Around A.D. 416, a Roman nobleman named Rutilius Namatianus left Rome for home and chose to go by sea. The roads that once carried Rome's legions, trade and law to the edge of the known world were flooded and falling apart. The greatest empire the world had seen was coming to an end, and you could see it in the crumbling of the very things that made it great.
What made Rome fall? Individualism, self-satisfaction, and a lack of respect for the values that got it to the top. Rome forgot a lesson every coach teaches his players: if you're not getting better, you're getting worse.
Rome stopped playing as a team
The Romans knew who they were supposed to be. Their hero was Cincinnatus, the farmer who left his plow to save the city and then went right back to it. Serve, sacrifice, go home. But Rome's own historians watched their people drift. Once Rome had no rival left to fear, it got comfortable. Wealth replaced virtue. In one fifty-year stretch, more than twenty men claimed the throne, and Roman legions marched on Roman legions. Emperors watered down their silver coins to pay today's bills with tomorrow's money.
A team that plays for each other can take a hit and keep fighting. A team where everybody is worried about his own stats falls apart the first time it gets punched in the mouth. Rome stopped playing as a team long before the Goths showed up.
The Founders knew freedom needs faith and virtue
George Washington called religion and morality "indispensable supports" of a free country. James Madison said free government asks more character of its people than any other kind. John Adams put it plainest: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People."
We were never meant to be a theocracy. The church shouldn't run the government, and the government shouldn't run the church. But the government can lock up a thief. It takes a family and a church to teach a child not to steal in the first place.
Me over we
Alexis de Tocqueville warned almost two hundred years ago that individualism starts by draining public life and ends in "downright selfishness." Freedom says I have rights and I owe something to the people around me. Radical individualism says I owe nothing unless it makes me happy.
You can see it in the family. Since 1974, the share of Americans living alone has climbed from 19 to 29 percent, people marry years later, and we're having far fewer children than it takes to replace ourselves. A culture that puts personal happiness above everything else can't explain why anyone should keep a marriage promise or pour their life into kids who can never pay them back.
You can see it in how we treat life. I believe an unborn child is a human life made in the image of God, and calling abortion a "personal choice" skips the question of who else is involved. I also believe biological sex is real and matters for fairness and privacy, and we can treat every person with dignity while holding that line.
And you can see it in how we help our neighbors. Jesus commands us to care for the least of these. Good help gets people back on their feet, and bad help traps them. A nation has to welcome people with dignity and still secure its borders and enforce its laws. Rome kept the crowd quiet with bread and circuses and watered down its coins. We borrow.
Where will the next generation learn it?
Fewer Americans call themselves Christian than at any point in my lifetime. So where will the next generation learn to keep its promises when keeping them gets hard? "Whatever works for you" isn't an answer. No nation in history has been held together by it.
America is not destined to fall. We still have strong families, faithful churches and people willing to serve. But roads don't crumble overnight. They crumble when people stop taking care of them. Our job is to get better, not worse: put we over me, and hand the next generation a country still worth inheriting.