The First Republic: Rebuilding the Home
A Weekly Devotional from The Founders' Quill: Reclaiming America's Judeo-Christian Heritage through Spirit and Truth.
Rebuilding the Home Is Where the Work of Cultural Renewal Begins
What if the future of the republic is being decided around the dinner table?
We have spent considerable time in The Founders’ Quill looking backward so that we might better understand where we are. We have examined the convictions that shaped the American experiment, the relationship between faith and liberty, the necessity of moral law, and the consequences that follow when a people forget the spiritual foundations of freedom. More recently, however, our attention has turned from the institutions surrounding us toward the person staring back at us in the mirror. That turn must continue, because it is far easier to identify what has gone wrong with America than to ask what part we may have played in allowing it to happen.
We can blame politicians. We can blame schools. We can blame Hollywood, universities, corporations, social media, or whichever cultural institution most recently offended our convictions. Some of those criticisms may be entirely justified. Institutions shape culture, and powerful institutions can do enormous harm. But common sense requires us to ask a more uncomfortable question: How did those institutions acquire so much influence over the moral formation of our children, our families, and eventually ourselves?
Perhaps some of that authority was not taken from us.
Perhaps we surrendered it.
The Republic at the Dinner Table
Long before a child understands a constitution, casts a ballot, or knows the difference between a republic and a democracy, that child is learning how human beings ought to live together. The first lessons usually come not from a textbook but from a household. There a child begins discovering whether truth matters, whether promises are kept, whether authority exists for the good of another, whether desires must sometimes be denied, whether work is honorable, whether forgiveness is possible, and whether there is anyone above us to whom we are ultimately accountable.
The home is therefore much more than a private refuge from public life. It is one of the places where public life begins.
The Founding generation understood this connection more naturally than we often do. John Adams spent much of the Revolution separated from Abigail and their children, engaged in the enormous public work of independence and diplomacy. Yet the education and character of his children remained persistently on his mind. In 1774 he wrote Abigail that the education of their children was “never out of my Mind,” urging that they be trained in virtue and habituated to industry.¹ Two years later, while Congress was engaged in the revolutionary work that produced the Declaration of Independence, Adams wrote that because he himself had lacked a systematic education, he would be even less excusable if he neglected the education of his children.²
Then came one of Adams's most memorable expressions of generational responsibility. Writing from France in 1780, he explained that he must study politics and war so his sons might possess the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, and they in turn might enable their children to pursue painting, poetry, music, architecture, and the arts.³
Adams was thinking beyond himself.
The Revolution was not merely about what his generation could win. It was about what another generation might inherit.
That distinction matters enormously today. We have become accustomed to asking whether our lives are comfortable, whether our preferences are respected, whether our careers are successful, and whether our children are happy. Those are understandable concerns. But previous generations often carried another question alongside them: What are we preparing those who come after us to inherit?
That is a different way to live.
Two Places, One Revolution
While John Adams participated in Congress and crossed the Atlantic in service to the new nation, another part of the American experiment was unfolding at home. Abigail Adams carried responsibilities that rarely receive the same attention as declarations, battles, and constitutional conventions. She managed household affairs, dealt with financial pressures, endured long separations from her husband, lived amid the uncertainty of war, and bore substantial responsibility for the education and formation of their children.
John's letters about education were not abstract instructions sent into empty space. Abigail was the parent most consistently present to carry much of that responsibility. Surviving Adams family materials even contain educational books associated with Abigail, and the documentary record describes her as the principal instructor of the young Adams children.⁴ Their son John Quincy Adams would eventually become a diplomat, senator, secretary of state, and the sixth president of the United States.
History remembers Philadelphia.
But the republic was also being built at the Adams family table.
This does not mean the Adams household should be romanticized. They were human beings with strengths, failures, disagreements, disappointments, and family difficulties of their own. Nor does it mean that every eighteenth-century household provides a model we should imitate. The point is more fundamental: the Founding generation understood that the character necessary for self-government had to be formed somewhere, and much of that formation occurred long before a person entered public life.
John Adams later wrote that Christianity carried moral instruction across every rank of society, teaching the duties of private as well as public life from early childhood.⁵ His famous 1798 warning that the Constitution was made for “a moral and religious People” is usually quoted as a statement about government.⁶ But it raises a question that government itself cannot answer: Where do moral and religious people come from?
No legislature can manufacture them. They must be formed.
“Impress Them on Your Children”
Long before there was an American republic, Scripture placed the responsibility for moral and spiritual formation remarkably close to home. Moses told Israel: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children.” (Deuteronomy 6:4–7, NIV)
Notice where the instruction continues. God's truth was to be discussed when the people sat at home, when they walked along the road, when they lay down, and when they got up. Faith was not supposed to occupy one isolated compartment of life. It was to enter the ordinary rhythms of the household.
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that picture. Parents did not need a professional degree in theology. They did not need elaborate programming. They needed to know whom they worshiped, keep His words upon their own hearts, and speak those truths faithfully into the lives entrusted to them.
The order is important. God's commands were first to be upon their hearts. Only then were they told to impress them upon their children.
There is our mirror again.
We cannot effectively teach children convictions we ourselves do not practice. We cannot teach them that Scripture matters if they never see us reading it. We cannot teach them that worship matters if everything else routinely takes precedence over it. We cannot teach self-control while allowing our own appetites to govern us. We cannot demand honesty from them while they hear dishonesty from us. We cannot teach the sanctity of marriage merely by defining marriage correctly; children must also see covenant faithfulness, sacrifice, forgiveness, tenderness, and perseverance lived before them.
The recovery of the home therefore begins not with controlling children but with the transformation of adults.
Scripture gives us no room for self-righteousness here. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, NIV). That includes the parents. It includes the grandparents. It includes pastors, teachers, politicians, writers, and everyone else tempted to believe America's moral problems are primarily somebody else's fault.
We have all fallen short.
But that confession is not the end of the story. In the Christian faith, repentance is never merely an admission that yesterday was wrong. It is an invitation to walk differently tomorrow.
When We Outsourced Formation
One of the peculiarities of modern life is how many people and systems now compete to form a child. Schools have children for much of the day. Entertainment follows them home. Friends communicate constantly through devices. Advertisers study their desires. Social-media platforms learn what captures their attention and place more of it before them. Algorithms can become extraordinarily patient tutors, repeating messages about identity, sexuality, possessions, status, anger, beauty, and happiness thousands of times.
None of this requires us to believe that every teacher, institution, technology company, or cultural influence is malicious. That would be neither fair nor useful. The common-sense point is simpler: if parents do not intentionally form their children, someone or something else will.
Formation never stops merely because a family stops doing it.
The vacuum gets filled.
For generations, many Christians have assumed that an hour at church each week could counteract dozens of hours of competing formation. We have sometimes expected pastors, youth leaders, Christian schools, or children's ministries to perform work that Scripture never assigned exclusively to them. The church is indispensable, but the church was never intended to replace the household. It equips believers to live faithfully within it.
And this is where blaming the culture becomes particularly tempting. We can become angry about what appears on a child's screen without asking who bought the screen, who pays for the service, who established—or failed to establish—the boundaries, and who modeled the family's own relationship with technology. We can complain that families no longer eat together while maintaining schedules that make shared meals nearly impossible. We can lament that young people know little Scripture while rarely opening the Bible with them ourselves.
These questions sting because they are close to home. They should.
The purpose, however, is not guilt for guilt's sake. It is to recover agency. If everything is somebody else's fault, there is very little we can do. But if we have surrendered responsibilities that were ours, then by God's grace some of those responsibilities can be taken up again.
What Can Still Be Done
No president needs to sign an executive order for a family to eat dinner together.
Congress does not have to pass legislation for a father to pray with his children. The Supreme Court cannot prevent a mother from opening Scripture at the kitchen table. No school board controls whether parents listen carefully to their children, teach them the difference between truth and falsehood, require them to keep their word, insist that they treat others with dignity, or show them by example that freedom does not mean doing whatever we desire.
A husband can decide today to become more faithful to his wife. A wife can decide today to speak life into her husband and children. Parents can put away their phones and listen. Families can rediscover Sabbath, prayer, meals, conversation, hospitality, service, and worship. Grandparents can tell grandchildren the stories of their faith and family rather than assuming someone else will do it. Churches can strengthen parents instead of replacing them. Older men and women can come alongside younger families who are struggling.
And those whose families have been broken are not excluded from this calling.
Some readers did not grow up around a table where faith was practiced. Some experienced divorce, abandonment, addiction, abuse, or neglect. Some are raising children alone. Some have adult children who have walked away from the faith. Some carry regrets about years that cannot be recovered. Others may read an article about the family and immediately feel the ache of what they never had.
The gospel does not ask us to pretend those wounds do not exist. Neither does it sentence us to repeat them.
The question is not whether you inherited a perfect family. None of us did. The question is what you will do with the relationships God has entrusted to you now. A single mother can build a household shaped by truth and grace. A widowed grandfather can speak faith into grandchildren. A divorced father can become more faithful and present than he was yesterday. A married couple whose children are grown can open their table to younger people who need examples worth following. Someone who inherited generations of dysfunction can, by the grace of God, decide that the inheritance will change here.
That is reclamation in its most practical form.
As for Me and My House
Near the end of his life, Joshua gathered Israel and called the people to decide whom they would serve. He could not make the decision for the entire nation. He could, however, declare where he would stand.
“But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15, NIV)
Perhaps that is the declaration our moment requires.
We spend enormous amounts of emotional energy worrying about things beyond our control. Elections matter. Laws matter. Schools matter. Courts matter. Culture matters. Christians should participate responsibly in all of them. But none of those responsibilities excuses neglect of the small territory God has already placed within our reach.
The recovery of American culture will not begin only in Washington. It may begin tonight in Wichita, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, or a thousand towns whose names will never appear in a history book. It may begin when someone turns off a television, puts down a phone, gathers a family around a table, bows a head, opens a Bible, apologizes for a wrong, keeps a promise, forgives an offense, or decides that the people inside the house deserve more attention than the outrage occurring outside it.
Those actions will never become breaking news. Most will be forgotten by everyone except the people who experienced them. So were most of the meals Abigail Adams shared with her children. Yet generations are formed through ordinary faithfulness.
We have spent years asking what politicians are doing to America, what educators are doing to America, what corporations are doing to America, and what activists are doing to America. Some of those questions need to be asked. But a people serious about reclaiming their heritage must eventually ask the question that requires more courage:
What am I doing with the part of America God has entrusted to me?
For many of us, the answer begins at home.
We cannot reclaim a civilization while neglecting the homes from which civilization comes. We cannot demand self-government from a nation while refusing the disciplines of faithfulness, restraint, sacrifice, forgiveness, responsibility, and love in our closest relationships. And we cannot expect another generation to preserve convictions they have never seen embodied before them.
The Founders gave considerable thought to what their children would inherit. We should do the same. Not because we can guarantee what our children will choose, and not because faithful homes produce perfect people. They do not. We do it because stewardship requires us to faithfully plant what another generation may someday need.
The republic beyond our windows matters.
But tonight, look around the table.
The work may already be sitting there.
Spirit & Truth,
Thom H. Paine
Notes
John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 28, 1774, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 7, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963).
John Adams to Abigail Adams, [post May 12, 1780], Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 3, ed. L. H. Butterfield and Marc Friedlaender (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), 341–42.
Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, editorial discussion of books used in the Adams household and Abigail Adams's role in the education of the children, Massachusetts Historical Society.
John Adams, diary entry, August 14, 1796, in The Adams Papers, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 3, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 240–41.
John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
Bibliography
Adams, Abigail, and John Adams. Adams Family Correspondence. Edited by L. H. Butterfield et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Adams, John. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. Edited by L. H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961.
Massachusetts Historical Society. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society.
National Archives. Founders Online. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration.
The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
The Founders’ Quill seeks to recover the spiritual and moral foundations that shaped the American experiment in ordered liberty. By returning to Scripture, history, and the wisdom of those who came before us, we are invited not merely to admire our inheritance but to become people capable of preserving it.
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