United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a landmark speech near the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, on October 7 that reflected a fatal misunderstanding of what connects the United States and Europe.

Rubio described the literary and philosophical traditions from classical antiquity that still influence Western civilization today, said Americans and Europeans must defend that heritage against progressivism, and praised modern Greece for its high defense spending and pushback against illegal migration.

Understanding what is truly virtuous and where it came from is even more crucial than Rubio imagines. But did he get it right?

America’s Foundation

Classical civilizations, particularly Greece and Rome, heavily influenced America’s Founding Fathers, who studied Greek history, quoted Plutarch extensively in the Federalist Papers, and commissioned the Capitol, the White House and other buildings in Neoclassical and Greek Revival styles. The Christian New Testament was written in Greek for a Greek-speaking audience.

Rubio also included in this “Western foundation” the rest of European civilization between antiquity and now. This reveals the fatal flaw.

“Here, in Athens,” he said, “we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” Rubio went so far as to credit Greco-Roman heritage as the source of America’s foundational principles, saying: “The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.”

Secretary Rubio rightly said that the stakes are high:

We are at an inflection point—an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization. … And now, there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again. And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together.

He concluded his speech:

The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes and that we should be proud—that we should be intensely proud—of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West.

Rubio is not wrong in acknowledging Greek and Roman influence on the modern West. But to claim America’s greatness began with “forefathers” from pagan cultures is a dangerous distortion of reality.

Seeing Past Greece

The Founding Fathers based American society on the culture of the Bible. George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” John Adams said: “Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.” In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: “I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it.”

The New Testament was written in Greek, in part from Greece and largely for people who spoke Greek—but all its authors, except one, were Jews, one of the tribes of Israel. The Bible’s entire focus, from Genesis to Revelation, is on the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. It discusses other nations and great empires only as they came into contact with the descendants of Israel. It records that God, the Creator of all mankind, had a special relationship only with Israel.

Rubio’s speech on origins and essential virtues missed this point—the main point!

The secretary of state did mention Christianity, saying Greek culture “paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology—of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.” But this very mixing of Greek and Roman culture and religion with the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God is Western Civilization’s fatal flaw!

Rubio also stated that “the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne and Cortés.”

The “empire of Christendom” he referred to is better known as the Holy Roman Empire. Augustine and Aquinas are some of the most influential figures of not the Bible but Roman Catholicism. The caesars created the empire that the popes would later influence to form the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Empire’s inaugural emperor. Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors brought the conquests of the Habsburg dynasty into the New World.

Rubio describes all of this as an extension of Classical civilization and, incorrectly, the foundation of what originally made America great.

Yet the Holy Roman Empire, a tyrannical autocracy with no freedom of conscience or religion, represented everything early Americans wanted their new nation to be liberated from.

A Peculiar Kind of Christian

“America’s founders were overwhelmingly Christian—yet a particular kind unwelcome in Europe,” the Trumpet states in “America’s Hebrew Roots.” “They read the Bible literally and held deep reverence for the law of Moses. To them, Europe was Egypt; King George, Pharaoh; the Atlantic, the Red Sea; and America, the Promised Land. Their journey was a new Exodus.”

This isn’t merely a metaphor. As the late theologian Herbert W. Armstrong explained in his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy (request your free copy), the American people descended from the ancient Israelites. Their political system is based on the Bible teaching of human nature and incorporates more principles from the Hebrews than from any other system.

America became great because the God of Israel made it great.

The Catholic-led Holy Roman Empire, as Mr. Armstrong elaborated in Who or What Is the Prophetic Beast?, is a counterfeit of the people and Church of the true God.

Rubio’s speech highlights the fact that the modern nations of Israel have forgotten God’s principles and laws and His Word, the Holy Bible. They have forgotten God! They even attribute the blessings He gave them to the traditions of a counterfeit political system—a system He specifically prophesied and warned against in that same Bible.

Meanwhile, Rubio and the rest of the U.S. administration are essentially championing a revival of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe. He claimed Europe needs to “awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.”

Bible prophecies found in Leviticus 26, Jeremiah 30, Revelation 17, etc forecast another worldwide war. The Holy Roman Empire will reawaken—and it will violently conquer other nations, specifically the United States, Britain, Israel and the other modern nations descended from ancient Israel. Just as ancient Israel sinned and was punished with national destruction, so too have we sinned and face punishment and national destruction from foreign empires.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote that the modern progressive movement’s “ultimate aim here is not only to blot out traditions and principles in general everywhere, but specifically to blot out traditions and principles in the modern nations of Israel that trace back to the Bible.” In other words, not all traditions are worth preserving. “What a dramatic difference it would make,” he wrote, “if … the nations of Israel would remember their roots, their history with God! Only they have roots worth remembering!”

Understand the true roots of American exceptionalism and the true values worth fighting for by reading The United States and Britain in Prophecy.