One of my Bible favorites is the story of Jacob’s Ladder. Jacob was one of the Old Testament Patriarchs. He was the son of Isaac and the father of Joseph (of Technicolor Dreamcoat fame). But before he became a father and the father of a nation, Jacob was a young, restless man wandering in the desert. Like many such young men, Jacob camped out in the wilderness on a journey he was taking from one town to another. While camping in this place, Jacob has a vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder, heaven and earth, to and fro. And he hears from God a promise that he will have abundant offspring and they will together dwell in this land.

In response, Jacob declares: “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:16-17, NCV)

The spirit of God present in this place made itself clear to Jacob, and Jacob responded by building an altar, marking this as a place that is sacred. A place where God dwells. This is a story that repeats itself throughout the scriptures. The Bible is narrated with stories of sacred encounters with God in the wilderness: Moses encountering the Burning Bush and hearing “The place where you stand is holy ground”; Abraham building an altar at the Oaks of Mamre, where he encountered God multiple times; the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus goes to pray before his crucifixion. 

Outside of the Temple, the wilderness is the place where the people of God were most likely to have an encounter with the divine. 

The land is not empty. It is filled with story and memory.

For Christians, our cultural inheritance is a land that is full of story and possibility. A land that is filled with the Spirit of God, if only we take the time to slow down and listen for it.

This experience of coming across a landscape that speaks to your spirit is a sacred experience. It’s an experience that has been felt across cultures and time. It’s an experience that I would guess you, the reader, have experienced. A profound feeling of connection and peace walking into a landscape. An ineffable, indescribable feeling of belonging with the land and creatures that surround you.

That’s an experience worth protecting.

And no law has been more important for acknowledging and protecting these sacred places than the Antiquities Act.

This week marks a significant anniversary: June 8, 2026 is the 120th anniversary of the Act. The Antiquities Act was passed by Congress in 1906 and signed into law by Teddy Roosevelt. It empowers the president to create national monuments from federal lands to protect places of significant cultural and environmental importance. It was designed to protect these places of significance from looting and destruction. To prevent bad actors from exploiting them for personal gain. To protect the stories and the history that these places tell.

Many of our most treasured protected places were originally protected under the Antiquities Act: The Grand Canyon, Acadia, Arches, Joshua Tree, and numerous other places now protected as National Parks. Many places that are sacred to Indigenous peoples, like Chaco Canyon, Grand Staircase Escalante, and Bears Ears. And many places that tell the stories of American history: Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, Stonewall National Monument, World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.

The Antiquities Act protects the places that narrate the sacred stories of America.

And yet, the Act is under attack.

For more than a century, presidents of both political parties have used the Antiquities Act to protect places of cultural, spiritual, scientific, and ecological significance. But today, there are growing efforts to weaken those protections and strip away the president’s authority to safeguard these lands and waters.

In recent years, political leaders and industry groups have attempted to shrink or dismantle national monuments to reopen them to extraction, drilling, mining, and industrial fishing. During the Trump administration's first term, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments were significantly reduced in size, opening millions of acres to potential development. More recently, protections for marine national monuments have also come under attack through efforts to reopen protected waters to commercial exploitation.

At the same time, opponents of the Antiquities Act are pursuing aggressive legal challenges in the courts. These lawsuits argue that landscapes, ecosystems, and marine environments should not qualify as “objects of historic or scientific interest” worthy of protection under the Act. If successful, these challenges would not only threaten existing monuments but could dramatically limit the ability of future generations to protect sacred places before they are destroyed.

Beneath many of these attacks is an old and familiar assumption: that land exists primarily to be extracted from, monetized, and consumed. That a canyon is valuable only for the minerals beneath it. That the ocean is valuable only for the fish that can be harvested from it. That wilderness is empty unless it can be turned into profit.

But the Antiquities Act begins from a different moral imagination.

It recognizes that some places possess a value beyond economic calculation. That these sacred landscapes carry memory, story, and beauty; that there are places so ecologically wondrous, historically meaningful, and spiritually-resonant that they must be protected not for quarterly profit, but for all those who will come after us.

The struggle over the Antiquities Act is ultimately a struggle over whether we will treat the land as sacred inheritance or disposable commodity.

The Antiquities Act is not merely environmental policy. Yes, the implications of the Act are significant for protecting our beautiful environment. But the brilliance of the Act is that it is a law that recognizes that land and story can never be separated. That, in protecting the land, we are protecting the stories of who we have been, who we are, and who we might become.

We may not build altars to God in the wilderness much anymore, but the Antiquities Act is about as close as you can get. By protecting these places, we say: “How awesome is this place,” and protect it so that those who come after us may be able to say the same.