You cannot see it from the ground. The capstone sits five hundred and fifty-five feet in the air, and unless you know to look for it, you would never know it is there. But at the very top of the Washington Monument, engraved in the aluminum tip that crowns the tallest structure in the nation’s capital, are two words in Latin: Laus Deo. Praise be to God. The men who built it put a prayer at the highest point of Washington, D.C., because they understood something we are in danger of forgetting: this nation was built not to glorify itself, but to glorify God.

It was not an accident. The founders were not a collection of naive churchgoers who wandered into political philosophy. They were serious men who had read serious books, and the most serious book they read was the Bible. They understood that freedom is not a human invention. It is a divine endowment. They understood that no government can grant what only God can give, and no government can legitimately take away what God has stamped into the soul of every human being. George Washington wrote in his First Inaugural Address that “the propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained.” He was not using flowery language. He was making a theological claim. And he was right.

Two hundred and fifty years have passed since this nation declared its independence and staked its future on the truth that God exists, that He creates, and that His creation carries His mark. The Declaration of Independence is not a political document dressed in religious language. It is a theological document with political consequences. When Jefferson wrote that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, he was not reaching for a poetic phrase. He was drawing a boundary line: a line that says government cannot go here, because God was here first.

The psalmist knew it long before Jefferson did. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord (Psalm 33:12). Not blessed is the nation with the strongest military, though strength matters. Not blessed is the nation with the most advanced economy, though stewardship matters. The blessing of God follows the acknowledgment of God. It always has. And the turning of God’s blessing always follows the forgetting of God. Always.

Whether a nation is young or old, rising or declining, the question that matters most has never changed. Not “how did we get here?” but “whose are we?” Two and a half centuries of history, with all its light and shadow, have not changed the answer. It is still engraved at the top if we have eyes to see it. Laus Deo. All of it, the founding, the sacrifice, the survival, the freedom, and whatever comes next, is an offering to the God who made us, sustains us, and to whom every nation on earth will one day give account.