Things We Love About America | Faith & Freedom News

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Faith & Freedom News

Independence Day · Editorial

Things We Love About America

On the nation’s 250th birthday, a list from the FFN newsroom — not a ranking, and certainly not exhaustive, but a tribute to the freedoms of conscience, the plurality of faiths, and the everyday grace notes that make this republic worth celebrating.

Faith & Freedom News

FFN Editorial Team

United States
July 4, 2026

Two hundred and fifty years in, America remains an argument as much as a country — a running debate over what liberty requires, who belongs, and how a nation built by people fleeing established churches and hereditary kings should govern itself. It is easy, amid the daily noise of that argument, to lose sight of what the founders actually pulled off: a republic where a Baptist, a Muslim, a Jew, an atheist, and a Catholic can each hold the same passport, cast the same vote, and pray to different Gods, or to none, without asking the state’s permission.

That is the America this newsroom covers every day — the one where a synagogue and a mosque can sit two blocks apart without a wall between them, where a persecuted minority from Lahore or Aleppo or Asmara can rebuild a life without hiding a faith, and where the freedom to disagree, loudly and often, is itself treated as sacred. So on the occasion of the 250th Independence Day, the FFN newsroom offers its own list: 80 things we love about America, organized not by importance but by the themes closest to our beat — conscience, pluralism, and the ordinary miracle of people from everywhere living as one people.

A republic that asks nothing of a citizen’s soul before it grants that citizen a vote is rarer in history than most of us appreciate.

I.Founding Documents & Freedom of Conscience

The First Amendment’s twin promises. No established church, and no barrier to free exercise — the rare constitutional settlement that trusts citizens with their own souls.
The Declaration’s appeal to “Nature’s God.” A founding document that grounded rights in something no king could revoke.
Article VI’s ban on religious tests. No American has ever had to pass a faith exam to hold office — on paper, at least, since the day the Constitution was signed.
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Jefferson’s 1786 blueprint for separating church from state, years before Philadelphia made it national law.
Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport. A young government promising to give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. The law that made defending believers overseas a permanent part of American foreign policy.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. An independent federal watchdog for persecuted minorities abroad, with few real counterparts anywhere else in the world.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Passed nearly unanimously in 1993, a rare moment of consensus that conscience deserved extra protection.
The Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. A cabinet-adjacent post that exists because Washington decided persecuted believers deserved a seat at the diplomatic table.
The 14th Amendment. Extended the promise of equal protection to every state in the union, laying the legal groundwork for the civil rights advances that followed.

II.A Nation That Prays Together, Differently

The National Prayer Breakfast. Lawmakers from opposing parties and clergy from opposing faiths, sharing a table once a year in Washington.
Military chaplains of every faith. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu chaplains serving side by side under one flag.
“In God We Trust.” Printed on the currency of a country that also guarantees the right not to believe at all.
Ramadan iftars on Capitol Hill. A once-unusual tradition that has become a normal fixture of the American civic calendar.
Menorahs on the National Mall. Public Hanukkah lightings a short walk from the Capitol dome.
Sikh Americans serving in uniform. Turbans and unshorn beards intact, after decades of advocacy finally being honored by the armed forces.
Coptic, Chaldean, and Assyrian communities. Ancient Christian communities from the Middle East who found in America the safety their homelands increasingly denied them.
Ahmadi Muslim communities worshiping openly. A minority persecuted in parts of South Asia, free to build mosques and hold services without fear on American soil.
Zoroastrian fire temples. A 3,500-year-old faith, quietly keeping its flame alive in American suburbs.
The Amish and Mennonite exemptions. Entire communities permitted, by law, to opt out of large parts of modern life in the name of religious conviction.

III.Pluralism in Practice

Naturalization ceremonies. New citizens reciting the same oath regardless of the god, gods, or absence of god they answer to at home.
Ellis Island. The gateway where, generation after generation, strangers became neighbors.
Little Havana, Little India, Chinatown. Entire nations compressed into single blocks, coexisting inside the larger one.
Interfaith councils. Quiet, unglamorous coalition work happening in cities from Dearborn to Brooklyn to Houston, largely without headlines.
The Abraham Accords. Diplomacy brokered from Washington that put Israel and Muslim-majority nations on a shared path toward normalization.
Pakistani Christian and Hindu diaspora communities. Building churches, temples, and cultural associations in American cities after facing legal and social pressure back home.
Vietnamese Buddhist and Catholic parishes. Existing a few miles apart in the same American suburbs their founders once fled across an ocean to reach.
Halal carts beside kosher delis. Sharing sidewalks in cities where that proximity would be unthinkable elsewhere.
Bilingual and multi-faith public schools. Classrooms where a child’s home language and home faith are treated as an asset, not a liability.
The right to convert, or to leave a faith. A protection many immigrants to America discover, often with relief, does not exist where they came from.

IV.Institutions of Ordered Liberty

An independent judiciary. Courts that have, at their best, checked power rather than served it.
Trial by jury. Ordinary citizens, not the state alone, deciding guilt and innocence.
A free press, imperfect as it is. A press free enough to criticize the very government that permits it to exist.
The peaceful transfer of power. Repeated so many times it can feel unremarkable — which is itself remarkable.
Federalism. Fifty states able to experiment, disagree, and learn from each other’s successes and mistakes.
The right to petition and assemble. Protest as a protected act of citizenship, not a crime against the state.
Habeas corpus. The right to know why you are being held, inherited from English law and hardened into American constitutional practice.
Checks and balances. Three branches built to distrust one another, on purpose.
The amendment process. A constitution designed to be improved rather than merely obeyed.
Local school boards and town councils. Democracy small enough that an ordinary citizen can still walk in and be heard.

V.Heroes of Conscience

Roger Williams. Founded Rhode Island on the then-radical premise of liberty of conscience for all.
William Penn. A Quaker who built a colony on religious tolerance rather than religious conformity.
Frederick Douglass. Turned the nation’s own founding language against its failure to live up to it.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Marched alongside Dr. King in Selma, famously saying he felt his legs were praying.
Martin Luther King Jr. Grounded a movement for civil rights in the language of scripture and the promise of the Declaration alike.
The Four Chaplains of the USAT Dorchester. A Methodist, a Rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Reformed minister who gave up their life vests together as their ship sank in 1943.
Dorothy Day. Built a Catholic movement for the poor that still operates soup kitchens and shelters across the country.
Elie Wiesel. Became an American citizen and, for decades, the conscience of a nation on matters of memory and human rights.
Chief Standing Bear. Won a landmark 1879 court ruling that a Native American was a “person” under U.S. law, extending habeas corpus rights.
John Lewis. Carried the fight for voting rights from Selma’s bridge into decades of service in Congress.

VI.America on the World Stage

The Marshall Plan. Rebuilt former enemies rather than merely defeating them.
The Berlin Airlift. Fed a besieged city by air rather than abandon it to blockade.
The Cold War victory. Freed the captive nations of Eastern Europe from decades of enforced atheism and one-party rule.
Refugee resettlement for persecuted minorities. Programs that have given Yazidis, Rohingya, and Christian and Ahmadi minorities from South Asia a path to safety.
Voice of America. Decades of broadcasting that reached listeners living under regimes that banned a free press.
The Peace Corps. Sent Americans abroad to build wells and classrooms rather than empires.
Sanctions and diplomacy on behalf of religious minorities. U.S. pressure campaigns that have repeatedly put the treatment of Uyghurs, Copts, and Baha’is on the global agenda.
Camp David and the peace treaties that followed. American mediation that turned open war between Israel and its neighbors into standing peace.
Support for religious minority rights in Pakistan and Nigeria. Quiet, persistent State Department advocacy on blasphemy-law abuse and communal violence, even when it draws little attention at home.
The Statue of Liberty as an idea, not just a monument. Exported far beyond New York Harbor as shorthand for what the country claims to offer the world.

VII.The Rhythms of the Republic

Small-town Fourth of July parades. Fire trucks, marching bands, and lawn chairs on Main Street, unchanged for generations.
Fireworks over a river or a harbor. A whole town looking up at the same sky on the same night.
The flag on a front porch. A quiet, everyday gesture repeated in millions of yards on the same July morning.
The national anthem before a ballgame. A brief, shared ritual before strangers become, for a few hours, fellow fans.
Memorial Day. A pause built into the calendar to remember the cost paid for the rest of the list.
Thanksgiving. A holiday of gratitude that predates the republic itself and now belongs to every American table, regardless of what else is on it.
The Pledge of Allegiance. Recited daily by children who will one day decide, for themselves, what it means to keep it.
Volunteer fire departments. Neighbors who show up for neighbors, no government contract required.
Town hall meetings. Local government still conducted, in many places, in a room you can walk into.
Election night results counted community by community. A decentralized system that, whatever its frustrations, keeps power scattered rather than concentrated.

VIII.Simple American Things

The diner. Open at odd hours, serving anyone who walks in, no reservation required.
The interstate highway system. Connected a continent-sized country into something a family could drive across in a week.
National Parks. Vast public land held in trust for a citizen who will never own an acre of it privately.
Public libraries. Free access to books, records, and now the internet, for anyone who walks through the door.
The backyard barbecue. A holiday ritual that asks nothing of a guest’s background beyond an appetite.
The U.S. Postal Service. A letter delivered to the same price, whether the address is a Manhattan high-rise or a rural route in Montana.
The local newspaper. Increasingly rare, and increasingly missed where it has disappeared.
The community college. An affordable second chance built into the system for anyone willing to take it.
Little League. Volunteer coaches, borrowed uniforms, and a summer’s worth of lessons that have nothing to do with baseball.
The open road. A frontier instinct that never fully left, however many cities have grown up around it.

Eighty entries, and still nowhere near a complete accounting. That is by design: this list belongs to a newsroom that covers the friction as often as the harmony — the blasphemy-law abuses, the antisemitism, the sectarian violence FFN reports on from Lahore to Beirut — precisely because we believe the American settlement, for all its arguments and imperfections, remains a model worth defending and, where possible, exporting. On the 250th Independence Day, that is worth pausing to say plainly.

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