America is great because America is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
Those words often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville (though in truth their origin remains much murkier) cut right to core of what makes America great: her goodness.
But today, too many Americans reject the very idea that America is good.
Our schools poison students with the lie that our American experiment has been flawed from the beginning because of sins such as slavery and that, as a result, we must replace the founding values of faith and freedom with a fundamentally new and different system of values often based on Marxist ideologies.
This shift makes some sad sense when you consider that America’s goodness has always been tied to the Godliness of her citizens.
The author of the quote attributed to de Tocqueville says that he searched for America’s greatness in many places but “not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.”
To be sure, there’s always been great variation among the religious beliefs of Americans, and Americans have always valued—and enshrined in our constitutional order—a respect and a demand for religious liberty.
But there’s little doubt that today church attendance and even adherence to a Christian worldview are declining. Once prominent mainline Protestant denominations are poised to fade away within a generation. And no wonder. They often espouse views in direct contradiction to Biblical decrees and take theological positions that would be anathema to congregants only a few generations ago.
Today’s pulpits don’t so much flame with righteousness as flirt with feel-good messaging.
The results have been dire. As Americans have fled from churches and Christianity, so too has our nation fled from God—or at least public acknowledgments of Him and His attributes.
In a series of diktats dating back to the 1960s, the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools, banned the Bible from those schools, and banned displays of the Ten Commandments on governmental grounds. Somehow, the justices contorted the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits Congress from establishing or endorsing any particular religion, to mean that any mention, tangentially tied to any governmental entity, of God, Christianity, or especially Jesus Christ in the public sphere is forbidden.
This ahistorical interpretation of the establishment clause can’t be squared with the understanding and practices of our founding generation who regularly gave thanks for God’s blessings and invoked pleas for God’s mercies in a variety of public and private places.
More tragically, this capacious view of the establishment clause has given short shrift to the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. For over half a century, Americans’ ability to freely exercise their religious beliefs in the public square has taken a backseat to the fear that a school teacher saying a prayer might establish a religion.
But there’s hope.
The Supreme Court in recent years has overturned many—but not all—of its problematic precedents in the establishment clause context. And many Americans are rightly outraged that Jack Phillips, a Colorado cake baker, has spent nearly a decade in litigation for merely living his life in accordance with his religious beliefs.
More Americans too are recognizing that it’s not discriminatory to talk about basic biological differences between men and women. And that it’s morally wrong to treat people differently based on their race despite what DEI advocates proclaim.
But there are flashpoints, particularly around abortion. After the Supreme Court overturned its problematic precedent that created a constitutional right to abortion—something unknown throughout America’s history until Roe v. Wade in 1973—the issue has been returned to Americans and their elected representatives to decide.
Would a nation fearful of God’s judgment allow the unmitigated murder of unborn children? Doubtful. And yet that’s exactly what some states like California and New York have done.
There’s no denying that laws and systems of government reflect the mores and values of the people who establish them.
So what do ours say about us?
As John Adams famously wrote to his wife, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Without God, there can be no goodness. And without goodness, there can be no greatness—at least none worth having. May we, like our founding generation, pray for God to guide us and to bless us with His goodness and His greatness. Without that, little else matters.
