Here’s How We Revive the American Dream
Numerous professional writers — historians, political scientists, and journalists — have described a divided and dispirited America with no shining city on a hill in sight.
In a 2023 Wall Street Journal–NORC poll, only 38 percent of respondents said patriotism is “important” to them, a measly 30 percent said having children is important to them, and just 27 percent deemed community involvement to be important. So much for Tocqueville’s praise of American volunteerism. (READ MORE: Trump and Vance Need to Articulate the Stakes of the 2024 Race)
Our entertainment centers, led by Hollywood and New York, vie to see who can plumb the depths of mindless violence and gratuitous sex. Schools teach “gender fluidity” to kindergartners, sex education to preteens, and access to abortion without parental consent. Thirty-two million adults cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level. Government programs spawned by the Great Society have reduced incentives to work, making many Americans, especially African Americans, dependent on the government for income. The result has been increased poverty and crime in our inner cities.
Why, then, should we take note of yet another study of our troubled land, by vice president of the evangelical Focus on the Family Timothy S. Goeglein? Because Goeglein has written a concise, readable study of our dysfunctional union in less than 200 pages, not a mammoth, statistic-laden volume that few people outside the academy will bother to read. He has written a succinct guideline of how to revive the American Dream.
A Guideline for Reviving the American Dream
The author recounts the decades-long process, initiated by progressives at the start of the 20th century, that weakened America’s moral foundations until they collapsed in the 1960s. It was then, writes Goeglein, that America discarded its fundamental underpinnings of faith, family, and community. Our nation has never been the same.
“Our relations with each other,” he says, “have worsened, our cities have become more decayed, our educational system inept, our families splintered.” National civility disappeared. (READ MORE: Trump vs. the Left’s Incitement to Violence)
“We are now living, “he writes, “in the seventh decade of what the Sixties have wrought,” including, a mockery of faith, broken families, sexual promiscuity, and a massively confused youth. How do we extricate ourselves from this morass? Stumbling Toward Utopia provides a convincing answer.
Geoglein is a church-going Christian, so it is not surprising that he calls for a third revolution built on the spiritual values and ideas of the American Revolution. (The second revolution was the sexual and moral revolution of the 60s which dismissed the family as “outmoded.”) The author insists that man does not live by politics alone, that the Founders understood that you cannot have freedom without virtue, that the legacy of the 60s cannot be reversed overnight, that a new revolution will require decades of sustained reform and commitment, and that it must begin by putting God and not man at the center of our lives.
There are encouraging signs of a growing backlash against “woke” ideology. A 2023 Gallup poll found a sharp rise in the number of Americans who are embracing social conservatism. The conservative view of social issues is now seen among nearly all demographic groups. (READ MORE: The Most Important Question Harris Can’t Answer)
Ignoring the soaring national debt, the family breakdown, bankrupt public education, and the rampant immorality of our entertainment is no longer an option, Goeglein writes — the unraveling of our society is too far advanced. “We must work to build consensus. And always in a way to direct people back to God.” Those over 40 may not see the complete reversal of the 1960s, Goeglein admits, “but it is possible our children and grandchildren will — if we act now.”
In Stumbling Toward Utopia, Tim Goeglein challenges every concerned citizen to join the epic battle being waged for the mind, heart, and soul of America.
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