God Blessed America.

If you don't believe America is guided by divine forces towards the greater good, the country makes no sense. Our founding fathers grasped this. Our veterans grasped this. Now we must all grasp it.

I don’t talk or write much about religion. My parents taught me well that one is not showy about spirituality. It is personal, intimate, and cheapened by proselytizing or overt demonstrations. I have carried that belief into my adult life as my Catholic upbringing has neatly merged with my Zen Buddhist practice, rigorous study of the classics, and other anonymous inspirations. When I get texts or emails from friends openly declaiming their faith, I think: “This is not the way; this is not the place.” Religious belief is too fragile to be overtly brought into the vicious, crude, competitive, and forceful world of the necessary, where it can become perverted into the cultish and messianic.

Today is different. Today, I woke up with one thought: “God Blessed America.” A miracle has occurred in this divided land. Our faithless media point to such language to denigrate those who dutifully believe our country’s founding was providential. I share the media’s discomfort with religiosity, but looking at the Sturm und Drang of nearly a decade in our roughhouse politics, how can you not think it was divined? How can you not believe some invisible hand guided us toward today’s capacious understanding?

It’s the only way to make sense of it. Why would a Godly nation choose a real estate developer and Reality TV star whose rhetoric and behavior were so indelicate and profane? Because we sought the anti-religious tenets of Fascism, Naziism, or Stalinism? No! Because we live in times when our freedoms are at risk, and the smiling, laughing but comparatively far worse Socialist alternatives are so near at hand. The “blue-collar billionaire” Trump is both aspirational and representative of all Americans in our bawdy, boorish, and uncouth imperfections.

But to embrace him a second time, we had to forgive him. It was not easy. As our nation and world descended into violence, chaos, and despair absent his leadership, patriotic Americans spent four exhausting years inspecting his actions in late 2020 and early 2021. He was wrong. Trump customarily pushes the limit, but he went too far. What were we to make of that? How could we forgive him for putting everything we had fought for and held dear on the line? It was a bridge too far.

But upon long reflection, we saw that, once again, he was not wholly incorrect. By Democrats’ admission in Time Magazine, there were deliberately irregular aspects to the 2020 election: mass mailing of unsolicited ballots, unilateral extension of ballot deadlines, waving of signature requirements, and other circumventions of state election laws. Something was off. It was not perfect. Trump sensed it, we sensed it, though his claims of massive ballot fraud were still false.

Ultimately, faith is best tested by fire, doubt, and persecution. We came to see that elections are sometimes about grossly imperfect choices: Nixon versus McGovern; Edwards vs. Duke; Trump vs. Harris. And as egregious and unforgivable as some of Trump’s actions were, they were not the whole story. The other side’s reaction was so ferocious, unhinged, and sinister that we realized “they doth protest too much.” We saw behind their “Get Trump” stratagems a vindictive, deranged delirium that masked an unchecked lust for power and, with that power, a desire to fundamentally remake America in ways that would undo our founding principles. When Democratic leaders compared Trump to “Hitler,” when they called his supporters “Nazis” and “fascists,” we knew the jig was up.

When Donald Trump rode down that Trump Tower escalator in 2015, we were a nation adrift. Many believed our best days were behind us. China or Chinese-style governance would soon take over with its social media scores, censorship, and Godless mercantilism. Illegal immigrants and technology would do most of the hard work. “What a relief!” We would be “unburdened by what has been.”

We were slowly following the path of our European founders into a deadly Epicureanism: life was about a simple job, drinks with friends, a meager vacation with our wife and 2.0 kids, and wide tolerance for all manner of strangers regardless of their violent beliefs and actions, plus cheap energy from the tyrant next door. We would stay passively above the fray, grateful for the few crumbs thrown at us by our Big Tech overlords, who used us as fodder for their post-human algorithms.

The tremendous weight of being that “shining city on the hill,” that model for the world, would be taken off our shoulders as we entered a multipolar world as one among many. As Karl Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” We would move from equal opportunity to equity, diversity of thought to diversity of look, and from extensive inclusion of persons from sundry beliefs and backgrounds to inclusion only for those who conformed to partisan codes of speech and conduct.

We realized this was not the principle of greatness our founding fathers had in mind. What made America salutary is that we were driven to be unique, to model innovation, creativity, and a higher governing standard, even as our leaders often failed to meet that standard. We were destined to lead not by force of arms but by the persuasive power of our laws, even as our leaders sometimes violated those laws.

“Why do Americans seem so happy?” the cynical, cigarette-smoking, cocktail-swilling denizens of global-i-stan ask. “Why are they so loud?” the beleaguered statist and corporatist grumbles. Americans still believe in a higher power that guides us through tangled, mysterious paths to the good. We believe that life has purpose, direction, and meaning and that our Bill of Rights is divinely inspired and necessary for maintaining happiness and goodwill.

Our nation’s Declaration of Independence references God in the following places:

• First sentence: "The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them"

• Second paragraph: "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"

• Last paragraph: "We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions." 

June 14, Flag Day, is Donald Trump’s and my birthday. On June 14, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower added “Under God” to The Pledge of Allegiance at the height of the Cold War. It reads: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Today is Veterans Day. On this day, we honor the unfathomably courageous men and women who died for their beloved country so we may enjoy the rare gift of self-determination. Though Darwin long ago perceived that such selfless sacrifice was critical to human evolution, it’s still important to ask why anyone would do it. Just as it is vital to ask why anyone would endure “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”––assassination attempts, slander, political persecution, censorship, vicious misrepresentations of policy and rhetoric, and diabolical attempts by partisan prosecutors to bankrupt him, his friends, and his family––to again become President of these United States? When Donald Trump shouted, “Fight, fight, fight!” after being glazed by a white rager’s bullet, he was saying, “Fight for this country, fight for what it believes, never give up.”

It’s not that these literal and figurative trials we’ve endured these past four years should not have happened. They needed to happen. You cannot understand Trump's resurrection without understanding the greater arc of his and our journey. Those who persecuted Trump were essential players––correct in their limited understandings, their light and their dark––directing us to something greater than ourselves.

As the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel understood, new truth emerges from a progression of thesis to antithesis to a new synthesis. As Hegel noted, History with a capital H uses all-too-human men and women for its higher purpose. We confirm as much in our enduring anthem:

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With the light
From above.

Friends, we cannot be passive in the face of what threatens the integrity of this great nation: open borders, violent crime, foreign wars of choice, state-sponsored censorship of our precious speech, the intrusion of the federal leviathan into all areas of our lives, the obstruction of the right to defend ourselves when the government fails to do so. A libertine, drug-infused populace who support infanticide up to and including birth, pot dispensaries on almost every urban corner, legal gambling on practically anything, and who view violence as speech and speech as violence is not evidence of a healthy republic. It is a sign of its imminent decline. Yes, we have the right to love who we want and maintain sovereignty over our bodies within the boundaries of reason, compassion, and decency. Still, on what planet does it make sense to allow biological boys to use girls' bathrooms or biological men to compete against biological women in sports?

It’s a complicated melange. It does not fit within Democratic or Republican orthodoxy. But this common-sense wisdom is America's essence and Donald Trump’s appeal to the men and women who make it run.

Today, on this Veteran’s Day, we recognize that this election, with the triumph of this singularly impossible, confounding, but captivating and clear-sighted man of action, has given us another chance to earn what Abraham Lincoln called upon us at Gettysburg, at the height of the most uncivil moment in our divined trajectory:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”