I am a mother of two daughters. I am a Catholic. I served in Afghanistan. I was a psychologist who treated veterans suffering from PTSD in the Veterans Affairs. I do charity work in Ukraine, where I have watched ordinary people pick up rifles and stand in the rubble of their cities because they decided, with clear eyes, that their country is worth dying for. I lead a national security and policy center at Independent Women because I believe American women and girls deserve to understand the threats around them—threats foreign, yes, but increasingly and alarmingly domestic.
I tell you all of this because what I am about to say comes from lived places. It is not abstract. It is not academic. It is the thing I think about when I look at my daughters and ask myself what kind of country I am leaving them and whether they will have the formation, the faith, and the conviction to defend it if history asks them to.
And I believe it will ask them.
America is turning 250 years old. That is not a small thing. It is, by any honest accounting, an extraordinary thing—a country founded not on ethnicity or geography or royal bloodline, but on an idea. And that idea was not invented in a vacuum. It was soaked, from its very roots, in a Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person: that we are made in the image of God, that our rights flow from that Creator and not from any government, that we are therefore endowed with a dignity no king and no state has the authority to revoke.
This is why the Declaration of Independence does not read like a political manifesto. It reads like a theological document with military consequences.
I will tell my daughters: We come from a people who believed in something. Who built something. Who bled for something.
The men who signed it knew exactly what they were doing. They were not naive about the cost. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Many of them paid all three. They did so because they believed in something larger than themselves, something given to them by God and owed to their posterity. That belief was not incidental to the founding; it was the founding.
And it is the thread that runs, unbroken, through every generation of Americans who have answered the call to serve. Through the frozen fields of Valley Forge. Through the hills of Gettysburg. Through the beaches of Normandy. Through the jungles of Vietnam. Through the mountains of Afghanistan. In every case, the men and the women who found the courage to go, who mustered something in themselves that many of us can barely imagine, did so because they believed there was something sacred worth protecting. Oftentimes, it was their faith that gave them the vocabulary for sacrifice. But it was our country that gave that sacrifice meaning.
Recently, Pope Leo XIV strongly opposed the U.S. president’s military actions in Iran, describing it as unjust. In his criticism, the pope has gone so far as to suggest that any military action is an affront to God and that “anyone who is a disciple of Christ … is never on the side of those who … today drop bombs.” According to the pontiff, no cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood. Peace, Pope Leo went on to say, “comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”
Defense of the innocent is at the heart of Scripture. But its lesson is not passivity in the face of evil. It calls us to recognize the sanctity of innocent life and our responsibility to defend it, even when pursuing justice requires great human cost.
To pretend that all wars, or military actions, are equally wrong is moral confusion. It is also antithetical to the teachings of the Catholic Church, which was uniquely responsible for developing the theory of just war—the belief that the disciplined use of force to defend the innocent, restore justice, and secure peace when all other means have failed is necessary.
Our faith teaches us we cannot erase the distinction between aggressor and defender, between conquest and liberation, and between tyranny and resistance. By that logic, the United Kingdom and the United States were no different from Nazi Germany in the Second World War. History, reason, and Catholic tradition all reject that claim.
Relatedly, I have listened to a particular class of podcasters and commentators, people with large platforms and small consciences, decry the military operation in Iran and remark that they will not “send their sons and daughters to fight for Israel.”
To be precise, this statement is antisemitic. The specific, deliberate singling out of Jewish people and the Jewish state as the cause for wantonly sacrificing Americans against our national interest has a long and ugly history, and dressing it in the language of anti-interventionism does not launder it. It is the same logic in different clothes.
It is also profoundly anti-American. Because the American project has always understood, imperfectly, haltingly, but genuinely, that the defense of human dignity does not stop at our borders. That a world in which tyrants are permitted to devour or terrorize their neighbors—our allies and friends—without consequence is a world that will eventually come for us. Standing with allies who share our values and advance our interests is never charity; it is strategy and survival.
I do not blindly advocate for military intervention. No parent should ever have to bury a child. I mean that with every part of myself. There is no grief like it, and I have borne witness to much of it. There is no good parent anywhere on earth who would not give everything to spare their child that anguish, even at the cost of their own life.
But as an American and Catholic woman, my patriotism and my faith do not permit me to stop there. Because the same tradition that teaches me to mourn and honor the dead also teaches me that there are things in this world worth dying for. That love, at its fullest, is not self-preservation. That the person who lays down their life for their friends has done something that carries eternal and historical weight.
I will not lie to my daughters and tell them the world is safe. I will not raise them in a faith stripped of the cross and tell them that comfort is the goal. I will not send them into a civilization that has forgotten what it is for and expect them to be able to defend it.
What I will do, what I am called to do, as their mother and as a person of faith, is give them something to stand on. To tell them clearly, We come from a people who believed in something. Who built something. Who bled for something. And who were sustained, in the doing of it, by a conviction that this life is not the end of the story.
That is not a burden I am placing on them. Simply, it is the most precious gift I have to give.
The erosion of the belief that there are things worth dying for is not just playing out on social media or within the chattering class. It is also happening in the halls of Congress, where members on the left, and even some on the right, have used the exact phrase, “We are not sending our sons and daughters to fight.”
Echoes of this abhorrence of sacrifice have been socialized and expressed in our schools for years, where students have been taught that America is fundamentally bad. What follows is the cultural belief that if our nation is bad, it is unworthy. Unworthiness begets loathing, and loathing hollows out the civic virtue on which a free nation depends.
We are now living through the consequences of a coordinated assault on the very meaning of what it is to be an American. Not the caricature, not the jingoism or empty chest-thumping, but the real thing. The idea that this country was given to us as a trust, not an inheritance. That we are stewards of something that belongs to our children more than it belongs to us. That the phrase “one nation under God” is not decoration. It is load-bearing.
When a culture loses that, it does not simply become less patriotic. It becomes less capable of survival. Because the question every civilization must eventually answer—what are we for, and what will we defend?—does not go away simply because we have stopped having the courage to ask it.
We are entering our 250th year as a nation. That anniversary demands something of us beyond celebration. It demands reckoning and then it demands recommitment.
The recommitment begins with honesty: that we live in the greatest country on earth and that great things will be demanded of us because of it. That our Judeo-Christian foundation is not a relic to be embarrassed about, but a living root system without which this tree does not stand. Freedom has never been free. The people who told you otherwise were either being naive, selling something, or being paid by one of our enemies to convince you of it.
And then it demands faith. Not faith as sentiment or as a bumper sticker. Faith as the thing that steadies you when the demand is real and the cost is clear, and you choose to pay it anyway because you know, in a place deeper than strategy or politics or policy, that some things are worth it.
Peace in the face of fear is what faith is for. It is not a promise that nothing terrible will happen. It is the assurance that nothing terrible is the end of the story.
I believe that. I am raising my daughters to believe it. And I believe this country, if it remembers who she is, can believe it too and act accordingly.