Steve Scott
America’s crisis isn’t primarily about policy. It’s about identity. We have forgotten who we are.
A nation that once understood rights as God-given now treats them as government-granted privileges. Our children are taught what to think, not how to think. Our politics has devolved into tribal warfare because we’ve abandoned the moral order that transcends party loyalty. And government expands in direct proportion to our spiritual poverty.
The remedy won’t come from Washington. It requires recovering three foundational truths our Founders knew but we have forgotten.
First: Education Must Liberate, Not Indoctrinate
Walk into most American public schools today, and you’ll find not education, but conditioning. Critical Race Theory repackages children by skin color. Gender ideology tells five-year-olds their bodies lie to them. American history is taught as an unbroken narrative of oppression rather than the story of ordered liberty’s greatest triumph.
This is ideological capture. Once young hearts and minds are seized by ideology, they harden. Reason gives way to slogans. Dialogue becomes impossible.
Real education asks the perennial questions: Who am I? What is truth? What constitutes the good life? These are nonpartisan, human questions. Yet our schools refuse to ask them, drifting instead into nihilism and filling the void with resentment and grievance. A generation raised on ideology rather than wisdom cannot sustain self-government.
The solution 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. Give them philosophy before activism, logic before ideology. Education should produce citizens who can think, not subjects who can 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 the fabric of reality. Christianity teaches it. Judaism teaches it. Even the ancient Vedic tradition of India recognized that the divine spark in you and the divine spark in me are, at the deepest level, one and the same. To harm another is ultimately to harm yourself.
This is the recognition of an objective moral law that stands above human opinion. The Founders called it natural law, deriving from “Nature and Nature’s God.” They understood that without this transcendent moral foundation, politics collapses into raw power struggles between factions that acknowledge no higher authority.
Today’s left has largely abandoned this framework, replacing transcendent morality with shifting cultural preferences enforced by social coercion. Rights become whatever the government says they are. Men become women by declaration. Life itself becomes a choice rather than a gift. When there is no fixed moral law, everything becomes negotiable, and eventually, nothing is sacred.
Conservatives must not merely oppose this chaos. We must articulate the alternative. We must remind America that morality is discovered, not constructed. The same moral law that prohibits murder also 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 were acknowledging a reality: that a moral order exists above government, above democracy, above human will. Our Constitution recognizes that our rights come from our Creator and not from the government.
This understanding once restrained both government and human ego. If God is sovereign, then Caesar is not. If rights come from the divine, then no legislature can legitimately revoke them. If we are all made in God’s image, then no person is expendable, no class is inherently oppressive, and no identity category can claim moral superiority.
But when we forget God, or reduce Him to a political prop, we lose this restraint. 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 faith as cultural identity or political tribalism, but faith as lived encounter with the transcendent. A citizenry that knows God has less need to be managed by government. A people who understand themselves as accountable to a higher law are already self-governing in the truest sense.
As Tocqueville observed, “despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.” Freedom requires virtue, and virtue requires belief in something beyond the self. This is why atheistic regimes inevitably become totalitarian. Without God, the state rushes in to fill the void.
The Heart of the Matter
America’s Founders created a system for a moral and religious people. They knew that 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 watching 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 will fight for their children’s minds, citizens who will recover the moral vocabulary our culture has forgotten, and believers who will 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.
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/10/america_s_crisis_is_spiritual.html
