When a civilization loses touch with its inspiration, there are only three broad options: renewal, replacement, or decline. The year 2026 gives America not only a baseline in the American Revolution but a benchmark today to really see where the Republic is now—what can be truly celebrated and what needs to be put right.
Free society is rare. Lasting free society is rarer still, and 250 years is no mean achievement. We’re told that this is the golden age of America. We need to use this year, however, not only for a genuine celebration and a true thanksgiving, but for a time of serious self-reflection, confession, and rededication to what made America great in the first place. Many talk of making America great again, but very few can tell you what actually made it great in the first place. It was not the economy and it was not the military. America was a nation by intention and by ideas, and it is those fundamental first ideas that have been lost today. The challenge is to think more widely, more deeply, and more constructively in terms of solutions.
Thinking More Widely: Our Civilizational Moment
As we think more widely, we realize we are in a civilizational moment. Civilizations rise, flourish, mature, decline, and fall. And where are the great civilizations of history? In ruins, in museums, and in history books. They decline; they fell. Civilizations rise by some inspiration, some dynamism, but at a certain point they lose touch with whatever made them great. Obviously, what is needed is renewal of whatever the inspiration was; then secondly, replacement of something equally adequate; or thirdly, decline occurs. Right now, a renewal of the Christian dynamism of the West is sorely needed.
But to go even wider than that, we not only have barbarians at the gates, but we have barbarians within the walls and there is a shifting of the tectonic plates. In the last decades, we’ve seen a swing from the focus on the West to Eurasia. Eurasia has the largest landmass in the world, has always been authoritarian. Shifts in the West and in the East indicate the other shift to power—unprincipled, unbridled power.
Friedrich Nietzsche fought all his life for what he called a revaluation of values, subverting the Christian subversion of pagan Europe. His last words were: “Do you want a name for my world? This world is the will to power and nothing besides.” You add to that social Darwinism, postmodernism, truth is dead, everything’s power, and you can see the grand global menace of our world today is power. And you can see that it’s not only the left, although authoritarianism there is very obvious. In the last few years we’re seeing a growing authoritarianism in conservatism turning right and doing things in terms of power without principle and without persuasion. The growing global danger today is unprincipled, unbounded power and even in the best causes in the world, that’s dangerous. The Bible and the early American experiment of the Republic are emphatically against the abuse of power.
Thinking More Deeply: Causes of Polarization
Now let’s think more deeply, looking at America more closely. What is the cause of the polarization in this country? The deepest cause is the difference in those who understand freedom and the republic from the perspective of 1776 and the American Revolution, largely biblical, and those who understand freedom in America today from the perspective of ideas going back to the French Revolution—1789, not 1776. Postmodernism, critical race theory, radical multiculturalism all come from the French Revolution and its heirs and have nothing to do with the American Revolution. Yet, in many parts of this country, they are what is in control and believe me, no power pushback alone will work.
You’ve got to win people back through persuading hearts and minds and setting up the choice again. Just as Moses told his people, “I’ve put before you life and death, choose life,” and as Lincoln said, “You can’t be a house divided, half slave, half free.” America has to choose. America can’t be half 1776 and half 1789. Some leader has to set up the choice and call the nation to choose. But ideological polarization is not the end, for there’s also an institutional polarization—the tension between the elites and ordinary people. This isn’t uniquely American, but here, there is a gap between the elites and the specialists and the experts and ordinary people. That gap undermines any notion of the equality of all people.
There’s a third level of the crisis, which some have called cultural climate change. In other words, the crisis of faith mixed with a crisis of truth, mixed in with a crisis of the family and with ethics. The family and the school are supposed to be downstream from faith; politics is supposed to be downstream from the family and the school, but with this crisis, politics becomes the be-all and end-all of everything. Consequently, what’s called civil society or the golden matrix of citizenship has broken down, so everything now is politicized.
This crisis of cultural climate change has gone very deep in American society, and we need to get back to a faithfulness in these areas—even in the church. There are two extremes in the church. Many people so careful for the faith have made it private—they’re overly privatized; they don’t engage with public life because it’s dirty. Others have engaged to the point that politics has become everything even instead of their faith. We must think constructively, for we of all people are the ones who bring hope into the situation.
Thinking More Constructively: Stating and Living the Good News
As followers of Jesus with the good news, we need to bring forward the positive and constructive elements that made America great. We must be the bearers of the good news of what it was and not only state it, but we must live it out ourselves in every part of our lives. The grounding for America’s concept of freedom comes from the Bible. The Lord is transcendent. He’s not part of creation—he’s transcendent above and beyond creation and he made humans in his image. And as the Jews and great writers like C. S. Lewis point out, freedom is where we most resemble our creator. It’s the biblical grounding of freedom that gives us freedom and today you don’t have that in the secular world, so if you have declined, you fall. That’s it.
But that is not the biblical pairing—decline and fall. This is the good news we state and live. The biblical pairing is exile and return. Exile tells us that we leave the way of the Lord and there are consequenc es— spiritual, personal, social. Adam and Eve were sent east of Eden. Cain became a wanderer on the earth. Israel was a captive under Babylon—and you go on down the line. We know the same story of God’s people in various times. When we leave the way of the Lord, the result is exile. But the glorious thing in the scripture is that exile is not the end; instead, there’s the possibility of return. I’m intrigued when people talk about this in America and instantly go to 2 Chronicles 7:14.
“If my people” were the words of the Lord, but Solomon didn’t follow them. He flouted what God told kings to do and not to do in his love for too many women and too many foreign gods and too much looking after his own monuments. And at the end of the story, you have the very same language as in Exodus of the horror of being under slavery with Israelites who were conscripts. Solomon spends more time building his own palace than he did in the temple of the Lord and he becomes, as the rabbis put it, a Hebrew Pharaoh. You don’t make a country great again by building great monuments.
Instead, exile and return goes back to the first great prophet, Moses, and goes all the way through the prophets to the last Jewish prophet, Malachi. And it’s always the same. If you return to me, says the Lord, I will return to you and restore your fortunes. And of course that happened. Think of Nehemiah. The lost 10 tribes were literally acculturated into oblivion. They became Assyrian. They were acculturated into oblivion as much of today’s church in the West is. But Nehemiah and Ezra humanly saved Judaism. How? Bringing people back to the covenant, back to the Torah, back to the way of the Lord—this saved Judaism. Now, of course, we see the same story in the church, times of corruption, times of decline, times of incredible shame and then, thank God, awakening and revival and return to him.
One of the final points of freedom is the freedom to repent and turn back to the Lord. Many know the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, implying an about turn of heart, mind, and spirit, but not so many know the Hebrew word, teshuvah. It also means an about turn of heart, mind, and spirit, but it also means coming home. People come back to truth, back to reality like the prodigal son, who came to himself in a far country and then came home. That meaning of repentance is what America needs this year—a coming home.
Articulate Champions of the Better Way
In this year of celebration, we need to pray. There’s an incredible amount to give thanks for, but this should be a year of confession, asking the Lord’s mercy for what’s gone wrong. Then we need to ask for a year of rededication and clear understanding of the first principles of freedom and justice, those mostly biblical principles that came through the Reformation and the rediscovery of the so-called Hebrew Republic. Then we have to be the articulate champions of that better way—living it out, not just saying it.
Each of us needs to be a living example showing that faithfulness is at the heart of everything. Our relevance in this country will be in direct proportion to our faithfulness to the Lord. We know that worldliness and being acculturated into oblivion is the danger. By God’s grace, we need a reformation. May this be a year of celebration, confession, rededication, and above all, homecoming.
