Much as modern secular scholars have tripped over one another in their eagerness to try and complicate the historical record of the role of religion in the American Founding, clinging like drowning men to the corpse of Thomas Jefferson as their beloved apostle of reason, the verdict of history is fairly incontestable.

If true piety depends on faith, and faith is an act of understanding and will, you cannot simply compel people into piety; that would defeat the very purpose. And yet is not compulsion central to the practice of politics and the exercise of sovereignty?

A Christian public culture, like a Christian person, will still be deeply sinful and deficient. But it can still be an awful lot better than the alternatives. If you’re skeptical, just consider the sex-obsessed public culture of the post-Christian West, with ubiquitous pornography and its inane celebration of gender experimentation as the pinnacle of personal heroism.

The New Right really does have a coherent critique of the current economic, cultural, and political establishment. And it really does have a coherent agenda for a new economic, cultural, and political establishment that would promote the national good and renew the traditions that used to anchor it.

*Editor’s note: this article is the third in a series of three. See Part I and Part II here. In […]

Drinking deeply from the well of the Old Testament, first English and Dutch Protestants, and then others throughout Europe, began to discern in the experience of the nation of Israel a model for their own experiences as particular nations, forged from many tribes in response to common enemies and in obedience to common laws, and covenanted before God to pursue justice and righteousness.