'The Thread of Liberty': The Best Documentary to Watch On America's 250th Birthday
A review of Ned Ryun's brand-new documentary of the American founding—and how we preserve it for another quarter-millennium.
There's nothing more glorious than to fight a losing battle—and win.
G.K. Chesterton might well have been describing the men and women who won American independence when he penned those words. Ned Ryun would agree. His upcoming documentary, The Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic, is built on exactly that paradox: that the freest nation in human history was born of the least likely odds imaginable, and that its survival was never guaranteed—then or now.
Very excited about the new documentary, The Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic. Lots of great guests, writers, producers. Watch this trailer. The full documentary will be available for viewing on July 4th. pic.twitter.com/UO1y0hLKT7
— Ned Ryun (@nedryun) June 29, 2026
Produced by American Majority, one of the leading organizations activating Christians and conservative voters, the film is a clarion call for Americans to take back their country by returning to the God Who gave it to them.
This is not a nostalgia trip. Ryun is after something more urgent.
The Founders didn't merely win their freedom from the British Crown—they made a theological claim about human nature that had never been codified before and, arguably, has never been replicated since.
God gave us rights. Government does not grant them; it secures them. That's the true Revolution, and the film cleaves to that insight from its first frame to its last.
It's a message our country desperately needs to hear as the United States turns 250. And from the fire of the Great Awakening to liberty's rebirth on the field of Gettysburg, you've never seen it so beautifully rendered.
The Revolution That Should Have Failed
Thread of Liberty turns to familiar experts—from historians Victor Davis Hanson and Paul Rahe to Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn—to make a memorable case for the role of Providence in shaping the young republic.
The overwhelming majority of human history is war, poverty, and authoritarianism. Self-government is a blip in that tale that always ended in tyranny. The Founders set out with breathtaking audacity to do what Greece and Rome could not: establish a government by the people that can renew itself, generation after generation.
The film's boldest reminder is that the Christian religion—not politics—was America's first political institution. That insight comes from Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer who marveled in the 1830s that Americans turned to churches and community associations, not government, to solve their problems. The colonial habit of self-rule did not begin in 1776. It was more than 150 years old by then, forged in pews and town halls from Boston to Charleston, the film explains. What the Founders did was codify an ancient inheritance of English common law: that the King and Parliament are themselves under the law of God.
That lesson could not land more sharply in a secular age that teaches our rights flow from government, power, or consensus. The Pilgrims, Ryun reminds us, could not have disagreed more.
America began with a covenant cut with God—and the rights that flow from Him. So when King George III and Parliament moved to abridge those rights in the 1760s, the colonists' first instinct was not to reach for muskets. It was to document their rights. We know them first in the Declaration, and later in the Constitution.
The Real Fight Behind the Tax
On the war’s origins, Thread of Liberty achieves a coherence usually lost in the retelling. The Stamp Act crisis is too often remembered as a squabble over taxes that were too high. Ryun correctly identifies the deeper battle: not how much, but who. Who held the right to levy new taxes at all—a distant Parliament, or the colonists themselves?
It is revealing that the Founders reached for constitutional arguments long before they took up arms. They did so only when it became plain that the Crown could not be reasoned with, only defeated.
Even then, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and the rest grounded their cause in "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God"—rights borne as the birthright of every human being made in His image. They did not need such lofty philosophy to justify war. They turned to it anyway because they saw a biblical principle at stake larger than themselves: that government exists to secure God-given rights. Thomas Paine called it "the cause of all mankind." It was never a quarrel over tax policy. It was the liberation of all people, by handing the world something worth imitating.
Ryun wisely sits with that astonishing fact before carrying it onto the battlefield. What's unmistakable was the founding generation's courage. A scattering of colonists set out to overthrow the most powerful empire on earth and were willing to lose everything to do it.
Washington in the Gap
Anyone who's studied the war knows how many defeats, retreats, and bitter setbacks the Continental Army endured. Through the winter of 1776–77, British redcoats fully expected the Americans to simply melt away as enlistments lapsed.
But then came the daring attack and victory at Trenton, followed closely by victory at Princeton. The militia were on the verge of breaking when General Washington rode out before them, shouting, "Parade with us, my brave fellows! There is but a handful of the enemy, and we shall have them directly!"
Men who were there spoke of it in awe ever after: Washington astride his horse in the open ground between two armies, musket balls whipping past him, rallying his men to hold. He very nearly died on that field. Instead, he lived, won the day, and saved the Revolution itself.
Washington did not shy from the hand of Providence in that war or its aftermath. Neither does Ryun. America's greatest hero could have seized a crown and ruled as George I. Instead, he laid down power and saved the infant republic, proving to a watching world that a free people could remain free without collapsing into despotism.
"If he does that," King George III said of our first president, "he will be the greatest man in the world."
It was the truest thing the king ever said.
The Miracle in Philadelphia
The film reaches well past the battlefield into the grinding work that produced an unlikely blessing: the Constitution. The smart money in the summer of 1787 was that the convention's quarrels—over slavery, federal power, the right of taxation—would sink the whole enterprise, and the 13 states would fall to civil war or tyranny as every republic had before them. Once more, liberty hung by a thread.
What the delegates produced instead was, in Ryun's telling, a walk through the graveyard of failed constitutions—and an ingenious design built to escape the trap. The will of the people, mediated through their representatives; the branches set against one another so that ambition might check ambition. Imperfect and miraculous in equal measure.
A Work Unfinished
The first great test of the Revolution's principles was slavery, and here Thread of Liberty is at its most surprising—and courageous. Ryun is clear-eyed about the contradiction of an institution initially condemned in the Declaration yet protected by the Constitution. It was a contradiction the Founders themselves felt keenly, including the Southern slaveowners among them.
His resolution is as brilliant as it is honest: the abolition of slavery in 1865 was the final achievement of the American Revolution. The very principle that rights come from God and not from men is what freed four million people who might otherwise have languished in bondage generations longer.
The price, of course, was a terrible civil war. Yet liberty was preserved as an everlasting covenant. The republic was renewed when its founding principles were restored. Eighty years on, the most faithful voices of the Civil Rights movement would measure their own cause by that same timeless principle.
The Tyranny That Faces Us
Today, Ryun warns, America suffers no warlord or king, but the "soft despotism" of the "experts"—precisely the danger de Tocqueville foresaw.
He pins it on two presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and the transformation they set in motion. Limited government swollen into a vast administrative state. Congressional authority drained into untouchable federal agencies. Governance itself cast as a science. The "progressive" creed held that you could remake human nature by remaking human institutions, a betrayal of the Founders' wisdom by people who thought they'd outgrown it.
Rights became grants because the progressives recognized no authority above the state. They christened it a "living Constitution" based on a single arrogant conviction: that the experts know better than We the People.
That system has reigned for a century. Its casualties include the dignity of the nuclear family and the people's own control over the laws that govern them. We arrived at the tyranny de Tocqueville feared not by conquest, but by an army of bureaucrats murmuring, "We're here to help."
The Call
Thread of Liberty lands its sharpest blow here.
There is no improving on the founding principles enshrined in the 1787 Constitution, because they were written for all men, for all time. Those who claim to be advancing human progress are the true reactionaries—dragging us back toward the world as it was before 1776.
That is the film's challenge. Our constitutional republic has survived armies and assassins; it may not survive the slow strangulation of the administrative state. And so, at the 250th anniversary of the greatest political document in human history, we are reminded that we are its heirs—standing at the very point where every other experiment in self-government has met its end.
Restoration begins now, as it began two and a half centuries ago, with the covenant renewal of patriotism and Christian virtue. Will we answer that call?
Ned Ryun believes so. God willing, history will prove him right.
Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic will be available to watch for free beginning July 3, 2026, at www.ThreadofLiberty.com.
"Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it."
—John Adams, Second President of the United States
