Last month I wrote about America’s 250th birthday with gratitude.
I meant every word of it. This country is not perfect. No country is. But the American story remains one of the most remarkable stories in human history. A nation founded on the belief that rights come not from kings, governments or political parties, but from God, has endured a civil war, a Depression, world wars, assassinations, terrorism, scandals, cultural upheaval and bitter political division.
And still, here we are. Still arguing. Still voting. Still publishing newspapers. Still gathering in town halls. Still worshipping freely. Still disagreeing loudly. Still trying, however imperfectly, to govern ourselves.
That is worth celebrating.
But a 250th birthday should also invite a warning: America is in a fragile moment.
A few months ago, I saw the movie “A Great Awakening” in theaters. The film tells the story of the unlikely friendship between George Whitefield, the great preacher of the First Great Awakening, and Benjamin Franklin, the printer, inventor, philosopher and skeptic who helped spread Whitefield’s words throughout the colonies.
On the surface, they seem like opposites.
Whitefield was the fiery evangelist. Franklin was the practical man of reason. Whitefield preached repentance, salvation and the need for a spiritual awakening. Franklin believed in civic improvement, public virtue, education, industry, invention and the power of a free press.
One represented religious revival. The other represented the Enlightenment.
And yet they needed each other.
That may be the most important lesson of the movie.
Whitefield understood that liberty could not merely be written into law. It had to be awakened in the human heart. Franklin, even if he did not fully share Whitefield’s theology, understood the public value of religion. He saw that faith could help make people more generous, more moral, more self-controlled and more capable of living together in freedom.
Franklin printed Whitefield’s sermons. He promoted and admired him. He recognized that this preacher, whose beliefs were not identical to his own, was helping shape the moral character of a people who would soon be asked to govern themselves.
That relationship feels more symbolic than I realized at the time.
America did not become America because one of those streams of thought defeated the other. America became America because, at its best, they worked together.
That is the cautionary tale. America works best when faith and reason, tradition and reform, gratitude and criticism remain in conversation. When one side decides it no longer needs the other, the whole experiment becomes more fragile.
That same balance applies to our politics today. Every healthy country needs a reforming spirit — people willing to challenge complacency, correct failures and push the nation closer to its highest ideals. Franklin, in his own very different era, embodied some of that restless spirit of improvement: practical, civic-minded, curious and confident that society could be made better.
But reform can take two very different paths. One seeks to improve America. The other seeks to indict it.
That second kind should concern all of us.
It is the progressivism that no longer says America has failed to live up to its ideals. It says the ideals themselves are fraudulent. It no longer asks us to widen the circle of liberty. It asks us to tear down the civilization that made liberty possible. I worry that this latter type of progressivism has gained influence in our politics and in our education system.
That distinction matters.
There is a world of difference between saying, “America has not always lived up to the Declaration of Independence,” and saying, “The Declaration of Independence was nothing more than a mask for oppression.”
The first statement is patriotic reform. The second is civilizational amnesia.
That distinction is not theoretical. We are seeing this tension play out in our politics. In New York, several candidates aligned with Democratic Socialists of America recently won major Democratic primaries. That fact alone should not be treated as a crisis. They ran. They organized. They won votes. That is democracy.
But it is also fair to ask what ideas are gaining influence.
The DSA is not simply arguing for a slightly larger safety net or a European-style welfare state. Its own program imagines “a future without capitalism,” describes the current system as built on “private ownership and profit,” calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, and says its goal is to draft a new constitution and create a democratic socialist republic.
No serious citizen should pretend these are small differences within ordinary American politics. These are arguments about the nature of the American system and freedom itself.
Thankfully, many progressives understand the danger. At the same time, conservatives should be careful too.
It is not enough to dismiss every concern raised by progressives. Housing really is too expensive. Working families really are struggling. Health care costs really are a burden for many people. If traditionalists only defend the past without addressing the pain of the present, they will not persuade the next generation.
That is why America needs something better than another shouting match.
We need the Franklin and Whitefield lesson.
The progressive needs to understand that liberty, equality and human dignity did not grow in a vacuum. They grew from moral soil. If we keep cutting away at that soil — if we teach our children only America’s sins and none of its virtues, only the failures of religion and none of its gifts, only the abuses of Western civilization and none of its achievements — eventually the flowers of liberty will wither.
A republic cannot survive on resentment. Not left-wing resentment. Not right-wing resentment. Not class resentment. Not racial resentment. Not religious resentment.
A republic requires virtue.
That was one of the great insights of the American founding. Freedom is not simply the ability to do whatever we want. Freedom requires self-restraint. It requires citizens who can disagree without destroying one another.
At 250, America does not need to choose between faith and reason. It needs both.
It needs the moral seriousness of Whitefield and the practical wisdom of Franklin. It needs the Bible and the printing press. It needs churches, synagogues, schools, newspapers, civic organizations, families and neighbors. It needs people who believe in eternal truths and people who ask hard questions. It needs progressives who still believe America is worth preserving, and conservatives who still believe America is worth improving.
The genius of America has never been that we all agree.
We do not.
The genius of America is that we built a system where people who do not agree can still live together, worship freely, speak openly, publish freely, argue peacefully, lose elections, win elections and try again.
We should thank God for the extraordinary gift of this country. But we should also remember that a republic can come apart — not only because of foreign enemies, economic hardship or bad leaders, but because its people forget why it deserved to exist in the first place.
America at 250 is still worth celebrating.
It is also worth preserving.
And it is still worth improving — together.
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