see those milestones as central to a fulfilling life. What once were the pillars of human existence — faith, family and purpose — are increasingly seen as optional. Meanwhile, consumer comforts and personal desires have become the new moral compass. We have traded the enduring for the immediate, the communal for the individual, the sacred for the convenient.
Our economic behavior mirrors this moral drift. The national debt has surpassed $38 trillion, a number that defies comprehension. Yet it is more than a fiscal failure; it is a moral one. A government that borrows endlessly spends not only money it doesn’t have but also virtue it no longer practices. It reflects a collective unwillingness to exercise the restraint that self-government requires. The Founders trusted citizens to be virtuous enough to govern themselves, but virtue cannot thrive in a moral vacuum or be sustained by institutions that have replaced faith with dependency.
The good news is that decline is not destiny. The same moral imagination that built America can renew it. The path forward does not begin with another federal program; it begins with a renewal of character, conscience and community. Faith communities must reclaim their historic role, not merely as houses of worship but also as pillars of compassion and formation. Families and neighborhoods must again become places where duty, discipline and dignity are taught and lived. Government has a place, but not the first place. It can coordinate, but it cannot inspire. It can protect, but it cannot redeem.
America’s greatness has never been measured by its wealth or armies but by its people and their faith, virtue and willingness to live as stewards of freedom rather than subjects of the state. The Founders’ experiment still stands, but it requires our active devotion. If we forget the moral and spiritual foundations that make liberty possible, we will lose not only faith in God but also faith in one another and, ultimately, in America itself.
• Jason E. Thompson is an entrepreneur and public servant in the Utah House of Representatives and a member of the Utah Federalism Commission. A former mayor of River Heights, Utah, he is passionate about strengthening unity and promoting dialogue on the balance of government. Jason lives in River Heights with his wife, Dana, and their six children.
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