America was not founded on secular philosophy dressed in religious language but on theological conviction applied with uncommon seriousness to the ordering of public life. That theology is not dead. It needs to be believed and lived, in our homes, our churches, our schools, and our public square.

In Harvard’s early rules and precepts, its mission was unambiguous: “Everyone shall consider as the main end of his life and studies, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life.” Its older heraldic tradition also reflected a view of truth shaped by revelation, even if Harvard’s official shield and motto history later developed in more complex ways.

Its early motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae: “Truth for Christ and the Church.” The original seal depicted three books, two facing up and one turned down. The two open books represented the Old and New Testaments, truth accessible through scripture. The closed book represented truth beyond human reach, knowledge that can only come through divine revelation. It was a declaration that man depends on what God reveals, and that not all truth is accessible to reason alone.

That seal has since been redesigned. All three books now face upward, a quiet declaration that human reason is sufficient and divine revelation is unnecessary.

“Christ and the Church” have been stripped from the motto. Only Veritas remains, truth severed from the One who is Truth. But truth severed from Christ is no truth at all.

Last December, Harvard history professor James Hankins published a blistering essay in Compact magazine after 40 years on the faculty, documenting the university’s descent into what he called “moral and intellectual disorientation.”

He is right, but the problem isn’t just Harvard.

The same pattern is playing out beyond the academy. In courtrooms, law is treated as a living instrument rather than a fixed standard, untethered from any transcendent authority. In public education, moral formation has given way to ideological conditioning that denies objective truth.

These are not isolated developments. They are the predictable results of a society that has kept the language of order while abandoning the God who defines it.

It is a nation that kept the vocabulary of its founding while gutting the theology that gave those words meaning. “Ordered liberty,” “self-governance,” “the rule of law”: None of these concepts are self-evident. They were forged in a specific theological furnace, one lit by men and women who believed that every sphere of life, from the courthouse to the kitchen table, belongs to God.

How the Puritans Built a Nation on the Bible

The Puritans who settled New England were not merely religious people who happened to build a civilization. They were Bible-saturated theologians who deliberately applied Scripture to governance, education, labor, family, and law. What they built was practical theology, biblical truth worked out in public life with uncommon seriousness. And the nation it produced was, for all its imperfections, the most coherent experiment in ordered liberty the world had ever seen.

The question for Christians today is not whether that theology still matters. It is a matter of whether we have the courage to recover it.

The Puritans understood something modern America has forgotten: God relates to His people through covenants, binding agreements with mutual obligations. And they applied that principle to everything they built. Church covenants governed their congregations. Civil covenants governed their magistrates. Authority was never absolute, because it was derived from God, exercised through the consent of the people, and bound by Scripture.

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