American governance and the path to our best future
Anti-ICE protests were staged in cities across the US over the weekend. Bikers also participated in memorial rides for Alex Pretti, who was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis last month. Over two hundred such rides took place across forty-three states.
In other news, the US government partially shut down over the weekend as dozens of federal agencies saw their funding lapse at 12 a.m. Saturday. And President Trump named Kevin Warsh to become Federal Reserve chair, but the process for confirmation by the Senate may be in doubt.
Here’s what these stories have in common: they illustrate features in America’s governance, not bugs. This is a fact that matters far beyond its political implications.
Equality vs. checks and balances
Public demonstrations have long been part of the American story, as the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the recent “March for Life” in Washington, DC, illustrate. Such events stand in marked contrast to the recent massacre of protesters in Iran and the 1989 murder of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Communist Party.
Our partial government shutdown occurred because the Senate approved a funding package late Friday, but the House is not expected to vote on it until tomorrow at the earliest. Mr. Warsh’s confirmation by the Senate may be blocked by Sen. Thom Tillis, not because he is opposed to the president’s nominee, but because he wants an investigation into the current Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, to be “fully and transparently resolved” first.
In each case, we are seeing the juxtaposition of America’s founding declaration that “all men are created equal” with the constitutional provision of checks and balances against unaccountable power.
Citizens can seek to persuade our leaders and otherwise catalyze change through lawful protests and public gatherings. The various branches of government can also leverage their influence toward the common good. And even individuals serving in leadership can have an outsized role in our governance.
This system has helped an amazingly disparate and diverse nation achieve a level of solidarity and progress that few Europeans foresaw at its birth. But no nation’s future is guaranteed, including ours.
Our “most grievous cultural wound”
I have long appreciated the work of New York Times columnist David Brooks. I do not agree with all he writes, but I appreciate the reasoned way he seeks to advance his vision of American flourishing.
I was therefore surprised on Friday to read that he is leaving the Times after twenty-two years. In his final column, he diagnoses our cultural condition once more:
Four decades of hyperindividualism expanded individual choice but weakened the bonds between people. . . . As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.
The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. . . . Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred—sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals—and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization, and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.
In other words, we want the benefits of consensual governance without the necessity of a consensual morality. But human laws cannot change human nature. At best, they can restrain some of us from harming others some of the time. They cannot produce the “shared moral order” that leads to the flourishing our Founders envisioned for us.
What can?
“Honest but reluctant taxpayers”
At this point, you probably expect me to recommend biblical morality as our essential cultural foundation. But here’s the problem: such morality requires our unconditional commitment. The Bible calls us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30, my emphases).
When did you last spend a day loving God with “all” your heart?
I am no different. I am just as tempted by partial obedience as you are. It is appealing to have my cake and eat it as well, to do what God requires to obtain his blessing but no more.
- S. Lewis observed in his last sermon:
Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of an income tax in principle. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a rise in the tax. We are very careful to pay no more than is necessary. And we hope—we very ardently hope—that after we have paid it there will still be enough left to live on.
But partial obedience can lead only to partial benefits. The more unconditionally we are committed to our marriage, our children, our work, or our friends, the more we experience the best such relationships can offer.
It is the same with God. Our Father cannot bless what harms his children, and anything outside his will is sin (James 4:17) that enslaves us (John 8:34) and “brings forth death” (James 1:15). As Lewis noted in his sermon, “When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, [God] claims all.”
How, then, can we give him “all”?
“I have now concentrated all my prayers into one”
Jesus promised, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). “Love” translates agape, the unconditional commitment to place the other before ourselves. When we love Jesus like this, he said, “you will keep my commandments.” Not might, but will.
Here’s the good news: agape is a “fruit” of the Spirit, not of human effort (Galatians 5:22). When we submit ourselves to him daily (Ephesians 5:18), he produces this fruit in our lives daily. The Spirit thus enables us to love our Lord so fully that we naturally and inevitably keep his commandments.
As the pastor and author Erwin Lutzer noted, “When you surrender your will to God, you discover the resources to do what God requires.” And doing “what God requires” positions us to experience his best in and through our lives, advancing the “shared moral order” that Brooks identifies as foundational to our cultural future.
Charles Spurgeon testified,
“I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is that I may die to self and live wholly to him.”
Let us make his “one prayer” ours today, to the glory of God.
Quote for the day:
“Few souls understand what God would accomplish in them if they were to abandon themselves unreservedly to him and if they were to allow his grace to mold them accordingly.” —St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556)
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