The Anchor: A Fourth Turning Rediscovery

"Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. ¹⁸ God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. ¹⁹ We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain,²⁰ where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek." Hebrews 6:17-20, NIV version (my emphasis in bold)

The Anchor represents stability in times of change

Over the last several years, one word I have heard repeatedly is "unmoored." People say Americans are "unmoored" from our Christian foundation as a nation. We are "unmoored" from tradition. We are "unmoored" from the family structure, community, even our personal sense of identity. The message is clear: Americans feel adrift, and this makes them feel unsafe. They are searching desperately for an anchor; something foundational, eternal, and unchanging that will bring them to rest in a healthy, healing place.

The anchor, a metaphor for hope in the Biblical epistle of Hebrews, connects the idea of salvation with that of descendance and inheritance. It centers salvation on the intercession of Jesus Christ via his death and resurrection in a priesthood that transcends the Levitical tradition, bridging the past and future of humanity with God Himself in human form. And while the promise of land and descendants was promised to the Hebrew families who could trace their lineage to Abraham (the first man recorded to encounter the priest Melchizedek, a "prince of peace"), the promise of salvation and a heavenly inheritance is available to anyone who believes in Jesus, making us adopted children of God.

Therefore, the metaphor of the anchor as hope is a sure one: God endures forever, inside and outside of time. The heart's wish for the unchanging is evidence of humanity's innate desire for God. So, while America feels unmoored, it is not because God does not exist (He does). Rather, it is because we have severed ourselves from the eternal, and denied the truth that holy Scriptures reveal. If our nation wishes to anchor itself once again, we must examine the ways in which our connection has been broken, and turn away from the lies that would betray us to the storms of chaos and evil.

This post is very long, and contains a good deal of thought and ponderance which I have collected over the past year. I apologize; I hope that my wit is up to a task for the soul that my brevity cannot match. If you like, read it in pieces, and decide for yourself what you think of it. Do you disagree? Do you have something to add? As always, you are welcome to contact me (politely) with your comments and ideas. Culture is a collective product; this is my contribution, but it cannot do without yours.

Now, let us explore the metaphor of the anchor in each aspect, and see how deep it will take us.

Heavy & Strong

An anchor must be made of metal, heavy and strong, a force of its own that plunges deep and holds the weight of a ship fast against the waves. It is not flexible, pliant, or billowy like a sail. An anchor is a solid object, authoritative, unbending in its purpose. And yet, much of modernity is premised on flexibility, on softness, on acknowledging spectrums and feelings and social context. While these characteristics have their place, their place isn't everywhere. Insomuch as anyone has a need to "feel seen," he or she also has a deeper, more primal need to know boundaries, chain of command, discipline, and rigor. Nature abhors a vacuum, and where structure is missing, chaos and evil will abound. I like to call it "Who's the Boss? Syndrome" or "WTBS."

In my years of working with volunteer-based and non-profit groups, I've observed WTBS over and over again. When there is no clear leader, or the leader provides little structure, the organization falters. Workers turn to gossip and triangulation because there is no communication from their higher-ups. Cliques form and people silo themselves off into pet projects with little oversight. The greater mission is ignored, because the greater mission requires the coordinated work of many. The organziation begins to resemble a herd of sheep wandering aimlessly across the land. As Scripture puts it, "Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, But happy is one who keeps the Law." (Proverbs 29:18, NASB).

Many times, the leader of a WTBS organization is a very nice person. He or she thinks that rules are harsh, discipline is mean, and liberty without responsibility is a blessing. That leader is wrong, and often he or she is the downfall of organization, which eventually dwindles from happy purposeful activity to disgruntled frustration and futility. Why? Because the weight of the law is what gives it strength. The heft of responsibility is what manifests authority. When a leader exercises authority through discipline, consistent boundaries, and steady vision-casting, he or she creates confidence and competency within the organization. Any serious athlete or artist understands this; there are no trophies or titles for dilettantes. The same is true for leadership: light expectations yield little reward. But hefty expectations, supported by healthy leadership, bring big harvests.

Followers of the "gentle parenting" movement are beginning to rediscover this truth. Like the leader of a "Who's the Boss?" organization, the Gentle Parent is convinced that wielding authority will lead to disaster, trauma, and disorder in the child. The opposite is true. Children who are raised in a bubble of constant affirmation, consolation, and comfort become nothing short of absolute brats. And why wouldn't they? All day long they hear, "You are fragile, infinitely precious, and the most important person here." This message does little to prepare children for life in a difficult, unfair world. It does not help them develop empathy or kindness, valuing others as themselves. And it cannot help them build the muscles of self-reliance or self-confidence, having every emotional and physical need catered to a whim. Moreover, it moves the locus of authority from the parent to the child, which is a weight those tiny shoulders were never meant to bear.

Instead, children must grow into authority just as they grow into their bodies, receiving the gradual weight of instruction in right and wrong, self and other, possibility and responsibility. Authoritative parenting, the middle ground between extremes of authoritarian parenting and permissive parenting, allows natural consequences, with instruction and explanation, to emphasize these laws. In this way, the proper exercise of authority is a gift to the child and to the world. Even teachers, who have sadly become ersatz parents to many wayward children, are learning that holding students more accountable is necessary and beneficial for everyone at school. Yes, it's difficult to follow rules. Yes, it's difficult to enforce them. But it is also good. As the book of Proverbs says, "Discipline your son, and he will give you rest; he will give delight to your heart" -- something the exhausted adherents of gentle parenting rarely experience.

A beautiful example of this is the Newbery Award-winning children's novel The Door in the Wall by Maurguerite de Angeli. When we first meet Robin, a lord's son crippled by disease in the time of England's bubonic plague, the boy is a selfish brat. Having had a privileged, carefree life up to the time of his affliction, Robin throws a bowl of porridge at an aged servant and thinks only of the fun he is missing playing in the streets of London. The suffering of others barely registers in his mind. However, with the guidance of Brother Luke, a monk who cares for Robin at the abbey while his parents are called into royal service, the boy begins to learn strength, faith, and responsibility.

Like a good parent, Brother Luke invests in Robin by offering him a creative outlet with woodcarving. He sets a faithful example for Robin by demonstrating regular works of prayer and service to the abbey. Lastly, he encourages physical discipline, teaching the boy to swim even in cold weather, saying, "Besides, it strengthens thy body and, best of all, it strengthens thy spirit to do a hard thing" (p. 78). It is any surprise that when the castle of Robin's godfather is attacked by the Welsh, Robin is the one who volunteers for a perilous journey to seek help from a neighboring ally? The boy is a hero made through hardship, gold refined by fire. And he knows where the boundaries stand.

As the United States continues to renegotiate the rules in every aspect from the military to the border to the criminal justice system, it's worth remembering the guidelines that assisted our founding fathers in the very creation of our sovereign nation: deep contemplation of natural law, philosophy, history, and the great commandments of the the Bible. Liberty and self-governance is a delicate balance between the rights of the individual and the well-being of the many. But it works when it is rooted in that which is heavy and strong.

Securely Attached

An anchor must be securely attached to the ship via rope or chain in order to be useful. If that cord of connection is cut, the anchor is rendered futile, a mere hunk of metal rusting on the ocean floor. However, in a postmodern world, connection and meaning are intentionally severed, "disruption" becomes a goal, and relationships turn increasingly transactional. Can it be any wonder that nihilism and an overall sense of hopelessness are the result?

I believe the most crucial point of this problem is family. If you have not seen it, please take some time and view the documentary Birthgap (free on YouTube) by demographer Stephen J. Shaw. Using data and evidence collected over four years and twenty-four countries, Shaw dives deep into birth rate statistics to discover a startling fact: the world population is in decline, set on that course by a massive drop in birth rates. But why?

According to Shaw, there are various factors that set the decline curve into motion in different countries. However, it seems the inciting incident is usually some kind of national economic setback that convinces women to push off childbearing into their later years. Then, when women feel "ready" to have children, their bodies disagree: advanced maternal age affects fertility more than most expect, leaving them with fewer children or none. But again, why are women doing this?

I believe the answer is simple: a spirit of fear.

A spirit of fear yields a shrinking, distrustful, hoarding mentality, one that is quite evident in contemporary life. It avoids attachment, expects pain, and is brittle, non-resilient. It holds no hope for the future, races to the bottom, and looks for the best ways to extract value instead of being generous. For an example, look no further than the current animosity between men and women in the dating world. Traditionally, courtship was the first step towards marriage, which would then lead to childbearing. But what happens when marriage is discouraged?

In her insightful Substack post "The Pressure To Be Single", columnist Freya India eloquently explains how families of young women today enforce a culture of detachment:

"Parents are judgemental only when it comes to commitment. They worry about their daughter closing down options; they feel she is too young to commit, even when she is the same age they were, sometimes older. Announce you’re getting married in your twenties and complete strangers will rush to tell you horror stories about affairs and divorce and heartbreak. Why would you do that to yourself? Don’t do what I did, throw those years away. [...] The dominant pressure in liberal culture, then, is to delay, to detach, to stay permanently available. We are permitted only one loyalty, and that’s to ourselves. The longer you stay single the stronger you are; the women with the most worth keep waiting."

However, India digs deeper into the root of these parental fears, saying, "We thought the answer to the failed marriages and broken families and mess we made over the past few decades was less commitment when it was clearly more," explaining that "We become ourselves through other people. Happiness comes from caring for others yet we are telling a generation to put that off for as long as possible, to arrange their lives so almost nothing is ever asked of them."

It's a strange form of hoarding, this obligatory keeping of the self: one's time, one's body, one's obligations. But, like any other form of hoarding, it is driven by fear: fear that you must provide for yourself at all costs, especially the expense of relationships that would help most in a crisis. Friends and family is the real answer, not stuff and self.

This lack of attachment has an ugly mirror image at the other end of life. It is not only the young, but also the old who must contend with the consequences of a child-free life. One of the saddest scenes in Birthgap takes place in Japan, where Shaw and his assistant travel to the hometown of a young teacher who cannot have children of her own. This northern suburb of Tokyo, which the young woman remembers as full of bustling shops and playing children, is now a ghost town. Worse, while conversing with some of the town's remaining residents, they learn that the elderly there are so despressed and lonely they have begun to commit suicide by throwing themselves from the balconies of their apartments.

In America, a more sanitized version of the opt-out comes from Baby Boomers residing in Florida's premiere retirement community, The Villages. Living by choice apart from their children and grandchildren, residents of The Villages aren't exactly exemplars of the evolutionary "grandmother hypothesis", which claims the purpose of post-menopausal women is to help provide food and care for their grandchildren. Nor are they the elders of Paul's epistle to Titus, which exhorts older men to dignified self-control and older women to temperance and mentorship of young wives and mothers. Instead, acccording to Sam Kriss's expose in The Lamp Magazine (quoted by Louise Perry), "The message of The Villages is this: that the true purpose of human life is to have fun, to drink and play golf." In an unnatural extension of youthful independence, these retirees "have absconded from their duty as old people, which is to be the link between the future and the past—because the world doesn’t have a past anymore, and precious little future either. You are suspended in an infinite present. You still wear blue jeans. You will never die."

But the pretence of immortatility only goes so far. Kriss goes on to explain how The Village residents' lifestyle erases their legacy, leaving them broke, alone and untraceable:

"They’ve spent their pensions on margaritas and golf carts. Hospice care is expensive, so their homes are sold while they’re still dying, and someone like [estate agent] Jason will move some other retiree right in, another lonely person eager to start having fun. Most of the people who die in The Villages end up being cremated. This pleasure-machine, built to delight you with cheap drinks and dancing every night, also systematically burns stacks upon stacks of dead bodies. People who will have no graves to visit."

Where is the legacy? Where is the hope for the future that family and inheritance are supposed to represent? Where is the love and committment that ties these together? And why would anyone want to live (or die) this way?

Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, says this short-lived trick of cutting out community to establish independence has its benefits: mostly, big money, like the "silver tsunami" of retirement funds that some Boomers have built up over their lifetimes (later to be drained by the corporate trifecta of 55+ funhouses, elder care facilities, and Big Pharma). While it makes sense that the young, fit, and upwardly mobile would seek some independence from their immediate families and communities of origin, when that pattern is prolonged it wreaks havoc on the social fabric. In Perry's words, "reinventing those systems is likely to prove hard, and it will carry costs. [...] But there’s a way through for any group capable of reinventing what the Medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyyah’: literally, family binding, otherwise understood as social cohesion and shared purpose."

Part of the joy of having children of my own has been sharing my past with them. As such, our family enjoys watching old Christmas movies from the Gen X era: Frosty the Snowman, A Christmas Story, and my sons' favorite, Home Alone. With its quick-witted kid hero Kevin McCallister taking on two bad guys with a series of inventive (and painful) booby traps, there's a lot for young boys to love about Home Alone. But as an adult, the most meaningful part of this evergreen classic is the importance of family ties. Kevin, a spoiled brat, first wishes to be home alone and later prays for his family to be reunited. Kevin's mother moves heaven and earth to get back to her little boy. Meanwhile, Kevin's father, siblings, and extended family watch It's a Wonderful Life (a bit of clever story-seeding in which the protagonist learns how his particular life is inextricably bound to the future of his family and friends) while waiting for their chance to return home and be together.

But the most surprising parallel, and one that missed me completely until it was pointed out by Pastor Josh Howerton's Lakepointe Church podcast, is the life of Kevin's neighbor, Old Man Marley. With a name that gives a nod to Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol, Biblical references abound from this character. The neighbor shuffles through the snow next door, literally "salting the earth" as he scrapes his walkway. His bandaged hands remind us of Christ's wounds, and his estranged son evokes humanity's separation from God due to sin. But at the film's end, when Kevin watches from the window as Old Man Marley greets his own family with open arms next door, we see the once-wounded hand held up to the watcher in testimony, now fully healed.

Rediscovering the anchor means becoming and staying securely attached to one another, despite the discomfort and despite the cost. It requires empathy and farsight, a willingness to sacrifice the present for the future. Like any real investment, it depends on hope, time, and hard work. But the benefits are tangible, for those who are willing to try. If you can find someone who shares your purpose in life, bind yourself to them in love. Moreover, no matter your relationships with your family, so long as you breathe you have a chance return to God. He will never forsake those who choose to join his family, and His perfect love casts out fear.

Fixed in Place

Ships, like sheep, can be wandering things. Sail a boat into a harbor, and the waves can easily run it aground, the tide can draw it back out into the deep, or wind can drive it into rocks or other vessels. But with the anchor dropped, a ship can rest because it is now fixed safely in place, exactly where it should be.

People, like ships and sheep, are easily led astray. So often our minds are focused on the present, like a sheep is focused on the next mouthful of grass. While we're getting ourselves fat and happy, it's easy to forget the plight of our fellow man; even easier to forget our future man. But the Christian faith calls for us to think beyond the present. It calls us to regard our lives as threads in a great tapestry of time, as eternal souls whose actions have eternal, interwoven consequences, as ancestors and descendants whose lives are part of a living legacy.

A legacy is, in simple terms, a gift from the past for the benefit of the future. It can take many shapes: money, land, works of art, titles of nobility, ways of living, wisdom of the ages, and descendants themselves. But to provide a legacy is to have a generous heart, hope for the future, and good character. Good character, however, cannot come from nowhere. Proverbs 13, which says in verse 22, "A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children," also contains a myriad of instructions about virtue and vice. Why? Again, the reason is deceptively simple: virtue creates hope, sustains peace, and promotes life. Vice invites despair, destruction, and death.

In an article for The Spectator aptly titled "Nihilism is destroying young minds," columnist Katherine Dee explores the connection between the symptoms of societal illness from school shootings to the sexually explicit furry-fetish community; namely, the internet. In Dee's words,

"America’s epidemics of despair have combined with technological access to make violence imaginable to people who, in another era, might have found solace in work, family or steady civic life. [...] These are not anomalies. They are signals that America’s crisis is not only political or technical but spiritual: the routinization of despair, the auditioning for obliteration."

As the Birthgap documentary powerfully illustrates, this obliteration is not simply metaphorical. From the dawn of the human race, the promise of children has represented hope for the future. Eve was declared an ancestor of Jesus and the mother of all living; Abraham was vowed inheritants as numerous as the stars. David was promised a descendant Redeemer; Mary gave birth to Him in David's own hometown centuries later. What happens when fear prevents childbirth? When, as NBC discovered in a recent poll, marriage and childbearing rank last on young women's list of priorities? Or when many adults would rather own a pet than be a parent?

When Freya India says the answer to our fractured family relationships is more committment, not less, I think she speaks the truth. But it is, as Katherine Dee and Louise Perry point out, very difficult to create healthy committment without examples. In Birthgap, Stephen J. Shaw finds Japan having some success by offering demo days, in which nervous prospective parents can spend a day with young families to better understand what that lifestyle involves. But for those who are unable to experience a good family life (or virtue of any kind) IRL, stories can provide a bridge for the imagination.

I've been thinking a lot about the reason that modern stories are so vapid and forgettable these days. Because our family loves to read, I am always on the lookout for good books to lay in my children's path, but it's difficult to find stories that suit our standards. After considering several theories, I believe the reason for today's story desert is this: Modern writers confuse influence for persuasion.

Christian writer and Substacker G.M. Baker says the purpose of stories is to make people wise and brave. I agree! Moreover, I think that a story done well persuades people to make different, wiser choices. For example, consider the Shakespearean tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Arguably, the titular Motague and Capulet kids have a deficiency of wisdom and an excess of bravado, what with their daring plot to marry and run away (and kill themselves when it doesn't work out). But hey, they're teenagers. The real point, as the Prince makes abundantly clear at the end, is that the adults in the room have been even more foolish, letting their longstanding fued fester into senseless violence to the point that it destroys their legacy and wreaks havoc on fair Verona, the city where they live. As readers, we are supposed to take that information and incorporate it into our own lives, (Note to self: bury the hatchet and let your kids live in peace).

Being wise and brave means having something solid to point to, an exemplar, a pole star, a due north. If we are wise, we know what is right to do in a given situation. If we are brave, we do the right thing, regardless of control over the outcome. In the Bible, a suffering man named Job, who lost wealth, family, home, and health for a test of his faith called his wife foolish when she suggested he curse God and die. Why? Because Job, being wise and brave, knew it was wrong to curse God, and because he was determined to remain righteous even though he was in sorrow and pain.

But for those who have no solid sense of the absolutes, influence supercedes persuasion. As guest columnist Michael Ventura writes in the New York Times, "Empathy that connects, that builds, that heals requires a code of ethics. It requires restraint. It requires trust. It asks the empathizer not just to understand others but also to honor what understanding unlocks. When empathy becomes unmoored from ethics, it becomes coercion with a smile." Where persuasion is a pull, influence is a push. If the only Almighty in your life is the dollar, then self-interested influence is always justified.

Today's storytellers, by and large, aren't here to teach you: they're here to scold you, to hook you, or to confuse you. Whether it's the profileration of wokeness, smut, or meandering "your experience was the art" stories, none of them are here to make you wise or brave. They're here to sell you something: a lifestyle in which they're invested (because differing opinions aren't allowed), another book to arouse you (because now you're addicted and you can't stop), or the approval of others (because books are handy intelligence-signalling props).

I'm so thankful for the legacy left by the female authors of my favorite books as a girl and young woman, stories that gently persuaded me to do and believe what is right. But I'm also fully convinced that it was the influence of Christianity that allowed them to do so, and that has made their works enduring classics. L.M. Montgomery's Anne Shirley-Blythe (Anne of Green Gables series) taught me to treasure my imagination and nurture my sense of humor. Louisa May Alcott's Jo March-Bhaer (Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys) showed me how to cherish femininity and masculinity without stereotypes. Jane Austen's Fanny Price (Mansfield Park) encouraged me to hold fast to my convictions in the face of overwhelming opposition. Charlotte Bronte's eponymous Jane Eyre exhorted me to value myself regardless of my circumstances.

But Montgomery was married to a minister, Alcott was the niece of one, and Austen and Bronte both had clergyman fathers. From an early age, they inherited the truths of the Christian faith, and have successfully passed those on to us, even though most of them had no children of their own. If we, like them, wish to have an enduring legacy in our art and our personal lives, we must cling to that which is fixed in place and teach others to do so as well. Conviction will lead to persuasion if it is deep enough to permeate every aspect of our lives.

Fully Integrated (not "self-actualized")

How do we teach others to hold fast in hard times? How do we reconcile the needs of the individual in the present with collective humanity in the future? How do we live lives that unify the heavy and strong, securely attached, and fixed in place? The anchor, a lasting symbol of hope, is the fully integrated example of that wholeness, and guides us to our rightful place in life.

The premise of the book Living With Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults is that the goal of human development is to reach a state of self-actualization. This is consistent with a humanistic philosophy that believes in the "fundamentally good" nature of human beings. However, this philosophy is flawed, because it denies the truth of original sin: that human beings are inherently selfish and inclined to evil. Many a person fancies himself or herself a self-actualized "great reformer" who can use influence and weaponized empathy to sell social change. But what we actually need are more people who are fully integrated: those who can incorporate religious truth, healthy social practice, and a robust work ethic to live within the community, not dictate it from afar.

In a guest post for The Culturalist on Substack, legacy adviser and author Johann Kurtz provides five ways for individuals to establish their families with a "thousand-year mindset": Never neglect fundamentals; Assert family rituals; Ensure your family has faith and knows duties; Assert identity, mission, and values; Arrange estates to bring powerful obligations. While Kurtz goes into greater detail on each of these points, the idea I find most salient is this:

"It is not wealth as such that is spiritually poisonous, but the sense of pointlessness that can arise in a life in which man desires only what he can easily buy. "

America is a wealthy nation not only in the financial sense, but also in the political one. Our standard of living is higher not just because of our wealth, but because of the freedom and security our founding fathers created for us. Attempts to systematically rob us of our nation's heroes by degrading and erasing them deserve to be met with anger and contempt, because those who attempt such things mean to steal our good inheritance. They either fundamentally misunderstand or purposefully misinterpret the reason we venerate America's heroes: not to idolize them, but to perpetuate a sense of responsibility in their successors. Our freedom isn't pointless, and it isn't license for self-indulgence: it's a precious gift that we must treat with respect.

I believe it is the disrespect of our legacy that is at the heart of our national civil conflict, one that is being echoed around the world. Defense of history, territory, culture, and religious practice play out against aggressions from the other side, each warring for dominance in a fundamentally primal way: it is the victor who writes the history books, the winners who create the future, the survivors who inherit the land.

This hit me especially hard while watching the end of the 1997 miniseries adaptation of The Odyssey. When Odysseus arrives home, he finds his wife Penelope being courted by a band of corrupt noblemen who loaf around his palace all day drinking his wine, consuming his livestock, and seducing his maids. While they secretly plot to kill Odysseus' son Telemachus, they vie for the hand of Penelope, pressing her until she is forced to make a decision. Finally, convinced her husband is dead, Penelope devises a contest to determine her choice: the suitors must string Odysseus' famous bow and use it to shoot an arrow through the holes of twelve axes.

First disguised as a beggar, Odysseus bests the suitors by the contest of the bow (after they have all failed). Then he reveals himself: the king has returned, and now he will have his revenge on them all. In desperation, they cry out in defence, the ringleader Antinous asking what crime they have committed that warrants so severe judgement. Odysseus replies:

“Your crime is that you tried to steal my world, the world I built with my hands, and my sweat, and my blood, the world I shared with a woman who bore me my son; and no one will ever take that from me. Now you will die to a man in a river of blood.”

In other words, the suitors were never benign in their intent. They wished to steal Odysseus' legacy: his hard work, his family, his future, his home-- everything worth living and fighting for.

This is the Fourth Turning: the cyclical struggle for the future of a nation. Postponed, forestalled, but inevitably violent. America's sesquicentennial year, 2026, has already begun to resemble civil war more than celebration. Why? For the same reason that Odysseus could not lay down his bow and extend a hand of friendship to his rivals: it was a matter of life and death. If he did not fight, he would lose everything. From the Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota to the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, the great unanswered question is this: To whom does America belong?

I don't know the answer-- not yet. Civil conflicts only end with imperfect compromises, once will to fight is exhausted. But it is clear to me that a surviving America, with its unique form of government, religious freedom, and economic opportunity, must be one that is anchored in truth and fully integrated. And if we ourselves have no integrity, do we deserve so rich a bounty as the one we have received? Or are we merely prodigal sons, wasting our inheritance on the pleasures of the moment instead of patiently investing in our future?

At present, I would say we resemble the prodigal far too much. The good news is that according to the Bible, even prodigal sons get second chances when they repent their sins and return home. Maybe America is finally ready to do just that. For the sake of my children, I certainly hope so.

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