Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s video message at Rededicate 250 on Sunday traced something most Americans were never taught in school. He walked the crowd through 250 years of American history and stopped at the moments where the people building the country reached for the Bible without apology.
The setting was “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving,” held on the National Mall on May 17, 2026, marking the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday. Tens of thousands gathered for worship, Scripture, and prayer. Rubio addressed the crowd by prerecorded video, alongside President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Rubio’s central claim was simple. “Our nation more than any other was shaped” by the idea that faith brought freedom.
He walked through the evidence. The revolutionaries who staked their lives on a Creator they believed had given them rights no king could revoke. The missionaries who carried the Gospel west alongside the wagons. The inventor Samuel Morse, who sent the very first telegraph message in human history and chose his words from the Bible’s Book of Numbers. “What hath God wrought.”
The 20th century astronauts looking back at Earth from the silence of space and reaching, without rehearsing it, for Scripture to describe what they saw.
That through-line is the part of American history that has been quietly removed from most textbooks over the last fifty years. The country was not founded by men who happened to be religious. It was founded by men who believed the right to be free came from somewhere higher than themselves, and that without that anchor, freedom would eventually drift into something else entirely.
Numbers 23:23 puts the same weight in fewer words. “According to this time it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!”
It was the first message Morse ever sent on the telegraph because he understood something the rest of the country has been slowly forgetting. Whatever the next 250 years bring, the question is whether the people building them still know where the strength came from.
What part of America’s faith story has stood out most to you?
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