As Americans recently celebrated our nation’s 250th anniversary, we rightly honored the extraordinary generation that declared independence, drafted the Constitution, and established the world’s first enduring constitutional republic. Their ideas—limited government, the rule of law, religious liberty, and the inherent dignity of every person—remain the foundation of the American experiment.
But as we reflect on what America has become in 250 years, and how we got here, deeper questions arise. If the Founders built this house, who laid its foundation?
High school textbooks often point to the familiar names of Athens, Rome, and Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Montesquieu. All of that is true. Yet it skips nearly a thousand years of history and overlooks the institutions that ensured those ideas survived long enough to influence Jefferson, Madison, and Washington.
When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, Europe entered an era of political turmoil and uncertainty. Cities declined, trade contracted, literacy diminished, and many of the institutions that had sustained classical civilization disappeared. Greco-Roman wisdom was no longer guaranteed to survive.
In that unsettled world, Christian monasteries became unlikely incubators of liberty.
Generation after generation, monks painstakingly copied manuscripts by hand. They preserved the writings of Cicero, Virgil, Aristotle, and other classical authors alongside Scripture and the works of the early Church. They established libraries, educated clergy and scholars, cultivated agriculture, cared for the poor, and maintained communities of learning at a time when much of Europe struggled simply to endure.
Their labor was neither glamorous nor political. Most could not have anticipated constitutional government, let alone fathomed what would become the United States. Yet because they believed truth was worth preserving, they ensured that the intellectual inheritance of the ancient world would not vanish.
Their contribution, however, extended beyond the mere preservation of books.
The medieval Church became one of the few institutions capable of standing apart from kings and emperors. While church-state conflicts were often contentious and imperfect, they reinforced a revolutionary principle: no earthly ruler possesses absolute authority. Political power is accountable to a law higher than itself.
That idea would prove transformative and revolutionary.
Medieval canon lawyers refined concepts of due process, consent of the governed, and the rule of law. Christian schools evolved into Europe’s first universities, where scholars debated theology, philosophy, and law using reasoned argument rather than political decree. Christian thinkers explored natural law, teaching that justice is rooted not merely in the will of rulers but in an objective moral order accessible to human reason.
Centuries later, these traditions flowed into the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the development of modern constitutionalism. They shaped the intellectual world inhabited by Locke, Montesquieu, William Blackstone, and countless other thinkers whose works were studied by America’s Founders.
The American Founding, therefore, did not emerge fully formed in the eighteenth century. It represented the culmination of a long civilizational journey.
By preserving independent centers of learning, insisting that rulers were subject to higher law, and maintaining a sphere of authority beyond the reach of the state, medieval Christian institutions cultivated habits that eventually matured into broader understandings of liberty—including what we today recognize as religious liberty.
The Reformation accelerated those developments. Europe’s religious divisions made it increasingly difficult for governments to impose uniform belief. Over time, Christian dissenters argued with growing force that authentic faith cannot be compelled by civil authority. Those arguments crossed the Atlantic, where they found fertile soil in the American colonies.
By the time the First Amendment was ratified, the principle of religious liberty had become one of America’s defining constitutional commitments.
Seen in this light, the Founders did not invent liberty from nothing. They inherited, refined, and constitutionalized ideas developed over many centuries by people who often never imagined the nation their work would one day influence.
This long arc of history matters because it reminds us that civilizations are not sustained by political victories alone. They endure because ordinary people faithfully preserve truth, educate the next generation, and build institutions capable of surviving turbulent times.
Our own generation faces its own challenges: declining trust in institutions, political polarization, and growing uncertainty about the moral foundations of a free society. It is tempting to believe that constitutional government can survive on promise alone. History suggests otherwise.
The American republic rests upon ideas that were nurtured long before 1776. Those ideas survived because countless individuals believed some truths were worth preserving, even when the future was uncertain and the rewards invisible. And those ideas are still worth preserving, and emulating, today.
As we continue to commemorate America’s 250th birthday, we should celebrate not only the brilliance of the Founders but also the quiet faithfulness of those who made the Founding possible. Before there was Independence Hall, there were monasteries. Before there were constitutional conventions, there were libraries. Before there was a republic dedicated to religious liberty, there were generations who preserved learning, defended the existence of institutions independent of political power, and insisted that even kings stand beneath a law higher than themselves.
That forgotten legacy also deserves a place in America’s story.
Mike Berry is Executive Director of Public Affairs and Senior Counsel for First Liberty Institute