Jay Richards, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, speaks at a Fidelity Month gathering on June 9, 2025, in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill. / Credit: Madalaine Elhabbal/CNA

Washington D.C., Jun 11, 2025 / 09:54 am (CNA).

Members of the grassroots movement promoting the month of June as “Fidelity Month” at a gathering on Capitol Hill on Monday called for a renewal of the “common bonds” that unite Americans.

Fidelity Month bills itself as “a positive, grassroots movement to heal division and restore unity in our nation. It celebrates June as a season of recommitment to God, our spouses and families, our communities, and country,” according to the Fidelity Month website. 

Princeton professor Robert George founded the movement in 2023 after reading a Wall Street Journal article citing survey data that showed significant declines in Americans’ belief in the importance of religion, family, and patriotism.

It was these principles, George said at the event in the Longworth House Office Building on June 9, that inspired him to declare “by the power invested in me by absolutely no one” the month of June to be Fidelity Month. 

The “exceptional” thing about America, George observed, is that the source of the country’s unity cannot be found in race, ethnicity, or a particular religious tradition. 

Rather, national unity of the United States is found in the “shared commitment to the principles of republican government” and the “shared belief in the importance of fidelity to God, fidelity to spouses and families, fidelity to our country and communities.” 

George said the movement has grown from a few thousand initial followers to tens of thousands in 2024. “This year, we’re moving into the hundreds of thousands,” he said, adding: “I hope we’ll be moving into the millions of people recognizing June as Fidelity Month, where we rededicate ourselves and pledge ourselves to these important principles.” 

George also discussed the Fidelity Month movement during a June 4 interview on “EWTN Pro-Life Weekly,” telling anchor Abigail Galván he hoped it would serve as a rallying point for Americans to reclaim the enduring values that have long been the bedrock of national unity. 

Sources of America’s unity and strength

At Monday’s event, titled “What Are the Sources of America’s Unity and Strength?”, George was joined by several conservative leaders including Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri; the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Richards; and Kristen Waggoner, CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

Echoing George in her speech, Waggoner reflected that “unlike most countries, [America] was founded on a direct appeal to divine reality.”

Waggoner continued: “When the founders declared independence, they didn’t appeal to a king or to an army or even to a written constitution. They appealed to heaven, to a God who endows each person with an alienable right, no matter what they believe.”

In his remarks, Hawley extolled marriage as “the true test of virtue for men and women” but especially for young men.

Citing President Theodore Roosevelt’s four-volume work “The Winning of the West,” Hawley noted Roosevelt’s view that of all the dangers faced by frontiersmen in the West, “the greatest challenge they faced” was their character and that fidelity to marriage was the ultimate test of manhood and the foundation of civilization.

“Whereas in Roosevelt’s day, the challenge of the frontier was the challenge of bringing culture and civilization to a vast wide-open space to what was in many respects a wilderness, our challenge today is to preserve our civilization from becoming a wilderness,” Hawley said.

“Today, the wilderness threatens to come to us,” he continued. “We see this nowhere more starkly than the breakdown of marriage and the family.” 

Hawley called on members of the movement to embrace their responsibility to “craft an economy and a society where marriage is rewarded.”

“I think Roosevelt was right all those years ago,” he said, concluding: “This must be the great call that we give to our countrymen again, to embrace the call to fidelity, to be faithful to what we believe in, to be faithful to what makes us who we are, to be faithful in our marriage commitments, in our family life, to our country.”

In his speech, Richards, director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, cited the changing tide on the gender ideology debate in the U.S., where half of the states have passed laws protecting children from “gender-affirming care.” 

Just three years ago, he pointed out, “it was difficult to get Republican staffers and members in Congress to even talk about this issue.” 

Now, he said, “something like 70 or 80% of the American public doesn’t believe that we should be conducting experimental medicine on kids who are uncomfortable with their bodies. [And] they don’t believe that males should be in female prisons.” 

“We now have a moment in which the vast majority of our country is opposed to the idea that separates children’s identities from their bodies and is focused like a laser beam on the health of children,” he said, concluding: “That’s concrete. That’s the moment for those of us to continue to commit ourselves to fidelity to God, to country, to marriage, and to family, to make the case for that good again.” 

Other speakers included former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ian Rowe.