We’re Letting Government Replace Religion
November 4, 2025
Link to Published Op-ed (Washington Times Subscription Required)
The American experiment was built on a radical premise: that a moral and self-governing people, guided by faith and personal responsibility, could live in freedom without tyranny. The Founders believed liberty was inseparable from virtue, and virtue sustained by religion. John Adams warned, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Nearly two and a half centuries later, that foundation is eroding. The moral and spiritual convictions that once anchored our republic are being replaced by an expanding government that seeks to do, through bureaucracy and regulation, what faith and community once did through conviction and compassion. As America grows more secular and dependent, the balance between freedom and responsibility that defined our national character is fading.
The framers never envisioned a theocracy, but they understood liberty cannot long survive without moral order and that moral order depends on belief in something greater than the self. From the nation’s earliest days, churches formed the backbone of civic life. They built schools, hospitals, orphanages, and networks that met both the material and moral needs of their communities. Charity was not merely distribution but dignity; help given person to person, rooted in the belief that every soul carries inherent worth.
Over the past century, that model has been steadily replaced by the state. Beginning with the New Deal and accelerating through the Great Society, government has assumed many roles once held by faith-based institutions. Public welfare spending that once measured in single digits of GDP now consumes more than a fifth of the economy. Scholars Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde found that as government welfare expands, religiosity declines. When the state provides the security once offered by churches, people’s reliance on religion weakens. As social spending rose during the twentieth century, church membership fell from about seventy percent in 1950 to below fifty percent today. Nearly one in three Americans now claim no religious affiliation at all.
What churches once provided and what government offers differ not just in scale but in spirit. Religious charity connected help with meaning. It invited accountability, belonging, and transformation. Government assistance, by contrast, is transactional, an entitlement detached from community. It can mail a check but not offer purpose. It can build housing but not a sense of home. It can redistribute wealth but cannot cultivate virtue. The welfare state is a synthetic substitute for what faith once authentically supplied: hope, belonging, and the moral habits necessary for a free society.
As government has grown, public trust in it has collapsed. In the 1960s, about seventy percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what was right most of the time. Today that number hovers near twenty percent. The irony is stark: as faith in God has declined and faith in government has risen to fill the void, we’ve found government itself unworthy of such devotion. The more it promises to do, the less capable it seems of doing anything well. Having traded spiritual faith for political faith, we now find ourselves with neither—a people searching for meaning in an institution that cannot provide it.
This erosion of faith parallels another quiet revolution: the decline of marriage, family, and birth rates. Fewer people are marrying or having children, and fewer see those milestones as central to a fulfilling life. What once were the pillars of human existence—faith, family, and purpose—are increasingly seen as optional. Meanwhile, consumer comforts and personal desires have become the new moral compass. We have traded the enduring for the immediate, the communal for the individual, the sacred for the convenient.
Our economic behavior mirrors this moral drift. The national debt has surpassed thirty-eight trillion dollars, a number that defies comprehension. Yet it is more than a fiscal failure; it is a moral one. A government that borrows endlessly spends not only money it doesn’t have but virtue it no longer practices. It reflects a collective unwillingness to exercise the restraint that self-government requires. The Founders trusted citizens to be virtuous enough to govern themselves. But virtue cannot thrive in a moral vacuum or be sustained by institutions that have replaced faith with dependency.
The good news is that decline is not destiny. The same moral imagination that built America can renew it. The path forward does not begin with another federal program; it begins with a renewal of character, conscience, and community. Faith communities must reclaim their historic role, not merely as houses of worship, but as pillars of compassion and formation. Families and neighborhoods must again become places where duty, discipline, and dignity are taught and lived. Government has a place, but not the first place. It can coordinate, but it cannot inspire. It can protect, but it cannot redeem.
America’s greatness has never been measured by its wealth or armies but by its people, their faith, virtue, and willingness to live as stewards of freedom rather than subjects of the state. The Founders’ experiment still stands, but it requires our active devotion. If we forget the moral and spiritual foundations that make liberty possible, we will lose not only faith in God but faith in each other, and ultimately, in America itself.
Jason E. Thompson
Representative
Utah House of Representatives
Jason E. Thompson is an entrepreneur and public servant currently serving in the Utah House of Representatives and is a member of the Utah Federalism Commission. A former mayor of River Heights, Utah, Jason is passionate about promoting dialogue on the balance and structure of government and strengthening unity in local communities. Jason lives in River Heights, Utah with his wife, Dana, and their 6 children.