Published July 13, 2026

The country was founded in 1776. It was also founded in 1965, on a bridge in Selma. It was founded in a one-room schoolhouse where a teacher taught children to read against the law. It is being founded this morning, in a food pantry in a church basement, by someone whose name will never appear in a textbook.

We have been taught to think of the founding as a moment – a room in Philadelphia, a document, a set of signatures, a generation that did the work so the rest of us wouldn’t have to. But a country is not a document you inherit. It is a practice you take up. The founders did not finish America. They started it, and then they handed us the pen.

Because America is not something you inherit passively. It is something you create actively.

This is the whole idea. The most famous names in our history and the most anonymous people in our communities are doing the same work: writing the country into being through what they do. George Washington was founding this country. So is the poll worker checking people in at a folding table. So is the parent at the school board meeting. So is the congregation that opens its doors to neighbors it was told to fear. The founding never ended. It just changed hands.

At BJC, we care about this for a specific reason. Religious freedom is not a promise that keeps itself. It requires a country where people can participate fully in civic life. Where they can gather, speak, vote, and stand in the public square without intimidation or state-imposed barriers. Religious freedom requires pluralism, and pluralism requires people to show up. When people withdraw from civic life, or are pushed out of it, the ground that religious freedom stands on gives way. Civic participation is not adjacent to religious freedom. It is the soil it grows in.

Which means the work of founding this country and the work of protecting religious freedom are the same work. Every person who acts, who joins, who shows up, who bears witness, is founding this country and defending the freedom that lives inside it.

So this year, as the country marks 250 years, we are not looking backward at a finished thing. We are looking around us at an unfinished one, and at the people still building it.

We want to show them to you. Over the coming months, we are building a Founders Wall – a place where we highlight the people, famous and unknown, historical and living, who are still founding this country through what they do. And we want you on it.

Tell us about a founder. It might be a name from history that shaped the freedom we live in. It might be someone in your congregation, your family, your town, doing the quiet work of holding a community together. It might be you.

Every generation is the founding generation. This one is ours.

Religious freedom can only be lived if we will it to be. So let’s found this country again and again.