America is a country torn apart. Moral confusion and societal breakdown has decimated our families and left our communities and the people in them looking for firm footing on which to stand. The cries of desperation echo throughout our public discourse and have resulted in a political landscape that is nothing if not dysfunctional.

In his new book, “Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society,” First Things magazine editor R. R. Reno, takes a look at the various causes of the rifts in 21st century America, and how a Christian Society ought to seek to address them.

One problem that Reno outlines is how freedom, one of the most important principles of our founding, has been wrested from its proper understanding in our public discourse, or as he says in the book, how a “culture of freedom” became a “cult of freedom.”

Reno explains that freedom is far from the end of human political involvement, but is rather the precondition for human flourishing. Furthermore, over the past few decades the kind of liberty envisioned by America’s founding fathers, the freedom given a new birth by the abolition of slavery and proclaimed by President Lincoln at Gettysburg, has lost something vital.

In Reno’s view, freedom has become unhinged from its responsibilities to the true and the transcendent. It has lost its allegiance to proper authority and has become self-seeking and destructive.

“Freedom properly understood is based in a pledge of loyalty, not a declaration of independence,” he writes, arguing that America’s liberty is derived from “eternal verities affirmed,” rather than “ties severed.”

Even the Declaration of Independence itself affirms the importance of freedom’s adherence to truth in its most well-known passage, the author continues.

In saying “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he writes, “the first and fundamental act is holding, not choosing, standing fast in truth, not making it up. We are freest when we acknowledge the authority of the truth, now when we seek a godlike independence from all limits.”

This strive for independence from even reality itself has precipitated a great deal of the political and social crisis that America sees laid at its feet today.

A concept of liberty completely unmoored from and irresponsible to authority of a transcendent and immutable truth has led to a society in which the self is the ultimate arbiter of truth. This is a culture in which the concepts of multiculturalism and what the author calls “nonjudgmentalism” — as a better terminology for what many call relativism — have dissolved the bonds of social cohesion, allowed the state to grow into the vacuums left by a declining civil society, and created an era of social chaos in which even the biological realities of marriage have become subjects to a perverse freedom’s ever-shifting whims.

“That’s our problem today,” writes Reno. “when ‘Obey only yourself!’” becomes the first and greatest commandment, freedom undermines itself.”

“To be free to achieve our most cherished goals we need authorities we can trust, assent to, and make our own.”

And this is especially detrimental to the country’s poor. Reno argues that America does not suffer nearly as much from income inequality as it does from what he calls “moral inequality.”

While those on the social Left may look at social conservatives with disdain, the policies and cultural norms created by the sexual revolution, whether that be no-fault divorce or the latest battle over transgenderism, have unquestionably left the American working class devastated. As the author puts it, “white, secular progressives have dismantled traditional morality, disempowering and disorienting the weak and the vulnerable.”

Citing recent sociological studies that each try to explain the ongoing rift between a despondent and disillusioned working class and a well-educated, engaged elite, Reno points to the social deregulation of American society as one whose toll has been disproportionately greater on the former. While well-to-do, college educated cultural elites extoll the merits of things like no-fault divorce — the problems with which the author outlines in great detail — they seldom actually practice those things themselves, boasting lower divorce levels, more robust expressions of civil society, higher religiosity, and other positive social indicators.

In contrast, the working class throughout the United States “actually [live] the sixties,” Reno explains. In these communities, “Less than 50 percent of prime-age adults are married. More than 35 percent of those who have been married are divorced. Nearly 25 percent of children are being raised by single mothers. Sixty percent of the children of mothers who dropped out of high school are illegitimate … only thirty percent of children [in these communities] are living with both biological parents when their mothers turn forty.”

“There’s a word to describe this trend,” he concludes. “Collapse.”

Freedom for its own sake has been perverted into chaos, allowing sexual revolutionaries to push their agenda while claiming to do so under the mantle of civil liberty. Consequentially, the author states, this chaos has hurt the least among us. So what is a Christian society to do? Throughout the rest of the book, Reno outlines a vision for a Christian society in America that does not seek political power, but rather seeks to be counter-cultural force in the name of the Gospel.

This societal movement seeks to address the truth-less freedom that has been foisted upon us by elites by embracing what the author a “courageous judgementalism,” that acknowledges what social chaos does to society. It looks to mend the rifts of a splintered society by promoting solidarity through a virtuous understanding of patriotism and by rejecting the false promises of “multiculturalism” for its own sake. This culture would aim to limit government so that the “little platoons” — to borrow from Edmund Burke — of our civil society would once again flourish and allows us to cohere as communities, rather than be sectioned off as atomistic individuals kept isolated by chaos and the overreach statist institutions.

But a Christian society, in the author’s view, looks different from the Christian political movements to which Americans have become accustomed, and operates quite differently than the religious right of decades past.

“[A] religious counter-culture unimaginable fifty years ago has emerged in America,” Reno writes. “Our ambition is not to become the next establishment but to influence, directly and indirectly, the moral and spiritual outlook of the current one, turning it in directions that promote wellbeing for everyone, not just [the cultural and economic elites].”

America has undoubtedly entered a post-Christian era. It now needs the prophetic witness of the church more than ever, in order for its citizens to truly exercise their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of (real) happiness. Christendom may have crumbled, but the Christian society in the United States, as Reno describes in his book, is not only possible, but desperately needed. (For more from the author of “America Is in Trouble, and It Needs More Than Just Freedom” please click HERE)

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