Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Good afternoon.
As we approach America’s 250th birthday this July Fourth, I’d like to address the subject of faith and freedom in this report, my last until September.
Despite all the supposedly intractable problems we face as a country, I believe the United States has a bright future.
In fact, I believe we’re on the cusp of a new American renaissance. Before exploring why I think that, I’d first like to explain how I came to love this country. I had to leave America to learn that I loved it.
It was 40 years ago this year when I departed the United States to live overseas. The destination was Bonn, West Germany, where we resided for four years. You know you are old when the country you departed to no longer exists.
West Germany was a partitioned and enfeebled country then. Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, the country was cut in half. It reunified in 1990, the year after we returned to the United States. The infamous Berlin Wall had finally fallen as freedom in the West eclipsed captivity in the East.
With the Wall gone, the so-called German Democratic Republic—East Germany as it was commonly known, the country on the other side of the Wall—ceased to exist. The Soviet Union, our bitter Cold War rival, also collapsed a year later, in 1991.
I returned from Germany having acquired perhaps the most valuable life lesson I’ve ever learned.
I came to realize that the human thirst for freedom is unstoppable. And that without faith, true freedom is also unachievable. Government by its nature accumulates power and seeks to use it. It is, therefore, a very active adversary of both freedom and faith.
The Founders understood this as a bedrock and guiding principle. The men who signed our Declaration of Independence in 1776, and later crafted and adopted our Constitution in 1789, were principled men of courage, conviction and faith.
They also were willing to risk everything in the pursuit of freedom. Their war of independence was won against King George III, the powerful ruler of the most powerful empire the world had known. And the documents the Founders wrote would ensure, for future generations, that faith and freedom would be preserved above all.
On a personal level, my experiences in Germany were transformative. I came to perfectly illustrate the old saying that if you’re conservative at age 20, you have no heart. If you’re liberal at age 40, you have no brain.
My ideological movement was a direct result of the barbarity I learned of and had witnessed while covering West and East Germany for the Wall Street Journal.
I had experienced it myself. Armed guards poking me and prodding me, even holding me captive on one occasion at Checkpoint Charlie (the crossing point from West to East Berlin), and pointing assault weapons at me another time during a 3 a.m. room search when they rousted me out of bed in an East Berlin hotel and demanded to see my papers.
When I met with East German citizens, as I did often, many wanted to leave but were imprisoned by the barriers and barbed wire which walled them in. They were so starved and hungry for the freedom they saw on Western television yet couldn’t enjoy, many sought to escape. Some were murdered.
How could the unimaginable horrors of Soviet communism have happened? It was an “evil empire” as President Ronald Reagan had described it. His explanation sounded harsh to me at the time, but I came to see the validity of his assessment.
The best explanation I know of why it happened was offered by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), the famed Soviet dissident. A former atheist who found Christ while imprisoned for eight years in the Soviet Gulag labor camps, he went on to win every prize for his literary masterworks, including the Nobel Prize for Literature for exposing the evil of the Soviet system, and an empire built on lies.
When he accepted the Templeton Prize in 1983, he offered a simple but chilling explanation of the absolute depravity not just of the Soviet regime but modern times.
“Men have forgotten God. That’s why all this has happened.”
It’s an analysis we’d be wise to ponder as young people increasingly embrace socialism and question the principles of faith and freedom. Everything bad that happens nowadays, in the United States and beyond, is because men have forgotten God. They have lost sight of the importance of faith and freedom.
My time in Germany also taught me that countries sometimes disappear.
They disappear when the governors forget those they govern. They disappear when the institutions of governance do not serve or protect the will of the people.
While I do not believe the United States is destined for similar dissolution as that which I witnessed behind the Iron Curtain, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if it might be.
Events like what happened barely a month ago give rise to such cataclysmic thoughts.
The foiled assassination of President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in our nation’s capital on April 25 was the third attempt on his life in less than two years.
No President in our history has been targeted three times with assassination. Nor have we ever had such derangement openly celebrated by political assailants.
Are we on the threshold not of a renaissance but something dark and foreboding? It’s not unreasonable to wonder that.
After the latest assassination attempt, the New York Times asked Tucker Carlson, Trump’s former ally now turned outspoken opponent and opportunist, about the suggestion he’d made in a recent podcast that Trump is the Antichrist. When Carlson denied saying it, the Times played him the tape. He had said it.
“Tucker hid behind ignorance,” Ben Shapiro writes about Carlson’s puzzling interview with the Times.
“This small lie is an example of the bigger lie that he’s propagating, which is the same lie the Left is propagating. It goes like this: America is a terrible place; there are nefarious forces beyond your control; you are not actually in control of your life; and those nefarious forces are ruining our country.”
While I agree entirely that nefarious forces are seeking to ruin our country, I reject the increasingly popular but false notion that America is a terrible place. Quite the contrary. As I said earlier, I love my country. I had to leave it to come to understand why I loved it.
During the time we lived in West Germany, I yearned to return to the United States. Absence had definitely made my heart grow fonder.
I missed going to baseball games and the scent of mustard on a summer hotdog.
I missed marching in Memorial Day parades and seeing Fourth of July fireworks.
I missed the wide aisles of our supermarkets, and the width of our ambitions.
I missed how friendly Americans were, especially when compared to Germans who I found to be exceptionally unfriendly—and especially so toward Americans even back then, four decades ago.
I missed the pageantry, exuberance, grandeur and scenic beauty of the United States.
I missed our unbridled optimism and boundless energy.
I missed the renewal and reinvention that typifies America.
I missed the hopefulness about the future that Americans so often exhibit.
I also came to discover while living abroad that America was uniquely good, and that God had providentially blessed the United States in unique and majestic ways.
I became more aware of America’s extraordinary place in the world as a sentinel for faith and freedom. One place I visited that memorializes the sacrifice Americans have made on behalf of others is the American Cemetery in Normandy, France.
Ever since my visit, I’ve thought that every American should be required to see it in his or her lifetime. It is impossible to witness it and not be moved by the “last full measure of devotion” that the place solemnly, quietly commemorates.
The cemetery sits on a bluff that overlooks one of the most legendary scenes in modern warfare, Omaha Beach. It’s the same beach where American troops stormed ashore under heavy Nazi gunfire in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, when the liberation of France began.
Row upon endless row of perfectly aligned crosses in the cemetery mark the sacrifice made there. It’s the resting place for 45 pairs of brothers, a father and son, three generals, four women, and 9,290 other GIs.
The one time I saw it in person, I wept.
When random Frenchmen learned I was an American visitor, they stopped to express their thanks—in English, no less—and to shake my hand.
It’s been almost 82 years since their country was liberated on that bloody Tuesday morning, yet they still salute and remember the heroes who came ashore at Omaha Beach—and the country that sent them there.
It has become a trope to believe that America’s best days are over. Another trope that’s adjacent to this is that America’s institutions are the problem rather than solution.
This too I believe is a huge and intentional misreading of current events by those on the Left who seek our demise. It is the strength of our institutions and founding documents that hold us together. As well as the strength and moral character of the people who are reforming those institutions and who cherish those documents.
What follows are three individuals I’ve recently encountered who are champions of faith and freedom. In some quarters, they are viewed as “radicals.” None are popular with the radical Left. Then again, neither are the views I regularly express in this report.
In my considered opinion, all three are at the vanguard of the new American renaissance I mentioned earlier. They embody the moral culture we need to embrace if the United States is to flourish, and perhaps exist, in the years to come.
PASTOR DOUGLAS WILSON
As a measure of the attention Reverend Wilson attracts these days, the podcast interview he recently granted us is the most viewed video (4,000 views and counting) that our church has ever posted to our YouTube channel.
For Wilson, though, 4,000 views are miniscule. His Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, has doubled its membership since 2019 to more than 3,000—roughly 10% of the population in Moscow, a university town in Idaho’s northern panhandle.
Wilson has been in the spotlight—some might say crosshairs—of modern American culture for decades, but has attracted greater celebrity of late.
In 2013, Christianity Today’s award for best work of fiction went to his novel Evangellyfish, a satirical takedown of modern evangelicalism and the pastors who populate that landscape.
“Before I dipped into this novel, I was told it was a satire. What satire? I was a pastor for 10 years, and reading this made me squirm. Wilson grasps the untold ambiguities that contemporary pastors experience. This is realistic fiction. No, make that just realistic,” Mark Galli, formerly a top editor at Christianity Today (and now a convert to Roman Catholicism), said in his enthusiastic review of the book.
Wilson, 73 years old, has led Christ Church in Moscow which he founded since 1975. A champion of Christian education, he started the Logos School in 1981. A publishing house, Canon Press, began in 1988, which lists over 100 titles by Wilson and family members. A college, New Saint Andrews, followed in 1994. The Canon+ media outlet offers access to over 10,000 hours of Reformed Christian content.
Among Wilson’s most powerful admirers is Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who belongs to one of the roughly 150 churches in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) that Wilson co-founded in 1998.
Wilson was a speaker last September at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., which drew senior Trump administration officials including border czar Tom Homan, budget chief Russell Vought and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
What struck me most about the above interview is that for someone whom opponents portray as a scary radical, Wilson presents as anything but.
He graciously agreed to be interviewed on our Parrhesians podcast because members of our congregation will be voting this September on whether to join the CREC.
Wilson sprinkles his conversation with expressions like “golly” and “gosh.” But make no mistake, he has a sharp tongue when he unleashes it.
Speaking on the subject of Christian education, and how top-ranked public schools are terrific at indoctrinating youth in secular ideas, Wilson says (minute 48): “You don’t want a form of education where you wind up with very clever lesbians.”
“We want parents actively engaged in what goes into their kids’ heads,” he says, explaining the operating philosophy of the Christian education his Logos schools provide. “We have a Christian education fund. We don’t want any child in the church to miss out on a Christian education because of money.”
Having listened to the podcast in its entirety several times, I came away thinking: who exactly is radical? Some of Wilson’s language is rough and at times off putting, but it’s also intentionally provocative. Ultimately, I judge people more on what they do than on what they say.
Many people—even supposedly devout Christians—no longer view the Left’s agenda and actions as extreme.
Whether it’s mandatory transgender education for first graders, gay priests and ministers in the pulpit or men pretending to be girls competing in female sports, the Left has managed to convince the gullible among us that such practices are not the least bit radical.
Hence the media portrayal that Doug Wilson is “scary.” Sorry if this may offend you, but I don’t buy it.
As for Wilson’s views of so-called “Christian nationalism,” for which he’s become a spokesman of sorts, he continues to have a sense of humor.
“Mr. Vader, Pastor Wilson, thank you for coming on the show,” Michael Knowles says at the start of another interview with Wilson released a month ago.
“It’s great to come with you, to you, from the Death Star,” Wilson quips, laughing at his image as Darth Vader.
“You seem like an amiable fella,” Knowles continues. “What is Christian nationalism and why do these guys hate you so much?”
“I’ve got several short definitions” of Christian nationalism, Wilson replies. “One is that I’m a Christian and I love my country. …
“I don’t want to have my Christianity in one compartment and my patriotism in another compartment. I believe that, and that leads to the second short form definition, which is Christian nationalism is the belief that Americans should stop making God angry.”
Makes sense to me. I suggest you listen to the rest of the Knowles interview, and ours, to fill out more of the details if you are so inclined.
NICK FREITAS
I have Grove City College to thank for introducing me to our second defender of faith and freedom. That should not come as a surprise given that faith and freedom is the college motto. Grove City actually lives up to its creed. Even having first principles at all or a creed that isn’t woke makes a college or university unique these days.
Having taught in higher ed for two decades earlier in my life (Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne universities), I say with authority that the so-called Academy’s intellectual degradation—its uninterest in anything that sits outside a very narrow definition of acceptable thought—is a mirror image of the news media I also occupied for four decades. Lucky me!
Grove City is a jewel among swine. It’s part of the solution rather than the problem.
I only wish my own undergraduate and graduate alma maters (Allegheny College and Northwestern University) exhibited the least bit of curiosity about faith and freedom, rather than viewing Christians as lab specimens to be examined under a microscope. But boy are they skilled at persecuting Jews and advancing the most bizarre political causes! That’s another subject for another time.
Let’s return to something I’d like to talk about: Nick Freitas. Every war needs a warrior, and he is surely that. Literally. He joined the military after high school, serving two combat tours in Iraq as a Green Beret in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
Freitas, 46 years old, was then elected to real warfare, serving five terms in the Virginia General Assembly in its once distinguished House of Delegates. There he gained wide attention for his powerful oratory and floor debates, with several speeches going viral on social media. He has amassed a social media following of 5 million followers.
Grove City invited him to speak to students back in February. He spoke for about a half hour, then answered questions for another hour. Students there were hungry for the message he delivered—an estimated 1,500 of them showed up to hear him! The college only has around 2,500 students.
I don’t consider his message the least bit “radical,” but if you’re faint of heart, you may need smelling salts. You can listen to it below.
As you may quickly surmise listening to his talk, Freitas was able to put his Green Beret training to good use in the House of Delegates.
He’s definitely a veteran when it comes to the jujitsu and hand-to-hand combat political opponents used on him.
“If I can ridicule and demean you, if I can engage in just relentless ad hominem attack, if I can just mock you, and I can get enough other people to mock you, well then I can deprive your argument of moral legitimacy,” Freitas says, explaining the combat tactics used against him in floor debates.
He continues: “I used to wonder why it was that when I disagreed with some of my Democrat colleagues on something as simple as tax policy or the Second Amendment, it wasn’t that they thought I was wrong. It’s not that they wanted to debate the points that I was bringing up. No, they just wanted to diagnose me as something.
“I was racist. I was sexist. I was bigoted. Because then you don’t have to engage with the argument. You don’t have to engage with the facts and data. Who cares about the facts and data of a horrible racist, sexist, bigot? So if I can ridicule you enough, I can rob you of your moral legitimacy. And now no one listens to your argument no matter how good it is.”
I’d remind you that the legislature that Freitas spoke of, where he was treated in the manner he describes, is the very same Virginia legislature that recently was unfavorably portrayed in the news.
Gerrymandering is defined as the crafty redrawing of legislative districts to favor one party over another. That’s exactly what the Virginia legislature did when it approved a plan to redistrict the state’s House seats in Congress from a slight 6-to-5 Democratic majority to a lopsided 10-to-1.
Voters narrowly approved that plan in a special election on April 21. But the Virginia Supreme Court nullified the election on May 8, saying that the General Assembly that Freitas before this year was a member of had violated the state constitution when it tried to redraw its congressional districts ahead of this November’s mid-term elections.
Virginia Democrats then responded with a request to the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a stay pausing the state ruling while they prepared to file an appeal. On May 15, however, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous, one-sentence ruling denying the stay without further comment. The prior 6-to-5 districts would be kept.
Freitas must have had a good laugh when that happened.
The involvement of the courts in this unusual turn of events brings me to my third and final subject.
JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH
In setting the law of the land, the nine Justices who sit on the United States Supreme Court are no strangers to controversy. But nothing in the Court’s history compares with the escalating threats of violence they’ve endured in recent years.
By far, the worst incident occurred four years ago when someone with knowledge of the Court’s inner workings—presumed to be a still unidentified clerk of liberal leanings—leaked the preliminary decision to overturn the landmark decision that legalized abortion.
In arguably the most controversial and I’d contend worst decision in the long history of the Supreme Court, the sitting Justices voted 7-to-2 on January 22, 1973 that a woman’s right to have an abortion was protected by implied privacy rights supposedly guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
On a moral level, the decision was an obscene travesty—a tortured construct that surely was a sign of the times but one that deeply angered God, as Doug Wilson would put it. The decision opened the door to the deaths of an estimated 63 to 64 million unborn babies in the United States alone over the next 49 years. For comparison, that’s a greater body count than the entire current population of those living in Italy.
Even such liberal lions and women’s rights advocates on the Court as Ruth Bader Ginsburg later criticized the decision as bad law in that it created out of thin air a “privacy right” that was neither implied nor existed in the Amendment the Court cited in its historic Roe decision.
In May of 2022, a more conservative Court had courageously and privately determined that the time had finally come to bring the Roe era of unbounded immorality to a close. But courage always comes at a cost. The opinion in the Dobbs case which reversed Roe was written by Justice Samuel Alito.
There was no implied right to privacy protected under the Constitution, Alito wrote. Abortion, therefore, was not a federal matter at all. Each state should decide on its own, through the will of their respective people, what the law would be in that state via normal democratic procedures.
Once the Court’s private verdict on Dobbs had been leaked, however, the death threats the Justices received afterward were so numerous and explicit that unprecedented security measures were employed to protect them. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent female arrival to the Court, recently revealed that she was advised to wear body armor, and actually put it on in front of her young children.
They thought it was “cool” until they realized why she was wearing it.
Meanwhile, Justice Alito and his wife were also temporarily moved to a secure location while Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted in a foiled assassination attempt. The assassin was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Yet despite such obstacles to the normal functioning of the Court, justice perseveres. So does freedom and faith, as the Founders intended it would.
One of the most steadfast defenders of our First Amendment rights in the Constitution is conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, 58 years old, who has served on the Court for nine years since President Trump nominated him in 2017.
In Gorsuch’s recent opinion which upheld that a Christian therapist had a First Amendment right to share her “conversion” views with LGBTQ kids who sought her counsel, he wrote that the Colorado law prohibiting her from providing it was “classic [and unconstitutional] viewpoint discrimination.”
It was, therefore, invalid, and the Justices accordingly vacated the Colorado law (by a lopsided decision of 8-to-1). Pastor Nate Devlin excellently summarized the case, and its significance, in his sermon this past Sunday.
Gorsuch is considered an originalist, meaning he interprets the Constitution based on the meaning of its text at the time it was written. Unlike liberal judges, he generally does not tolerate inferred or implied rights that are not explicitly written in the document itself.
In addition, he is a studious interpreter of American history, particularly of the Revolutionary period and our founding documents.
In a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal titled “How imperfect people form a more perfect union,” he began: “The Declaration of Independence is a short document, not much longer than this essay. Even so, it contains three ideas that shocked the world in 1776: Each of us is born equal; God grants us all inviolable rights, including the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and We the People have the right to govern ourselves.”
He added: “The Declaration’s three great ideas still speak to us.”
One way they still speak to us is through a children’s book he has authored.
When the book was released earlier this month, I heard him interviewed by Hugh Hewitt. I bought a copy as a Mother’s Day gift for Louise (and me) to read to our grandchildren.
Explaining why he’d written the book, Gorsuch told Hewitt: “We need to take a moment to reflect on the humanity of the people who made [independence] possible, and the courage and sacrifice they endured during those eight years of war when things looked bleak often and dire. …
“Ordinary people who did extraordinary things. … How many of us really know about Caesar Rodney?”
It’s his story that I’d like to close with.
On the evening of July 1, 1776, only nine of the 13 colonies had voted for independence. The delegates debating the Declaration were packed into the sweaty assembly room in the Pennsylvania State House building on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Today, this historic Georgian building is known as Independence Hall.
Delaware was among the holdouts. Its approval was deadlocked 1-to-1 when delegate Thomas McKean, who supported the measure, sent an urgent message to fellow Delawarean Rodney, urging him to come immediately to break their deadlock.
It was a big ask as Rodney was sick and in Delaware, 80 miles away.
Yet despite suffering from cancer and asthma, he rode that distance on horseback that night to Philadelphia through a raging thunderstorm.
“The next day, July 2, Rodney staggered into the assembly room, still soaking and caked in mud but in time to vote for independence,” the book relates.
His heroism and vote assured that the Declaration of Independence was unanimously approved.
There’s one last modern coda to this story.
For generations, Rodney was revered. For the better part of a century, a statue of him on horseback and holding a copy of the Declaration stood in Rodney Square in Wilmington, Delaware. But on June 12, 2020, amid the Black Lives Matter rioting that swept the country then, the Rodney statue was removed.
A revered American hero was yet another victim of the anti-American revisionist rage that had gripped the country. From my perspective, it was a national psychosis.
The moral of the story, I suppose, is don’t forget your history, either personal or patriotic. That’s a good moral to remember this Fourth of July.
You also might consider visiting the new National Garden of American Heroes in Washington when it opens in July. Among the statues there in Freedom Plaza near the National Mall will be the same one of Caesar Rodney that Wilmington erased. President Trump is reinstating it to redress Rodney’s erasure.
That’s my report for the merry month of May. Have a grand and glorious Fourth of July. Give thanks to God for the faith and freedom we enjoy in this great land of ours!! See you in September. God bless.