Beach Reading for America’s 250th

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 26, 2026

What books do you take on vacation? Usually I pack something light for the beach. But this year my vacation ends on the Fourth of July, and this is no ordinary Independence Day. America250 marks the nation’s biggest anniversary in half a century, so I decided to bring Robert R. Reilly’s America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. It is not light reading. But it may be essential reading.

Reilly says his book is “less about the Founding than about its intellectual provenance,” tracing “the lineage of ideas that made the United States possible.” At its heart is the contest between “the primacy of reason and the primacy of will”—the very terms, he argues, in which the American colonists understood their dispute with Britain.

Although most of the Founders were Protestants, Reilly contends that the principles they appealed to were rooted in the Catholic natural law tradition. They invoked natural law and natural rights to justify independence, making the American Founding the fruit of a shared Christian inheritance. This argument is familiar from Fr. John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths, but I have never seen it argued with such historical depth or such an impressive command of the sources.

Reilly demonstrates that the Founders consistently understood liberty to depend upon virtue—both Aristotelian and Christian. Christianity, he writes, “does not necessarily lead to the American Founding... but it would not have likely happened without Christianity.” Likewise, the biblical distinction between God and Caesar made constitutional government possible by denying the state any claim to man’s highest allegiance.

The story begins with Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. Greek philosophy established that reason can know objective reality. Genesis revealed man as created in the image of God, laying the foundation for genuine human rights. Christ’s command to “render unto Caesar” separated the political and spiritual realms, making constitutional government conceivable.

The medieval world then developed these principles into a political order. Quoting Lord Acton, Reilly notes that representative government, virtually unknown in antiquity, became widespread during the Middle Ages. Even Magna Carta, often celebrated as a purely English achievement, owed much to the influence of the Church. As Reilly memorably puts it, “The straight road runs from Rome to Runnymede to Philadelphia.”

The story then takes a darker turn. William of Ockham elevated divine will above divine reason, opening the door to political absolutism. Martin Luther unintentionally accelerated the politicization of religion. Thomas Hobbes completed the shift by making justice simply the expression of the sovereign’s will. From this intellectual lineage emerged the Divine Right of Kings against which the American colonists would eventually rebel.

Yet this older constitutional tradition survived. Richard Hooker recovered essential elements of medieval political thought within Protestant England. Catholic thinkers such as St. Robert Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez mounted powerful arguments against absolutism, anticipating many of the principles later embraced by the American Founders. Their influence can even be seen indirectly through the Protestant writer Algernon Sidney, who was widely read by the Founders despite being almost forgotten today.

John Locke, of course, occupies a more familiar place in American history. Reilly acknowledges that Locke’s writings can be interpreted in different ways. Some scholars see him as quietly undermining Christianity while borrowing its language. Others, including Michael Novak, suggest the opposite: that many Americans used Lockean language in the service of Christian principles. Whatever Locke himself intended, the Founders largely understood him as standing within Hooker’s natural law tradition.

Reilly goes on to argue that the American Revolution was not a radical break with Western civilization but a restoration of older constitutional principles that England itself had begun to abandon. His comparison of the American and French Revolutions is especially illuminating. Although the American Revolution was hardly bloodless, it never descended into the ideological fanaticism or Reign of Terror that consumed France.

In his concluding chapters, Reilly answers critics who portray the Founding as rooted in radical individual autonomy rather than classical and Christian philosophy. He also argues that America’s present crisis owes less to the Founding than to German historicism, which transformed American universities during the late nineteenth century.

I am not persuaded that German historicism alone explains America’s decline. Something else supercharged it. As Reilly himself observes, “We won the American Revolution but lost the sexual revolution,” with all the moral and cultural damage that followed.

Still, his larger point stands. The American Founding cannot be separated from the moral character of the American people. The Founders never believed liberty could survive apart from virtue. As we know from the Weimar Republic, free people can freely choose tyranny.

That may be the most important lesson to remember as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday. If Reilly is right, America’s future will not be secured merely by patriotic ceremonies or renewed devotion to the Constitution. It will depend upon recovering the moral and spiritual foundations that made constitutional liberty possible in the first place.

As Reilly concludes, “We can avoid the cataclysm anytime we choose to, by returning to reality, to reason, to ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’“