Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

by David French

When your nation spans a continent, a sense of collective place is harder to share. When your nation contains multitudes of virtually every race, creed, and color on planet Earth, a sense of shared blood is nonexistent. But men and women of dramatically different heritages and from fundamentally different places can and do unite around a shared idea—that each of us enjoys liberties so essential that our government is legitimate if and only if it guarantees their protection.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

It’s a sad fact of our modern era that our warring factions spend an enormous amount of time battling over whether the government is upholding its end of the social compact. We spend less time looking inward, pondering how we exercise our blood-bought freedoms. In other words, we debate whether our nation is worthy of our patriotism. We simply assume we’re worthy patriots.

It’s easy in polarized times to seek justice. After all, we fight our political, cultural, and religious battles because we think we are right. We believe we stand on the side of the angels, and our opponents are misguided. We justify the intensity of our passion by the conviction of the rightness of our cause.