This piece argues that the cultural foundations of the United States are rooted in Christianity, and that those who oppose that inheritance are undermining the shared moral language that binds the nation.

Democrats often attack the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization, treating those traditions as if they are a problem rather than an inheritance. They label visible signs of faith as threats and slur public figures who make no secret of their beliefs. That hostility feeds a larger project to replace Christian cultural touchstones with competing ideologies.

Christianity makes many on the Left uncomfortable not because it is oppressive, but because it claims objective truths that clash with radical relativism. Rather than contesting those truths on their merits, the Left often resorts to caricature and cancellation. Vice President J.D. Vance recently laid out arguments for our shared Christian heritage that drew sharp criticism from an Obama appointee and MS NOW contributor, Barbara McQuade.

Here’s some of what Vance said:

“The decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language,” Vance contends. In its place, the right has worshiped the marketplace, while the Left has embarked on an endless quest of self-indulgent self-discovery. “Each of us, in our own weird ways, is guilty of casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilization,” he writes.

https://x.com/BarbMcQuade/status/2074920558886613229

Vance looks upon the men who won the Second World War as civilizational models. They weren’t just defending ideas — “not ‘liberalism,’ not ‘freedom,’ not even ‘democracy,’” he writes. “It was Western Christian civilization, and the values particular to it: the concept of natural rights, including freedom of speech; a sense of duty to one’s neighbors; an obligation of the strong to protect the weak; a belief in free will and individual conscience.”

Where is he wrong? He isn’t. The claim that Christianity supplied a shared moral language is not nostalgic fantasy; it explains how a pluralistic, self-governing people agreed on basic rules for liberty. Erasing that shared framework weakens the glue that holds civic life together.

For years the Left has pushed the narrative that White Americans lack a distinct culture while simultaneously working to erase the common cultural experiences that built this country, including Christianity. That erasure is strategic: remove the shared memory, and the argument goes, and you can remake the polity in a different image. The historical record shows the opposite — religion helped form the habits and moral expectations that sustained republican government.

The opening of that Treaty reads:

In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.

It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the Hearts of the most Serene and most Potent Prince George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Duke of Brunswick and Lunebourg, Arch-Treasurer and Prince Elector of the Holy Roman Empire …

The Declaration of Independence famously says we are ‘endowed by our Creator,’ and numerous writings from the Founding Fathers, while not establishing a state religion, acknowledge Christianity’s influence on public life. Men like Franklin warned that the Constitution required a moral people to survive, and that morality does not originate with the state. Foundations matter; dismissing them unravels civic responsibility.

Benjamin Franklin said the Constitution could only be maintained by a moral people, and the question of where that morality originates matters for policy and culture. It is not accurate to expect the government to manufacture ethics from thin air. Like our rights, moral bearings point back to the Creator rather than the state.

McQuade and her allies often try to claim the only legitimate voice about Christian ethics is theirs, as if public proclamation buys moral authority. Declaring oneself offended does not confer the right to decide what faith means for everyone else. Ordinary Christians, conservatives, and people of faith have their own moral claims and civic attachments that deserve equal respect.

I am a Christian and I find the Left’s campaign against these roots deeply troubling; I doubt critics like McQuade would recognize the moral seriousness of those who practice faith outside the political circles she inhabits. The broader concern is not personal pettiness but a coordinated alignment between progressive movements and ideologies that do not share our cultural instincts. That alignment threatens to hollow out the shared references that make national life possible.

Consider how regimes without separation of mosque and state treat dissenting moral views; Turkey and Egypt recently refused docking to a gay cruise on moral grounds, and other governments enforce harsh penalties for perceived sexual transgressions. Those realities are not entertainment for Western activists to romanticize or borrow from; they show what happens when faith and state fuse under a different theology.

Across many Islamic-majority countries, people face laws that restrict sexual freedoms and limit women’s independence in ways most Americans would find intolerable. Comparing a nun’s habit to Islamic garb ignores vast differences in coercion and liberty. I once lived near a college founded by the School Sisters of St. Francis; those women lived freely and safely in a way that is simply unavailable to many women under theocratic regimes.

If critics like McQuade are genuinely worried about freedom, they should understand how bad things can be when a different religious framework governs public life. Rather than scoffing at Christian roots, the Left should recognize how those roots helped produce the freedoms they now enjoy. The choice is not between intolerance and liberty but between competing visions of the public good.