For America to be great again, Americans must first remember how to be good.

J.B. Shurk | September 12, 2026

The most important lesson I’ve learned in life is this: Virtue matters.  You cannot hope to find happiness until you accept that there are good and bad ways to live.  For most of America’s history, these statements would have been considered common sense.  

The cultural revolutions of the ‘60s and ‘70s changed so much about the structure of society.  Relations between men and women changed.  As women pursued careers, office culture changed.  Family life changed.  Public expressions of shared Christian beliefs slowly disappeared.  Adults stopped acting as adults.  Society embraced infantilism.

Out of this cultural conflagration, society abandoned any commitment to moral commandments.  In the past, people understood that there were moral and immoral ways to behave.  Poor decisions engendered social stigmatization, which produced feelings of personal shame, which encouraged reflection, self-corrective behavior, and future temperance.  After the twentieth century’s cultural revolutions, morality was mocked as an outdated system of social control.  Our institutions — including our churches — increasingly embraced the deception that extolling virtue and condemning sin was an impermissible sin of its own.

The end result has been a sixty-year walk toward nihilism, self-gratification, cynicism, amorality, emptiness, listlessness, and existential dread.  All these descriptive nouns evoke torments one might endure in Hell.  By refusing to admit that there are good ways and bad ways to live, our society has invited the Devil to remake the world in his image.  Then our civic leaders feign surprise when it turns out that this is not a happy place to call home.

I want to make two arguments here: First, Americans will not succeed in the decades to come if they do not recommit to the pursuit of virtuous lives.  Second, the United States will not succeed in the decades to come if its leaders continue to embrace moral equivocation over righteous truth-telling.

As to the first point, one need not look very hard to witness the devastating consequences for a society that abandons virtue and embraces sin.  By........

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