Antidotes for American Decline

on September 15, 2012

Os Guinness

By Rick Plasterer

Author and social commentator Os Guinness spoke to the Faith and Law forum for Congressional staffers on Friday, Sept. 7, focusing on topics covered in his new book Free People’s Suicide. Saying that he was born in the era of Winston Churchill and had personally met him, he noted the “gigantic challenges” currently facing the United States. More serious plans to address the future are needed than are now being advanced, he said. He referred to Augustine’s claim that to understand a nation, one must understand what it loves, and America’s love is freedom. Quoting a veteran of the American Revolution, he noted the veteran’s answer to why the war was fought, namely that Americans “always have been free, and must be free always.”

Guinness believes that the current “culture war” over traditional authority is really a “second freedom war” after the American Revolution. While revolutions in France, Russia, China, and elsewhere degenerated into tyranny, the American Revolution produced a free society because it recognized that liberty must be ordered in sustainable…

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