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Secretary Rubio Records Remarks for Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, May 18, 2026

May 18, 2026 · U.S. Department of State · 0:04:01

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered recorded remarks for “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer,” released by the State Department on May 18, 2026. He opened with the Continental Congress’s national day of fasting and prayer two and a half centuries earlier, when the thirteen colonies humbled themselves “to acknowledge the overruling providence of God” three and a half months before open revolt against the most powerful empire in the world, and recalled Benjamin Franklin’s line after signing the Declaration: “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Rubio traced what he called the Christian idea that shaped America — John Winthrop’s 1630 “city upon a hill” sermon aboard the Arbella, the missionary call that drove westward expansion, Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message in 1844 (“What hath God wrought?”), and the Apollo 8 crew reading Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968 to the largest television audience in history to that point. “This is who we are,” the department’s release quotes him. “It is who we’ve always been” — a young nation, he said, whose soul “has always been rooted in an ancient faith.”

Why it matters

The remarks place the Secretary of State inside the administration’s 250th-anniversary civic program in a faith register: the founding presented as an act of prayerful resolve, and American exceptionalism argued from Winthrop to Apollo 8. The department published the text line with the video: “250 years ago, our forefathers gathered for a national day of fasting and prayer. Americans are coming together again as one Nation under God.”

Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Rubio Remarks for Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks as delivered; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store.