Proclaim Liberty

There is a bell in Philadelphia with a verse carved around its crown. Before it ever rang for independence, before there was a Congress or a Constitution or a country to speak of, someone climbed up and inscribed words that were already more than two thousand years old: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

That line isn’t a slogan a marketing team dreamed up. It’s Leviticus 25:10. The Liberty Bell was preaching scripture before America had a name.

I think about that a lot, especially now, as we stand at the doorway of our 250th year. Because the story of this nation is, at its root, the story of a people who carried a Book across an ocean and built a civilization out of its ideas. Not perfectly. Not without sin. But unmistakably. And on the anniversary of all anniversaries, that’s a story worth telling our children plainly.

A Nation Built on a Book

When historians actually count, the pattern is hard to miss.

In 1984, political scientist Donald Lutz published a now-famous study in the American Political Science Review. He and his colleague surveyed roughly fifteen thousand pieces of American political writing from 1760 to 1805 — the pamphlets, sermons, articles, and books that the founding generation actually read and argued over. When they tallied up every source those writers quoted, one source stood above all the rest. Not Locke. Not Montesquieu. Not any Enlightenment philosopher.

The Bible. It accounted for roughly a third of all the citations — more than any other single source — and the single most-quoted book of all was Deuteronomy, the book of God’s law.

Now, let me be honest, because honesty matters more than a good talking point. That number rises partly because so many of those writings were sermons reprinted by ministers, and the founders themselves held a wide range of personal beliefs. The Constitution is not a book of theology. But you cannot read the founding and miss the truth underneath the statistics: the moral imagination of early America was soaked in scripture.

The vocabulary of liberty, covenant, law, and conscience came off those pages and into the bloodstream of a new people.

You can hear it in the founding documents themselves. The Declaration of Independence appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It declares that all are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It appeals “to the Supreme Judge of the world.” And it closes with “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

The God Who Governs in the Affairs of Men

Here’s the part that should make your spine straighten.

When the colonists declared independence, they were a scattering of farmers and shopkeepers picking a fight with the most powerful empire on earth. Britain had the world’s finest navy and a professional army that had humbled nations. The Americans had no real treasury, no navy to speak of, and a Continental Army that was often barefoot.

It was David and Goliath. Literally the same story — 1 Samuel 17 — playing out on a continental scale. A boy with a sling against a giant in armor. And the men who lived it knew it.

Listen to what they said when it was over. In his very first act as president, George Washington stood up and told the country that “no people” had more reason “to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men” than the people of the United States. Years later, in his Farewell Address, he warned the young nation that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of any free and prosperous people.

And he meant it from experience. In August of 1776, his army was trapped on Long Island with the East River at their backs and the British closing in. Through the night Washington ferried nine thousand men across the water — and as dawn broke and threatened to expose them, a thick fog rolled in and hid the final crossings until every last soldier was safe. The men who were there did not call it luck. They called it the hand of Providence.

That same army would freeze and starve through the winter at Valley Forge, bury its dead, and walk back out in the spring stronger and better trained than before. It would cross an icy Delaware on Christmas night, in a storm, to win a battle no one expected it to win.

These were not naïve men. They were the sharpest minds of their age. And they looked at what had happened to them — the giant felled, the smooth stone finding its mark — and they gave the credit to Heaven.

The Standard That Made Us Better

I won’t pretend the story is clean. It isn’t.

The same nation that proclaimed all men created equal held some men in chains. That contradiction is real, and it is shameful, and it nearly tore the country in two.

But here is the thing that’s easy to miss, and it’s the most important part: the cure came from the same Book. The abolitionists who fought slavery did it on their knees, Bible in hand, insisting that a God who made every soul in His image could not bless a nation that bought and sold His children. A century later, a Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and called the country back to its founding promise by quoting the prophet Amos: let justice roll down like waters.

That’s the genius of it. Scripture didn’t just found this nation — it kept judging it, kept calling it higher, kept holding up a standard the country could never quite reach but could never quite escape either. The same words that lit the founding lit every reform that followed. A nation given a holy yardstick will always be measured by it, and that mercy is exactly why America has been able to repent, rebuild, and keep climbing.

That is how a flawed people became, again and again, one of the great forces for freedom the world has ever known.

A People Built to Endure

If you want to understand the American spirit, you have to understand what it was raised on.

Exodus — a people walking out of bondage toward a promised land. Exile and return. The shepherd boy and the giant. The valley of the shadow, and the table set in the presence of enemies. A nation weaned on those stories learns something in its bones: that the odds are not the final word. That you get knocked down and you get back up. That the smaller, weaker, written-off thing can still win if its heart is set on something bigger than itself.

A True American Fight

Which brings me, of all places, to a cage on the South Lawn of the White House.

On June 14, 2026, as part of America’s 250th celebration, fighters walked out of the Oval Office itself and into an arena built on the president’s front yard. The main event was a man named Justin Gaethje — an American, a former college wrestler from a small Arizona mining town — against Ilia Topuria, an undefeated champion the whole world had already crowned. The oddsmakers made Gaethje more than a six-to-one underdog. Commentators called him a lamb led to slaughter. He had even told everyone that if he lost, he would walk away from the sport for good.

David against Goliath. Again.

And it looked, for a while, like the giant would win. In the second round Topuria dropped him, rocked him, nearly finished him. Gaethje would say afterward that he had told himself beforehand he was going to lose — so that he could go to his most primal place and dig deep. He weathered the storm. And then the underdog went to work. Round after round he piled on punishment until the champion’s own face betrayed him, until his corner, between the fourth and fifth rounds, finally threw in the towel.

I can’t think of a more American sentence. Not the gifts you were born with — the heart you choose when you’re hurt and behind and everyone has already counted you out. That’s the smooth stone. That’s the fog over the river. That’s Valley Forge in the spring. That’s a people who read, from childhood, that the giant is not the end of the story.

Why This One Was Personal

I can’t write all of this and pretend I was watching from a distance. That night was mine in a way I’m still finding words for.

The first person who ever taught me what I just spent this whole post describing — resilience, adaptability, getting up off the mat when every muscle is begging you to stay down — was my father. He pushed me past limits I didn’t know I had. He refused to let me settle for less than I was capable of, because he loved me too much to watch me quit. And he loved fighting. He loved watching two people drag each other to the very edge of their will as much as anyone I have ever known. He would have been glued to every second of those fights on the South Lawn.

They fell on his birthday.

My dad is gone now. But on June 14th — his day — the country threw exactly the kind of celebration he would have loved, and an underdog the whole world had already written off refused to quit and wrote a story in that cage that was, beat for beat, the lesson my father spent my childhood working into me. That same month, my first book went live on Amazon — the work I built to give my own children the things he gave me. And on July 14th, the first physical copy rolled off the press. One month. A father’s birthday. A nation’s 250th. And the first book I ever held with my name on the cover.

I don’t think that was an accident, and neither would the men who saw the hand of Providence in a fog over the East River. The God who notices a sparrow fall surely notices a son who misses his father — and every so often He lines up a day so quietly perfect that all you can do is stand still and feel two things at once. A swell of pride in where I come from: American, Christian, one more link in a long line of stubborn, faithful people. And right beside it, a deep humility at how little of it I earned, and how blessed I am to have been handed any of it at all.

I like to think my dad had a better seat than anyone in that arena.

The Fourth at Grandma Mooney’s

The truth is, my love of this country didn’t start with me. It was handed down to me, the same way everything that matters in my life has been.

I come from a family that loves and adores America — not in a loud, performative way, but in the bone-deep way that just shows up in how you live. And every single year, the biggest gathering of all of us happened on the Fourth of July. The whole extended family would pour into my Grandma Mooney’s house — my grandma and her sisters, and all of their kids, and all of their grandkids, more cousins than I could count, spilling out into the yard. If you want to know what America felt like to me as a boy, it felt like that: a packed house on the Fourth, three generations under one roof, flags and food and noise and belonging.

My grandma loved the Liberty Bell. I can still hear her talking about it when I was little. She had gone to Philadelphia once to visit my uncle while he was in medical school at Temple, and she made sure to go see it in person — that cracked old bell with the verse from Leviticus carved around its crown — and it clearly never left her. Funny how that works. I started this whole reflection at the Liberty Bell without quite knowing why. I think I know now. It was hers first.

Every July she’d hang a patriotic print over her fireplace. One year I noticed the signature and realized it was by Ed Hardy. “Grandma,” I said, “did you know he’s a tattoo artist?” She thought about it for a second, looked back up at the picture, and said, “Well — if I ever did get a tattoo, it’d probably be of that one.” I still laugh about it. That was her: a lifetime of quiet propriety with a little streak of patriotic mischief running underneath.

She passed away in November of 2018, and I have missed her at every Fourth since. Standing at America’s 250th, I feel that absence with a particular weight — she would have loved this one so much. The whole family together under her roof was always the Fourth of July to me, and she was the heart of all of it. That love for this country she carried didn’t go into the ground with her. It just moved down a generation, the way these things are meant to. I hold it now. So I’m writing it down.

And in her house — and in my parents’ house too — there hung the image I have never been able to shake. George Washington, kneeling bareheaded in the snowy woods at Valley Forge, his hands clasped and his head bowed, his horse standing watch behind him with its breath fogging in the freezing air. I must have walked past that picture ten thousand times growing up, and I only learned later that it was Arnold Friberg’s The Prayer at Valley Forge, painted for the nation’s last milestone birthday, the bicentennial of 1976.

And here is the part that still gives me chills: Friberg is the same artist who painted the scenes from the Book of Mormon that hung in our home and sat inside my scriptures. The same hand that showed me Washington on his knees showed me the prophets on theirs. I didn’t understand until I was older how deeply that had wired itself into me — that for me, from the very beginning, America and Heavenly Father and the scriptures were never three separate things. They hung on the same wall, sometimes painted by the very same brush. The most powerful man in the new world, down on his knees in the cold, asking God for help — that was the picture of strength I was raised on.

And if my father taught me how to take a hit and keep standing, it was my mother who taught me where the real strength comes from. She gave me my first knowledge of Heavenly Father, and right alongside it a love of reading — a quiet certainty that words on a page can shape a soul. She is the one who first put the scriptures in my hands. Every story I write for my own children at the end of the day grows straight out of what she gave me.

The Freedom to Build Something

And here is the part that still stops me in my tracks.

I’m a regular guy — a father raising a family in a small town of about 1,700 people in southeastern Utah. Not long ago, all I had was an idea: that the bedtime rhythm my own mother gave me, scripture and story and prayer, was worth handing to other families. That was it. An idea.

And then I got to actually build it.

I keep marveling at how astonishingly simple it was to start Little Scripture Travelers. To sit down and write. To publish a book that anyone in the world can hold in their hands. To put up a website, to form a company, to chase a calling all the way to its edges — and to do all of it as an ordinary father, with no permission slip from anyone. No king had to sign off. No official decided whether a man like me was allowed to dream this particular dream. I just started — and the only thing standing between the idea and the world was the work itself.

That ease is not normal. It is not how most people across most of history have ever lived. For the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever drawn breath, your future was settled by the circumstances of your birth, and the notion that you could simply build the thing in your heart was a fantasy. The fact that I can — that any of us can — is not some accident of the modern age. It is the direct inheritance of a freedom that was purchased in that same snow, two and a half centuries ago.

I don’t take a second of it for granted. We are so deeply blessed to be here.

The Bell Still Says It Best

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a barefoot army knelt in the snow and trusted that the Invisible Hand was not done with them. They were right. The nation they built has stumbled and bled and repented and risen, over and over, because it was founded on a Book that promised exactly that — that liberty is the gift of God, that providence is real, and that the heart that refuses to quit is stronger than any giant in armor. The founders staked a nation on that truth. My father taught me to endure; my mother put the scriptures in my hands. And I am spending my life trying to hand both down to my own children, one bedtime story at a time.

So happy birthday, America. Two hundred and fifty years on — humbled, grateful, and proud of where I come from — I still think the bell says it best.