I never expected my journey to re-educate myself and my children about American history would lead me face-to-face with the same deception that brought sin into the world. But here we are, unpacking truths that our public education system carefully wrapped in layers of omission and revision.
The truth? America’s founding was built on Biblical bedrock, on the unshakable principle that our rights come from God, not government. And a man named Abraham Lincoln knew this so deeply that he was willing to lead a nation through its bloodiest trial to preserve it.
Lincoln’s Unwavering Foundation
“Slavery is unjust in the eyes of God.”
Five simple words that changed everything. Lincoln didn’t root his opposition to slavery in economic theory or political expedience. He anchored it in divine truth, in what he called “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” He understood that if we know slavery is wrong before God, and if we have the power to end it, we must act “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.”
This wasn’t political rhetoric. This was a man who recognized that God rules the world and that we can know a portion of the law by which He rules it. Lincoln saw the Civil War as more than a political conflict. It was a moment of divine reckoning, an opportunity for national reconciliation built on our original founding principle: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.
As I explain this to my children, I see their eyes widen. This isn’t the Lincoln they learned about in school, a distant historical figure who freed slaves for strategic reasons. This is a man of profound faith who believed in absolute truth.
The Progressive Pivot
But Lincoln’s vision of reconciliation, bringing the nation back to its founding principles, would be tragically short-lived. Not long after the Civil War, a new movement arose that would fundamentally reject everything Lincoln fought to preserve.
The Progressives.
Like the serpent in the Garden, the Progressives came with a seductive promise: You can be like God. But they dressed it in the language of progress, evolution, and historical contingency.
Woodrow Wilson said it plainly in 1911: “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.” In other words, ignore the part about God-given rights. Skip over “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Why? Because those truths place a permanent limit on government. And the Progressives needed unlimited government to achieve their vision.
Frank Goodnow, a prominent Progressive thinker, articulated their core belief with startling clarity: “Man is regarded now throughout Europe as primarily as a member of society and secondarily as an individual. The rights that he possesses are, it is believed, conferred upon him, not by his Creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs.”
Do you hear it? The same whisper from the Garden: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The Progressives promised that we, through evolved government and human wisdom, could determine what rights people should have. That we could decide what is good and evil based on “social expediency” rather than divine law. That we had progressed beyond the “primitive” constraints of natural rights and could solve the great problems of history through unlimited governmental power.
It’s the ancient lie repackaged: humanity can transcend its created nature, determine its own truth, and become its own god.
As I teach my children this history, I explain what happens when we abandon God-given rights for government-granted privileges. When we make the State supreme over the individual, when we invert the founding principle entirely, we don’t create utopia. We create tyranny dressed in the language of progress.
The Progressives rejected the Declaration’s “preface” because it anchored rights in something beyond human manipulation. Lincoln celebrated that same preface because he understood what happens when we untether ourselves from divine truth. He knew that without “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” we have no stable ground to stand on when declaring slavery, or any injustice, wrong.
The Ministry of Reconciliation
This is where my heart breaks and hopes simultaneously. Because while the Progressives offered a counterfeit reconciliation, one based on evolving human wisdom and expanding government power, the Gospel offers something infinitely more powerful.
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18).
The blood of Christ is an emulsifier. It binds together disparate parts that don’t naturally cohere. It reconciles what seems irreconcilable, not through government force or social engineering, but through transformation from the inside out.
Lincoln understood this too. His vision wasn’t just political reconciliation but a return to founding principles rooted in divine truth. He sought to make the nation whole again by calling it back to what it knew in its bones: that our rights come from God, that all humans bear His image, and that no government has authority to trample what God has bestowed.
Teaching my children the truth about America’s founding has become more than a history lesson. It’s spiritual formation. It’s teaching them to recognize the serpent’s voice when they hear it, whether in the Garden, in Progressive ideology, or in the cultural messages that surround them daily.
It’s teaching them that there are truths that transcend time, circumstances, and popular opinion. That God’s law is not contingent on historical moment or social expediency. That when we know something is unjust in the eyes of God, we stand with firmness in the right.
It’s teaching them that true reconciliation, whether of a nation or a soul, can only come through Christ, who alone has the power to bind together what sin has torn apart.
An Invitation to Truth
Lincoln called America back to its founding. The Progressives called America forward into a future untethered from divine truth. These aren’t just competing political visions. They’re competing theological visions.
One says: Your rights come from God, and no government can legitimately take them away.
The other says: Your rights come from society, and society can redefine them based on evolving needs.
One limits government to protect God-given liberty.
The other unleashes government to pursue ever-expanding control.
One recognizes human nature as fixed and in need of redemption.
The other claims human nature has evolved, and we can save ourselves.
As I look at my children absorbing these truths, I pray they’ll recognize the choice that every generation must make: Will we build on the Rock, or will we believe the lie that we can be like God?
Will we seek reconciliation through the blood of Christ, or through the power of the State?
Will we stand with Lincoln in affirming that slavery, and all injustice, is wrong in the eyes of God? Or will we embrace the Progressive notion that right and wrong are fluid, determined by whoever holds power?
My journey of re-education continues. Each day brings new discoveries of how deeply Biblical principles shaped America’s founding, and how systematically those principles have been obscured or denied in modern education.
But I’m not discouraged. Because truth has a way of breaking through. Lincoln knew it. Our founders knew it. And deep in our hearts, beneath layers of cultural conditioning, we know it too.
We were created by God. Our rights come from Him. And no government, no ideology, no progressive vision can ultimately overturn what He has established.
That’s the truth I’m teaching my children. That’s the truth Lincoln died defending. That’s the truth the Gospel proclaims.
And that truth will make us free.
“All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” —Abraham Lincoln, 1859
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