Abraham Lincoln

King recognized that for nations, as for individuals, the measure of goodness is not perfection, but rather direction. America was born headed in the right direction—and continues to build a “more perfect union” dreamed up by imperfect men.

The first statue ever erected in Washington that is still in place is the suddenly much-contested one of President Andrew Jackson.

Of course America will survive the coronavirus. We’ve many times survived far worse.

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic in which the United States must seemingly make the frightful choice between saving lives and saving the economy, we inexplicably have a legion of volunteer mathematicians lining up to show off how well they can make the terrible calculations to decide who lives and who dies.

In the fervor to recognize Abraham Lincoln’s invaluable contributions to the abolition of slavery, his commitment to the rule of law and the constitutional limits on presidential power has been obscured.

According to Jonah Goldberg in Suicide of the West, the death of the country will not be the result of civil war but the culmination of a steady rot of the ideas and institutions that produced the liberty and prosperity of the West.

In the ceaseless struggle between civilization and barbarism, America has tipped the scales toward civilization, toward freedom and justice. In many ways, it has organized its national life—its economic, military, and moral resources—toward this end. Are we still up to the task?

Christians should remember this: any political theology that treats its own people as a divinely chosen political community treads on heretical soil.

Christian clergymen of today typically prefer to disparage power and prestige as demonic ensnarements that Jesus shunned when offered. But Jesus exemplifies not the rejection of power per se but rather a godly deployment of it.