Over the past several years, I have had the honor to write a series of columns on issues dear to my heart: the importance of marriage, families, male leadership, a well-ordered society, faith, and history. Each of these issues affects what we are experiencing today as we conclude the first quarter of the 21st century.
My new book, What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Family, and Freedom is a collection of these columns calling on Americans to return to these core values. It is my firm conviction that we as a nation can reverse the decades-long trend of rejecting these values and bring about a great American restoration that will lift us out of the current political and cultural morass in which we find ourselves as a nation.
I also wrote these columns and, with the assistance of my good friend Craig Osten, compiled them in this book because of my love for our country — the freest and greatest nation ever devised. Because I love my nation so much, it grieves me when we have seemingly lost our way — particularly when it comes to marriage, family, faith, and education.
The book features columns on all these topics and proposes a blueprint for restoring each into our country’s collective DNA. I will look at the breakdown of marriage and the family, the current lamentable state of many young American males, the impact of cultural secularization, and the loss of teaching true American history, and how each impacted our society.
But one thing we always have is hope, even in the darkest of times. While all of these factors have increased our national divisions, which can only be healed if we return to the values that made America the greatest nation on earth, I believe that can happen. It is the restoration of these values that will be the antidote to purge our nation of its current poisonous climate of political and cultural polarization.
It is these values that will also restore communities and relationships as we seek to treat all our fellow citizens with dignity and respect, regardless of our differences, provide loving and nurturing homes for our children, and our schools once again become places of learning rather than of indoctrination.
But it will take time. As my friends Jim Daly and John Stonestreet write in their forward to the book: “A complete overhaul of society won’t happen overnight. Just as a long series of small compromises got us way off course, it’s going to require a long series of small corrections to help point us back in the right direction.”
Those words could not be truer. Political and cultural change often does not come in waves, but instead in small drips that increasingly erode our national fabric over time. To bring about political and cultural restoration, we need to first shut off the drips before we can start to work on the repairs. But to shut off the drips, we need to first find the source that caused the drips in the first place – which was, in our case, our slow national turning away from God and His eternal truths.
That is what I have tried to do in What Really Matters, to raise our awareness of the “drips” and point to the source which will repair the damage that has been done and restore a nation based on the principles upon which it was founded – faith in God, the affirmation of human dignity, and “one nation indivisible” instead of divided.
I believe if we return to these values, a great American restoration is not just possible, but probable, but like so many things, it needs to start with each of us first. By remembering “what really matters” hopefully we can once again focus on these essential values and once again be the “shining city on a hill” for the world to see.
