Introduction
"I have chosen the sea, since the roads by land, if on the levels, are flooded by rivers; if on the hills, are rough with rocks." Rutilius Namatianus wrote those words around A.D. 416 as he set out from Rome for his home in Gaul.1 He was describing the roads of the Roman Empire, the same roads that had once carried Roman legions, Roman trade, and Roman law to the edges of the known world. Now they were falling apart, and a Roman nobleman would rather risk the sea than travel on them. The most powerful empire the world had seen up to that point was coming to an end, and you could see it in the crumbling of the very things that had made it great.
What made that powerful nation fall? Individualism, self-satisfaction, and a lack of respect for the morals and values that brought it to the top. The mindset shifted from "we have to live by these values to reach the top" to "we don't have to do anything, because we're already at the top." Rome forgot a lesson every coach teaches his players: if you're not getting better, you're getting worse.
In America we are facing the same predicament. We are blessed to live in the most unique country the world has ever known, a country built on religious principles without forcing a religion on anyone, a country where everyone has a voice and a chance to succeed! But we have forgotten how blessed we are, and we are heading down the Roman road. Individualism will be the death of America just as it was the death of the most powerful empire on earth. Coaches preach it to their teams every day: we over me. Abraham Lincoln said it in 1858, and Jesus of Nazareth said it long before him: a house divided against itself cannot stand.2
America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, a free and brave people who have always been willing to serve their neighbors. But as more people ask "what about me?" fewer people are willing to help. This experiment in freedom is facing one of its greatest tests. Lincoln asked at Gettysburg whether a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could long endure.3 Today the question is whether that nation can survive a mindset of "I'm in it for me."
We are a country founded on Christian values: that you as an individual are fearfully and wonderfully made, that every life has value and is precious, and that we do the best we can to serve those around us, knowing that "greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."4 Those values built this country. Walking away from them is tearing it apart.
How Rome Lost Its Way
The Romans knew what they were supposed to be. They had a word, virtus, for courage and excellence, and another, pietas, for duty to the gods, to your family, and to Rome. Their great hero was Cincinnatus, the farmer who left his plow to save the city, then walked away from power and went back to his plow once the job was done. That was the Roman ideal. Serve, sacrifice, and go home.
Rome's own writers saw their people drifting away from it. Sallust, writing in the first century B.C., said the turn came after Rome destroyed Carthage. With no rival left to fear, Rome got comfortable. Wealth and ease bred greed and ambition. Friendships became tools for getting ahead. Riches replaced virtue as the thing men admired.5 Sallust had his own political scores to settle, but he lived through those years and watched it happen to his own people.
Polybius, a Greek historian who lived among the Romans, saw it coming even earlier. He warned that when a nation reaches the top and stays there, prosperity breeds luxury, and men start fighting each other for office. Ambitious politicians flatter the crowd, the crowd grows bitter toward the elites, and the whole system breaks down.6 Polybius put the blame on both sides, and he was right. The politician who treats public office like his own property and the citizen who treats the government like a free handout are guilty of the same thing. Both of them are taking from the team and giving nothing back.
Look at what happened when personal power became more important than Rome itself. Between A.D. 235 and 284, more than twenty men claimed the throne, and most of them were killed by their own soldiers or by rivals. Roman legions marched against Roman legions. Every army fighting for a general's ambition was an army that wasn't guarding the frontier.
The money tells the same story. During those same years, emperors kept cutting the silver in their coins until the "silver" coins in Roman purses were mostly bronze with a thin coat on the outside. The Manchester Museum has traced this collapse using the coins themselves.7 Why would an emperor do that? Because it let him pay his soldiers today and push the bill onto tomorrow. Sound familiar? It should. Every government is tempted to do the same thing.
By the time Rutilius took to the sea, the West had been hit by plague, invasion, and a Gothic army that had sacked Rome itself in 410. No amount of virtue stops a plague or an invading army. But character decides how a people responds when those blows land. A team that plays for each other can take a hit and keep fighting. A team where every player is worried about his own stats falls apart the first time it gets punched in the mouth. Rome had stopped playing as a team long before the Goths showed up.
One more thing has to be said. By the end, Rome was officially Christian, and so was the Eastern Empire, which lasted another thousand years. Wearing the name didn't save the West. Faith only builds a nation when people actually live it.
The Founders Knew Freedom Needed Faith and Virtue
The men who founded this country loved freedom more than almost anyone in history. They also knew freedom could not survive on its own.
George Washington said it plainly in his Farewell Address in 1796: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." Then he warned his countrymen to be careful of "the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion."8 Think about that. This was the last message of the man who led us through the Revolution and served as our first president, and this is what he chose to tell us.
James Madison said the same thing while he was defending the Constitution. In Federalist No. 55, he admitted there is "a degree of depravity in mankind," but he insisted that "republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities," meaning honor and trustworthiness, "in a higher degree than any other form."9 In plain English: a free country asks more of its people than any other kind of government does. A king can rule a corrupt people. A free people has to rule itself.
Madison also knew that good people alone were not enough. "If men were angels," he wrote in Federalist No. 51, "no government would be necessary."10 That is why the Constitution splits up power and sets ambition against ambition. The founders didn't trust any man with too much power. But checks and balances only work if the voters can still tell the difference between a statesman and a flatterer.
John Adams said it best of all. In 1798 he wrote to the officers of the Massachusetts militia: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."11 Read that again. The man who sat on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence and became our second president said the Constitution does not work for any other kind of people.
The founders read Cicero and John Locke as well as the Bible, and they didn't all agree on theology. Jefferson cut the miracles out of his Bible. Adams died a Unitarian. But every one of them was raised among, led, and wrote for a people shaped by the Christian faith, and they knew that faith was holding up the whole building.
Separate Institutions, One Moral Foundation
We were never meant to be a theocracy. The government has no business running the church, telling people what to believe, or forcing anyone into a pew. The church has no business running the government. The Constitution makes that clear. Article VI bans any religious test for federal office, and the First Amendment keeps Congress from setting up a national church while protecting every American's right to practice his faith.12 Those rules put limits on the government. Nowhere do they tell Americans to leave their faith at the door when they step into public life.
The founding generation understood that balance. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the same Congress that protected settlers' freedom to worship also declared that "religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."13 Freedom of worship and the public good of faith sat side by side in the same document.
And they lived it. As president, Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote about a "wall of separation," went to Sunday worship services held in the House of Representatives. James Madison went too. Congressman Abijah Bigelow wrote home in December 1812 describing the president sitting in one of those services.14 John Adams, in a proclamation on March 23, 1798, called the whole nation to a day of fasting and prayer and asked Americans to seek God's mercy "through the Great Mediator and Redeemer."15 These men fought hard against a national church, and then they turned around and worshiped in the halls of Congress. They never imagined a country scrubbed clean of faith.
That is the relationship we have to protect. Separate institutions, one moral foundation. The government can lock up a thief, but it takes a family and a church to teach a child not to steal in the first place. The law can make a father pay child support, but it can't make him love his kids. It can't make a mother sacrifice for her family. It can't make a politician tell the truth or a neighbor show up when you need him. Those things come from somewhere else, and for most of our history, they came from faith.
You don't have to be a Christian to be a good American. People of every faith and of no faith are equal under our laws, and many of them live with great integrity. My point is about where a nation learns how to live. In America, that has been the Christian faith, taught at kitchen tables and in churches all across this country. I believe we need to renew that inheritance while protecting the conscience of every citizen. And if we are going to throw it away, someone needs to answer a simple question: what will teach the next generation to keep its promises when keeping them gets hard?
Me Over We
Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s and saw this danger coming. He described individualism as a feeling that "disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends," until "he willingly leaves society at large to itself." Then he told us where it ends: individualism "at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness."16 Almost two hundred years later, we are living out his warning.
There is a big difference between freedom and radical individualism. A free man has rights, property, a conscience, and his own goals, and he also knows he owes something to the people around him. Radical individualism says I owe nothing unless it makes me happy. Marriage matters as long as it fulfills me. My country matters as long as it benefits me. Right and wrong matter as long as they agree with me. When every commitment can be dropped the minute it costs something, a free people can no longer govern itself.
Every coach knows what happens to a locker room like that. When players care more about their own stats than the scoreboard, you lose, no matter how much talent you have. And it starts at the top. The executive who takes advantage of his workers, the politician who lies to win, and the wealthy man who won't sacrifice anything for his country are just as guilty as anyone else. Leaders who demand sacrifice from everyone but themselves have already lost the locker room.
The Family
The family is where "we over me" gets tested every single day. Marriage asks two people to keep a promise through every season of life, the good ones and the hard ones. Parenthood asks you to pour years of your life into children who can never pay you back. A culture that puts personal happiness above everything else can't explain why anyone should do either one.
The numbers show how far we've moved. According to the Census Bureau, people living alone made up 19 percent of American households in 1974. By 2024 that number was 29 percent, or 38.5 million households. Over the same fifty years, the median age when people first get married jumped from 23.1 to 30.2 for men and from 21.1 to 28.6 for women.17 Some of that is people living longer, staying in school longer, and the cost of housing. But a lot of it is a culture that used to treat marriage and family as the normal road to adulthood and now treats them like something to get around to after everything else.
We are also having fewer children. The CDC's provisional numbers for 2024 put the fertility rate at about 1.63 children per woman. A country needs about 2.1 just to replace itself.18 A nation that doesn't replace itself ends up with fewer workers paying for more retirees, fewer young people to defend it, and fewer families to pass on its values. Plenty of young couples want kids and can't afford them, and a country that says it values families ought to do something about that. But too many Americans have been taught that children get in the way of a good life, when children are the heart of it.
Rome faced the same problem. Augustus was so worried about Rome's leading families refusing to marry and have children that he passed laws rewarding marriage and penalizing those who stayed single. Suetonius tells us the leading men of Rome fought him hard on it.19 Augustus found out you can't pass a law that makes people love family, and neither can we. That has to be taught, at home and in church.
Divorce belongs in this conversation too. Abuse, danger, and abandonment can make leaving necessary, and nobody should be trapped in harm. But a marriage is supposed to last longer than the good feelings do, and when parents walk away from their promise, it's the kids who pay for it. We ought to expect couples to fight for their marriage, and we ought to help them do it.
Life
If you want to see radical individualism at its clearest, look at abortion. I believe an unborn child is a human life, created in the image of God, and that life places a claim on the adults responsible for it. People who defend abortion talk about bodily autonomy and the real hardships of pregnancy. But calling abortion a "personal choice" skips the most important question: is there another human being whose life is on the line in that choice? I believe there is.
The CDC counted 613,383 abortions in 2022, and that number is short, because it only includes 48 reporting areas.20 The abortion rate in those areas dropped about 10 percent between 2013 and 2022, and I thank God for that. But that is still more than six hundred thousand children in one year, from an incomplete count. A nation that won't protect the most defenseless people among it has forgotten what it means to owe someone something.
The debate over gender identity raises a related question. Should how a person sees himself override biological reality everywhere? I don't believe it should. Biological sex is real, and it matters in sports, in locker rooms, and in public policy. Every person deserves dignity and respect, including people who identify as transgender, and we can treat them with that dignity while still keeping the lines that protect fairness and privacy for everyone. When "how I see myself" becomes the final word on every question, the shared standards we all depend on disappear.
Helping Our Neighbor Without Losing Ourselves
Any Christian argument for responsibility has to start with the poor. Jesus commands us to care for "the least of these," and that is not up for debate.21 So with welfare, the real question is how we help. Good help carries people through hard times and gets them back on their feet. Bad help traps them, teaches them to expect support without giving anything back, and buys votes for the politicians who keep expanding it. Responsibility goes both ways. Citizens owe what they are able to give, and the government owes fair treatment and honest use of the money it takes from us.
Rome learned this the hard way. The emperors kept the crowds quiet with free grain and public games, and "bread and circuses" has stood ever since for a government that buys loyalty with comfort today while the bills of tomorrow go unpaid.
Immigration is another place where our duties meet. People who come here looking for safety and a better life deserve to be treated with dignity. But the government's first job is to protect its own citizens: secure borders, laws that are actually enforced, and public systems that work. Being an American comes with responsibilities, and those responsibilities should decide who comes, how they come, and how they become Americans. A nation that can't control who comes in can't keep its promises to anybody, including the immigrants who did it the right way.
The same goes for spending. We cannot demand every benefit now and hand the bill to our grandchildren, and that is just as true for corporate handouts and special-interest giveaways as it is for any government program. Rome watered down its coins to pay for its promises. We borrow.
Where Will We Learn It?
The Christian foundation of this country has gotten a lot weaker in my lifetime. Pew Research Center's 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of American adults call themselves Christian, down from 78 percent in 2007. Over that same stretch, the number of Americans with no religion at all nearly doubled, from 16 percent to 29 percent.22 Pew also found signs that the decline has leveled off over the last few years, and that gives me hope. But a whole generation has grown up with fewer ties to the places that taught their grandparents how to live.
So where are Americans going to learn the duties that go beyond "what about me"? The church has always been one of the biggest answers, along with the family, the school, and the community groups Tocqueville admired so much. And the church should be judged by the people it produces: honest workers, faithful husbands and wives, generous neighbors, and citizens who serve. Calling yourself a Christian without living like one does nothing to hold up a nation.
America has a choice to make. We can renew the Christian inheritance that taught generation after generation what they owed to God, to their families, and to each other, while still protecting every citizen's freedom to believe what he chooses. Or we can try to build something else in its place. If we pick the second road, we had better be able to explain why parents owe their children care, why leaders owe the public the truth, why citizens owe obedience to just laws, and why one generation owes the next a country worth inheriting. "Whatever works for you" is not an answer. No nation in history has been held together by it.
Conclusion
Rome's roads, armies, and wealth could not save it once its people and its leaders cared more about themselves than about Rome. By the time Rutilius chose the sea over the crumbling roads, the decay he saw had been building for centuries. The Romans enjoyed everything their ancestors built while tearing down the values that built it.
Our founders saw that same danger and met it two ways. They wrote a Constitution that keeps the ambitions of powerful men in check, and they called on the American people to live with the virtue a free country requires. Washington tied religion and morality to the nation's success. Madison said free government depends on the character of its people. Adams said our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. The Northwest Ordinance protected freedom of worship and declared religion and morality necessary to good government in the same breath. They kept church and state apart, and they never once pretended a nation could survive without faith and virtue.
We have to hold that same line. The church must never become the state. But this country needs citizens who govern themselves before the government has to step in, and families and churches that teach responsibility before failure becomes a national crisis. I believe renewing the Christian faith that shaped this nation is the strongest foundation we have for that work.
America is not destined to fall. We still have strong families, faithful churches, good communities, and men and women willing to serve. But a Constitution can survive on paper long after the habits that hold it up have died. The roads don't crumble overnight. They crumble when a people stops taking care of them. Our job is to get better, not worse: to rebuild those habits, put we over me, and hand the next generation a country still worth inheriting.
Sources
- Rutilius Claudius Namatianus. De Reditu Suo (On His Return), book 1. In Minor Latin Poets, translated by J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. ↩
- Mark 3:25; Abraham Lincoln, "House Divided" speech, Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858. ↩
- Abraham Lincoln. Address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863. ↩
- Psalm 139:14; John 15:13 (King James Version). ↩
- Sallust. The War with Catiline, chapters 9–13. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921. ↩
- Polybius. The Histories, book 6, chapter 57. Translated by W. R. Paton. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923. ↩
- Manchester Museum. Money in a Time of Crisis. https://money-in-a-time-of-crisis.museum.manchester.ac.uk/ ↩
- George Washington. Farewell Address, September 19, 1796. ↩
- James Madison. The Federalist No. 55, February 15, 1788. ↩
- James Madison. The Federalist No. 51, February 6, 1788. ↩
- John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798. Founders Online, National Archives. ↩
- U.S. Constitution, Article VI and Amendment I. ↩
- Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787, articles I and III. ↩
- Library of Congress. "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic: Religion and the Federal Government, Part 2." https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel06-2.html ↩
- John Adams. Proclamation for a National Fast, March 23, 1798. ↩
- Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America, volume II, part II, chapter 2. Translated by Henry Reeve. 1840. ↩
- U.S. Census Bureau. "Nearly Two-Thirds of U.S. Households Are Family Households." Press release, November 12, 2024. ↩
- Hamilton, Brady E., Joyce A. Martin, and Michelle J. K. Osterman. "Births: Provisional Data for 2024." NCHS Vital Statistics Rapid Release, no. 38. April 2025. ↩
- Suetonius. The Lives of the Caesars, "The Deified Augustus," chapter 34. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. ↩
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Abortion Surveillance: Findings and Reports." November 2024. ↩
- Matthew 25:40. ↩
- Pew Research Center. "Religious Landscape Study: Religious Identity in the United States." February 26, 2025. ↩