Toward an American Renewal

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I’m doing my part to help celebrate. That means, of course, sharing stories. I’ve recast both my website and my newsletter to focus on “the good, true, and beautiful.” You’ll find evidence of all three in my recent and future coverage.

Good, true, and beautiful things are the heart of classical-Christian education. The God of the Bible hardwired them into all human beings. We’re meant to spend our lives working to uphold them—not just because the pursuit is worthwhile, but because they point us back to Him.

Perhaps more than ever, we Americans need to find our way back to the truth. We’re at a critical juncture, riven by deep divisions. These divisions aren’t political, despite what our formerly truthful Fourth Estate would have us believe. The battles we’re fighting are spiritual. The stakes are the future of Western civilization.

We’ll win if we restore our failing K-12 and higher-education systems. We’ll win if we commit to shepherding our youngest, most impressionable minds along the path to truth. The wisest among us—Os Guinness, Wilfred McClay, Victor Davis Hanson, and the late Charlie Kirk, to name a few—have acknowledged this.

At Hillsdale College’s spring convocation, professor and historian Wilfred McClay said, “A republican form of government cannot exist for long let alone thrive if it does not elicit and reinforce the loyalty, and competence, and love of its citizenry. An education that refuses to address these things, refuses to situate them on solid ground, an education that blithely declares that such things are ‘not its job,’ will undermine a republic rather than support it. Doing the necessary things, and doing them with energy and conviction, that has to be somebody’s job. Perhaps America’s 250th is the right moment for us to begin thinking about why this job must be done, and done better than it has been.”

This is the right moment. If we fail to seize it, the civilizational decline on full display since 2020 will gallop apace. According to Os Guinness, “[T]he irony is that Americans, whose founders addressed the issue [of sustainability] as shrewdly as anyone in history, now pay scant attention to their founders or to the sustainable freedom that underlies their strength and prosperity. And Americans indulge this neglect at the very moment when they can least afford to—the moment that spells out the blunt alternative: renewal or decline.”

In his final book, Stop, In the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life, Charlie Kirk wrote, “In a culture where the lines between good and evil have grown increasingly blurred, a monotheistic worldview provides the necessary anchor for moral clarity. Without belief in a transcendent, unchanging source of goodness, morality becomes little more than social consensus or personal preferences—easily reshaped by emotion, peer pressure, or cultural trends. The next generation, growing up amid moral relativism and digital noise, is increasingly untethered from any objective framework that defines what is right, just, or true. Monotheism teaches that goodness is not invented by humans; it is revealed by a God who is Himself the measure of all virtue.”

Reaching back to the Founders, remembering what their intentions were, and recovering objective truth—this is how we achieve renewal. I look forward to striving for it together.