Why Faith Month in April matters

By Hannah Lape, Op-ed contributor Monday, April 27, 2026

After long days advocating for biblical values on Capitol Hill, it is a comfort to see plaques hanging in congressional office buildings that read: “In God we Trust.” That phrase is not archaic, nor is it shallow nostalgia — it reflects the historical fact that the United States of America was founded on Christian principles. That is why Concerned Women for America (CWA) celebrates Faith Month each April. 

In August 1620, William Bradford’s band of Separatists departed for North America aboard the Mayflower, making landfall later that year in November. Bradford wrote of his company, “Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven.” 

Historians Peter Marshall and David Manuel observed that the Separatist Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact, written and signed on board the ship for the establishment of their Massachusetts colony, was “the first time in history since the children of Israel in the Sinai wilderness (with the exception of John Calvin’s Geneva) that free and equal men had voluntarily covenanted together to create their own new civil government based on biblical principles.”

This distinction is an important one. Not only was the Mayflower Compact a forerunner of the United States Constitution, but it was the lifeblood of the Christian families that laid the foundations of our Christian country. 

Founder John Adams agreed. He wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The men who built America and wrote the Constitution that has framed our government for almost 250 years acknowledged that America’s government is Christian, and so are its people. 

This foundation is evident in several core functions of American civilization: the equal dignity and value of all humans, the sanctity of human life, special care for children, the equality of the sexes, and the dignity of work and free enterprise. 

Christianity teaches that men, women, and children (born and unborn) are created in the image of God and are inherently equal. This truth rings from the Garden of Eden and the Levitical law in the Old Testament — in the beginning, God creates mankind in His own image, set apart from all other creation to steward the earth. He goes on to command: “Thou shalt not murder,” affirming and enforcing the sanctity of innocent human life. All humans are valuable: we have no castes or untouchable classes of people, and our country has strived to end slavery from its founding. 

God also commanded His chosen people never to sacrifice their children — this is what distinguished God from the pagan gods of the Israelites’ contemporaries, and a revolutionary distinction at that. While death and child sacrifice were encouraged in the pagan world, God charted another course for Israel. Today in America, Christians are following through on that distinction as a bulwark resisting the violence of abortion. It was the decades-long efforts of many Christians that overturned Roe v. Wade; it is Christians who foster and adopt most, and it is Christians who own and operate the vast majority of around 1,900 pregnancy resource centers across the country. 

Our country operates on a distinctly Christian idea about the equality of the sexes, too. Here, men and women are equal before God and the law — as opposed to Muslim-majority countries where women are second-class citizens and young girls are subjected to child marriage. 

Americans at large, religious or not, do benefit from a culture imbued with and built upon Christian ethics — so much so that we often forget it. Fish do not realize they are swimming in water, and we do not realize we are a free and prosperous nation due to its bedrock Christian ethics.

This Faith Month, we are celebrating our nation’s distinctly Christian worldview. As we seek to advance biblical values in public policy, we know that we are honoring the God-fearing heart of the Mayflower Compact, and, in this fallen, sinful world, “seeking the welfare of the city” where we live (Jeremiah 29:7).