HuzzahWhy I Wrote Made for the Mountains
A Son of the American Revolution Returns to Christ and Finds Out They Were Always the Same Inheritance
June 2, 2026 | AmRev Resurrected
In the Forge the Son launch essay I wrote about Thomas Murphy, my seventh great-grandfather, a private in the 2nd Regiment of the Salem County New Jersey Militia.
I wrote about the gap between his formation and mine. How the pride of the lineage had reached me intact, but the formation behind it had not.
What I did not write about, because that book was not the place for it, was the way the recovery happened. Not in two separate projects. In one.
The return to Christ and the dig into the American founding were not two things I did at the same time. They were the same thing. I did not know it when I started. By the time I was deep into both, I could not separate them. By the time I sat down to write this second book, I understood why.
The Word built the republic. The men who built it knew. Their grandsons knew. We forgot.
This is the recovery of what we forgot.
What I Started Reading
In 2022, after my daughter was born, I came back to Christ in the way I described in the last essay. A real return. A thirst to be a righteous man and a father worth following.
What I did not know was that the thirst was going to send me back through the founding in a way I had not expected.
I had grown up forty-five minutes from Trenton. I had walked Old City Philadelphia as a boy. I had touched the Liberty Bell. The founding was geography to me. I knew the dates and the places. I had read the standard accounts.
But when I came back to Christ as a serious man, I started reading the founders differently. Their letters. Their sermons. The pamphlets they read. The texts they cited. The Bibles they kept. I was reading them as a man who was now serious about the same God they had been serious about, and what I saw was a founding I had not seen before.
The political philosophy I had been taught did not account for what I was reading. The founders were not Enlightenment deists going through religious motions. The men who built the republic had been formed by a preaching tradition that ran for one hundred and forty-one years before the Declaration. The Bibles they carried had margin notes that argued tyrants could be lawfully resisted. The sermons they sat under every Sunday preached the doctrine of covenanted government, of the magistrate as steward under God, of the people’s right and duty to hold authority accountable to the Word.
I had been taught that the founding was a child of the Enlightenment. I was reading documents that showed it was a child of the Reformation.
The dig into Christ and the dig into the founding were not parallel projects. They were the same project. The deeper I went into Christ, the deeper I went into the founders. The deeper I went into the founders, the more I saw that the Christ I was returning to was the Christ they had built the country around. The two recoveries fed each other.
The Lineage Question Was Not What I Thought It Was
I joined the Sons of the American Revolution in the South Jersey chapter, in the ground where Thomas Murphy had served. When I moved to Indiana I transferred to the Fort Wayne chapter. I serve as secretary there now.
The SAR membership was the first dig. The genealogy work had been done by my Uncle Tommy in the late 1990s. The line was documented. The patriot ancestor was real. The pride was inherited.
What the SAR membership eventually surfaced for me was a question the genealogy alone could not answer. I knew Thomas Murphy had served. I knew he had paid the supply tax. I knew he had shown up.
I did not know why.
A private in the Salem Militia in 1780 did not show up because the country had a long political philosophy paper convincing him to. He showed up because he had been formed by something. Something that produced men who paid the supply tax in the hard years, who stood when the regulars came, who marched into the Illinois country in February through chest-deep water, who buried their dead on Lexington Green at dawn and called it the beginning of the liberty of the world.
The pride of having a patriot ancestor is a beginning. The honest second question is what formed him. Once a Son of the American Revolution asks that question seriously, he is not in genealogy anymore. He is in the formation tradition that produced the lineage. The lineage is the visible tip. The tradition is the body underneath.
I started reading to find out what had formed Thomas Murphy. The path went back. New Jersey colonial preaching to New England preaching. Election Sermons to covenant theology. The Pilgrims to the Reformers. The Reformers to the Sermon on the Mount. Every link in the chain held weight. The man who paid the supply tax in 1780 was the harvest of every preacher who had carried the Word forward for seven generations before him.
The deeper I read, the more I understood that the duty of a Son of the American Revolution is not finished by joining the chapter. It is finished by recovering what made the Revolution possible in the first place and passing it forward.
That recovery is what this book is.
The Wild Horse
Somewhere in the middle of the reading, the image came.
The wild horse runs across the high plain at dawn. He answers to nothing. He was made for the mountains.
The other horse stands in the pasture with his head down. The fence is low. He could clear it before breakfast. He waits for the next command. He has forgotten he was made for something more.
The American mind in 2026 is the second horse.
The men who built the republic were the first horse. They had been formed by a preached tradition that taught them to stand directly before God, accountable to God, free by the gift of God, answerable to no king in the matters God had reserved to Himself. A man formed this way runs across the high plain at dawn. He cannot be governed by fear in the way a subject can. He has already settled the largest question without asking permission from any human authority.
The American mind today stands in the pasture. The fence is low. The memory is still there. The Word is still on the page. But the man waits for the next command. He has forgotten he was made for something more.
Made for the Mountains is the account of how he got there and the path back. It traces the formation tradition that built the first horse, from the Sermon on the Mount through the Reformation through the Atlantic crossing through the colonial pulpit through the Election Sermons through the Black Robe Regiment through the men on Lexington Green and the circuit riders carrying the Word over the Appalachians in the rain. It shows the tradition working, where it came from, what it produced, why it broke, and how to recover it.
The texts have not changed. The Word has not changed. The mountains have not moved.
Why I Wrote This Book
I wrote this book for the same reason I wrote Forge the Son.
Forge the Son was for my son. A father’s manual for raising sons by the Spirit that built America. The household is the first republic. The father is its first magistrate. The boy is formed in the home before he is formed anywhere else.
Made for the Mountains is the larger frame around the same project. You cannot form a son for a free republic if the mind the republic requires has been broken at the source. The boy formed in the household has to step out into a wider world. The wider world is either still capable of receiving him as the kind of man he was formed to be, or it is not. If the formation tradition that built the wider world is broken, the boy formed in the household has nowhere to go.
The first book formed the son. The second book recovers the mind the son is being formed toward.
I wrote it because the country forgot. The men who built it knew. Their grandsons knew. By the time the inheritance reached my generation, the pride was intact but the knowing was gone. A Son of the American Revolution who only knows the genealogy is carrying half an inheritance. The other half is what made the patriot ancestor a patriot in the first place.
I wrote it because Thomas Murphy paid the supply tax in 1780 and 1781 and somebody in the chain between his life and mine ought to do the work of remembering why.
Why Now
July 4, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration is the closing argument of a sermon the colonial pulpit had been preaching since 1634. The men who signed it were the formation product of seven generations of the Word taken seriously.
There will not be another 250th anniversary. The window for recovering the formation tradition in the year that commemorates its harvest is now.
I wrote this book to be in the hands of the men who want to use this year for that recovery. Not to celebrate the founding as a finished thing in the past. To recover the formation that produced it as a living thing in the present.
What This Book Is
Made for the Mountains is the second volume of The First Republic Series. Forge the Son was Volume One. The same project, larger scale. The household formed the man. The preached Word formed the mind. The two books together are the formation argument from the inside of the home out to the inheritance the home is supposed to produce.
The book is live now on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. The hardcover is the edition for the permanent shelf. The paperback is the standard reading copy. The Kindle is the cheapest entry.
This is the book to read between now and July 4.
The Charge
I am a Son of the American Revolution. So are millions of other Americans who are eligible and have not yet joined, and other millions who are not eligible by lineage but who are sons of the same tradition by formation. The lineage is the visible tip. The tradition is the body underneath.
The duty of a son of the Revolution is not finished by knowing his ancestor served. It is finished by carrying forward what made the ancestor serve. The preaching that formed the men who built the republic is still preachable. The texts are still in print. The Word is still on the page. The mountains have not moved.
Read the book. Send it to a man who needs it. Sit with it before July 4. Take what is recoverable and recover it.
The first horse remembers. The Word is still speaking.
Lift your head.
Value for Value
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a private in the Salem County New Jersey Militia paid the supply tax in the hard years because he had been formed by a tradition that made paying it unthinkable to refuse.
I am the seventh great-grandson of that man. I wrote this book because the formation behind his service is recoverable, and the country that he served deserves to have it recovered before its 250th anniversary.
If this essay gave you something worth having, give something back. Send it to one father who needs to read it. A man who has wondered what built the republic and is ready to do the dig. Post it. Pass it forward. That is how the transmission works.
Made for the Mountains is live on Amazon. Hardcover, paperback, Kindle.
Order on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0czQts7A
Forge the Son, Volume One, is also available: https://a.co/d/0ezYbsTX
If you want to sustain this work through July 4 and beyond, become a paid subscriber. Every essay in this series is one argument built piece by piece toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.
The republic is rebuilt one household at a time.
Start yours.
~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸
Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the author of Forge the Son: A Father’s Manual for Raising Sons by the Spirit That Built America and Made for the Mountains: How the Preached Word Built the Free American Mind and How to Recover It.
amrevresurrected.com | @AmRevResurrect | amrevresurrected.substack.com
Where this first appeared
First published on AmRev Resurrected on June 2, 2026. Read it there.