Athens Needs Jerusalem—and America Needs Both

The Challenge

Western Civilization is reeling. The fusion of Judaean ethics (Jerusalem) and Greco-Roman governance (Athens) that sprang to life in Christianity is under attack. From one side, utopians have deployed an entirely new metaphysics that mocks traditional faith, inverts Biblical morality, and pushes toward a successor civilization. From the other, religious supremacists assert that their monopoly on theological correctness buys them not only favor in the Kingdom of God, but also favored legal status and a unique right to rule here in the realm of man.

While utopians set their sights on a future whose morality they see as far more enlightened than Judeo-Christian ethics, supremacists reach back into history, seeking to resurrect religious intolerance, inequality, discrimination, and hierarchy. Both camps have posted significant twenty-first century gains. The combined effect has been brutal.

A core Judeo-Christian belief, however, is that God provides solutions capable of meeting all challenges—if only we can muster the courage and wisdom to find them. The solution to today’s challenge lies in the American founding—not in its revolution in temporal governance, but in its underappreciated revolution in spiritual governance. America’s founding introduced an entirely new “spiritual platform,” preserving Biblical metaphysics and ethics while embracing theological ecumenicism. This innovative American model provides the West’s best (perhaps only) chance for survival.

America’s turn away from this platform in the post-WWII era has led to our current morass. No society can survive without metaphysical glue binding its members together and marking them as distinct. Bible stories defining Western Civilization have faded from public consciousness, educational curricula, and childhood awareness. Their removal has obliterated the most effective way of instilling the shared morality necessary for American society to cohere. We’ve collapsed into a values divide stemming from the very different moral codes of Biblical and utopian metaphysics. The supremacists accept the utopian claim that this collapse is inherent in the American system, and thus seek to squelch the ecumenicism they identify as its root.

Our national malady is spiritual; temporal politics is but a symptom. Yet only through politics can we reclaim the spiritual platform that positioned America to save Western Civilization from the twin evils of utopianism and supremacism. Athens needs Jerusalem to provide moral foundations unavailable from reason alone. Jerusalem needs Athens to translate divine wisdom into temporal governance structures. Both need the American spiritual platform enabling equality under temporal law while deferring theological judgment to God.

Jerusalem Meets Athens

Western Civilization’s foundational metaphysics began with God’s Adamic, Noahic, and Abrahamic Covenants—steps toward His Mosaic covenant forging the Israelite nation around Torah. Though the Israelites understood that the Torah’s rituals and theological commandments were unique unto their nation, they believed that all of the world’s people would eventually accept the One True God and hew to His moral code.

For nearly a millennium, God’s prophets directed and exhorted the Israelites—through the destruction of their Temple, Babylonian exile, return to Zion, rebuilding of the Temple, and promises of Messianic deliverance. Long after the prophecies ceased—more than 300 years after Alexander’s conquests began the cross-pollination of Athens and Jerusalem—Judaean culture hardly seemed compelling. Factional infighting was rampant. Roman occupiers ruled, often with a heavy hand. Hellenizers sought assimilation into Greco-Roman culture. Sadducees clung tightly to Temple rituals. Pharisees emphasized scholarship and law. Messianics believed that deliverance was imminent. Samaritans, Essenes, zealots, and various other groups rounded out the picture—along with the inevitable disputes and divisions within each broad camp.

Jesus of Nazareth preached to a troubled nation. Many messianics resonated to his message; most Judaeans did not. Within decades, however, his followers had jettisoned the distinction between Jew and gentile, announced that the Torah’s ritual and theological commandments were no longer applicable, and brought the good news of God’s New Covenant to the world at large.

Three centuries later, Constantine’s embrace of Christianity marked the true founding of Western Civilization. His Council of Nicaea canonized official Roman Christianity. Founded as an adjunct to imperial governance, the emergent Church’s universalism (i.e., catholicism) gave it a monopoly path to salvation through Christ; its orthodoxy rendered all competing Christian denominations heretical. Though Islam’s later emergence as history’s second great universal, monotheistic empire helped make this combination appear normative, its fourth-century arrival marked a revolution in governance.

Like all empires, Christian Rome was multi-ethnic and supremacist. Imperial laws always place conquered peoples beneath those that the Emperor considers his own. As Rome became increasingly Christian, that handed legal primacy to Church adherents.

That imperial governance structure proved robust. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Pope eventually emerged as de facto head of a loose, decentralized Christendom. In the East, church governance remained intertwined with the Emperor. This divergence in governance structures eventually led to the Great Schism—leaving the successors to the original Church as the two most important institutions of Western Civilization.

For more than a millennium, the Church enforced its theological supremacism. Pagans were killed or converted. Muslims—Christendom’s only temporal peer, perpetual enemy, and necessary trading partner—received the predictable combination of fear, loathing, curiosity, and respect. Internal Christian challengers arose every few generations, anchored in scripture and complaining that the Church had corrupted the faith. From Nicaea until Luther, the Church coopted some as reforms and squelched others as heresies, forcing advocates to recant or die.

Jews, while no temporal threat, posed the greatest theological quandary. The adoption of the Jewish Biblical canon as the Christian Old Testament guaranteed a perpetual intertwining of the faiths. For the Church, belief in an eternal, covenantal God posed a conundrum: If the Mosaic Covenant retained viability, Jewish fidelity to Torah evaded the Church’s monopoly. If it did not, then the eternal covenant of an eternal God could be less than eternal—a disquieting thought to all living within God’s other covenants.

How should the Church understand—and of greater practical importance, treat—the Jews? Replacement Theology argued that the New Covenant fulfilled and superseded the Mosaic Covenant but provided no practical guidance. St. Augustine’s Witness Doctrine filled that gap, proclaiming that God had preserved a unique but degraded role for the Jews as subjugated witnesses to Christ’s Truth. With that, Western Civilization assumed its full structure: A dominant, imperial Church plus a permanent Jewish subclass. Every important juncture in Western history thus mandated an asterisk posing what eventually (and dangerously) became known as “The Jewish Question:” The effects on Christendom may tell the primary story, but what about the Jews?

The effect on the Jews was clear. Unlike Europe’s defunct pagans, Jews survived long centuries chafing beneath theologically supremacist imperial governance structures. Ironically, their status did bear witness to Christendom—though almost the inverse of the testimony Augustine had anticipated. One of the best indicators of the health of a Christian society was the welfare of the Jews living in its midst. Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish violence tended to flare under two sets of circumstances. During a spiritual challenge, whether a Christian heresy or a Holy War, the Jews’ theological incorrectness assured that they’d become collateral damage. During material crises—war, famine, economic collapse, epidemic—Jews were useful scapegoats. In between, notwithstanding their perpetual degradation, Jewish communities flourished, Jewish learning advanced, Jewish life often thrived, and the Jews proved loyal contributors to their host societies.

The asymmetric relationship, however, ran far deeper than the power disparity. Christians obsessed over Jewish metaphysics, agonizing over how God’s chosen people could reject His only Son. Jews rarely returned the fascination. They saw Jewish identity as unique and affirmative, giving Jesus little reference in their self-conception. Jews cared deeply about how Christians behaved—particularly toward Jews—but not about what Christians believed.

Each community thus spent centuries studying its own morality as it stood in theory and exhorting adherents to comply. Christians then focused on Jewish theology rather than the Biblical moral code, while Jews focused on Christian morality in practice (i.e., behavior) rather than in theory. Neither could fully appreciate that the two moral codes differed largely at the margins. The morality of Athens has long been defunct. Jerusalem bears primary authorship for nearly all of what Western Civilization considers moral.

From Westphalia to Utopia

The imperial structures Rome bequeathed to Christendom eventually collapsed. The Treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648) ended the Church’s temporal dominance. The new Westphalian system didn’t force any denomination to accept any other denomination as anything other than heresy. It simply acknowledged that pragmatism required accepting heretical and faithful Kings as equals under at least some laws—including the elevation of a King’s chosen denomination to a position of privilege within his realm.

The shattering of this longstanding governance structure reverberated. The wars of the next century-and-a-quarter were about nothing other than the momentary allocation of power and wealth. Philosophical debates about society, governance, morality, reason, science, and the proper lines dividing the rule of man from the rule of God raged in the background. The twin revolutions of the late eighteenth century brought them to the fore—precisely when Western Civilization most needed a successor structure.

In 1789, utopianism scored its first major victory. The French Revolution sought to obliterate all that came before it, replacing Biblical metaphysics with a new man untarnished by the Fall, a new week untethered to Genesis, a new calendar unrelated to Christ, and a new ethics based in pure reason. Its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may have been made “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being,” but it attributed those rights solely to the wisdom and authority of the French Assembly.

Yet the Assembly still felt the need to ask about the Jews—and its answer once again served as a reflective witness: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, but accord everything to Jews as individuals.” Everyone living beneath the Assembly’s enlightened governance was required to relinquish pre-existing identities or communal affiliations to join the newly defined French nation. Imperial theological supremacism was alive and well in this secular utopian republic.

That answer augured what was to come. As knowledge of the physical world grew, the apparent need for metaphysics receded. Athens pushed out Jerusalem. Utopian thinkers, committed to new systems that would elevate humanity, filled the void. Many eschewed objective morality and higher purpose, asserting that only exploitative social structures restrained humanity’s perfection. The most influential of them forwarded ideologies as universal as Christianity and Islam. Their efforts bequeathed the world socialism, fascism, Nazism, Communism, the “End of History” thesis, globalism, and Wokeism. As their utopian infection spread beyond the West, it birthed Islamism, Khomeinism, Maoism, and Third Worldism. Utopianism’s first quarter-millennium has been impressive in scope, bloody in implementation, and soul-sucking to all who’ve fallen beneath its sway. Its conflict with the Judeo-Christian worldview is elemental.

The American Spiritual Platform

At the very moment that utopianism was gaining its European toehold, England’s American colonies, seeking first independence and then union, had to grapple with yet another challenge. Unlike Europe, where the Westphalian formula had locked in de facto local monopolies, the colonies showed significant denominational diversity. A temporal formula for accepting the legal equality of those you deemed heretical was a practical imperative. Because Christendom’s imperial governance structures provided little practical guidance, America’s founders turned for inspiration to the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Greece—Jerusalem and Athens.

Their solution was elegant, powerful and radical. The Declaration of Independence defined the new American nation around the shared belief “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” It deferred the establishment of a government “instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to secure those rights. Fifteen years later, the First Amendment to the Constitution establishing that man-made government decreed: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (the Establishment Clause), “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (the Free Exercise Clause).

The United States thus drew a new, distinct line between the roles that God and man would play in temporal governance. God moved first, as a Creator who bestowed individual rights and the implicit moral code needed to secure them. He then deferred to man, charging us with establishing a government capable of providing that security. That man-made government rested its legitimacy on both popular consent and its ability to secure the divinely-endowed rights. A government that failed at this foundational, God-given task would lose all legitimacy.

Unlike prior Western governments, this new one claimed no role in ushering those living beneath its sway into the realm of God. The Establishment Clause explicitly eschewed theological supremacism; any claim from any denomination of any faith that its theological correctness warrants elevated legal status is inherently anti-American. The Free Exercise Clause recognized that one of those God-given individual rights is the right to choose freely among the many approaches to the intangible, metaphysical, spiritual realms beyond this one. Stated simply, the new American formulation combined a shared, core, objective morality defining society with individual theological ecumenicism.

What might that mean in practice? Once again, the treatment of the Jews revealed the answer. This time, the Jews themselves raised the question. In an August 1790 exchange, George Washington assured the Hebrew Community of Newport: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Note the assumption Washington embedded so deeply that it almost escapes notice: To have any meaning at all, “good” citizenship must rest upon a shared, objective notion of “good,” rooted in natural law and a divine dispensation of rights—core Biblical morality. Acceptance of that moral code is a prerequisite for inclusion in the American nation. Anything further is left to the individual. The American formulation was never intended as a free-for-all. It broadened Westphalia to include all denominations whose moral codes were consistent with objective, biblically-defined good citizenship. It deepened Westphalia to extend beyond the conscience of Kings to the conscience of individuals. And it rejected all assertions of theological supremacism. All denominations or philosophies that either reject core Biblical morality or assert that their unique correctness warrants legal favoritism are thus inherently anti-American.

This innovative spiritual platform established America as inheritor of the Athens/Jerusalem fusion precisely when Europe began moving toward utopian successors. Was the near-simultaneity of these revolutionary proposals coincidental? Or was God sowing the seeds of a solution while presenting the challenge? Either way, it highlights the danger of our current juncture. The simultaneous attacks from anti-biblical utopians and theological supremacists—emanating from within today’s American citizenry—threaten to undermine the entire American system and the best hope for a stable, non-imperial, liberty-oriented Western Civilization.

The platform also proved to be both good for governance and salutary to faith, starting with American Protestantism. Church affiliation and attendance at the Revolution had fallen below 20%, only to skyrocket during the Second Great Awakening. By the mid-nineteenth century, American Christianity—powered by denominations that mastered evangelism, persuasion, and moral exhortation—had developed a sociology resembling nothing in European history.

Even the deviations from the ideal that arose as America digested its first three sizable non-Protestant faith communities confirmed and strengthened the platform’s character: Anti-Catholic bigotry focused on fear of Papal dominance—resurgent imperialist supremacism. Anti-Mormon bigotry focused on polygamy—an affront to core Western morality. As those specific concerns abated, those faith communities integrated fully into the American melting pot. Jews—for perhaps the first time since Constantine—faced only the social problems of neighborhood, establishment, and employment exclusion, rather than legislated inequality or complaints about theological deficiencies. Deeply unpleasant episodes, but all within the theologically ecumenical contours of America’s founding spiritual platform.

Christianity Transformed

The evolution of Christian governance that began as a pragmatic response to Protestantism reshaped Western Civilization. The American separation of church and state freed ecclesiastic and temporal leaders to focus on their distinct spheres of expertise. If theological correctness confers no legal advantages, its enforcement loses much salience. Christian leaders had to emphasize persuasion and evangelism—harkening back to Christianity’s earliest years. The shift was profound, emanating far beyond American shores—and once again, it brought the Jews to center stage.

American Protestantism had always had a distinctively Old Testament feel, often seeing this discovered continent as the new Promised Land. Philosophies including covenant theology, dispensationalism, and Christian Zionism opened new lenses through which Christian adherents could reassess the role of today’s Jews. As more Christians drifted toward philosemitism, more Jews could relax enough to appreciate what Christianity had brought the world—and even to ponder whether as degrading as Augustine’s Witness Doctrine may have been, it provided more protection than they might have enjoyed under two millennia of European paganism.

Catholicism followed its own path to an analogous reassessment. After two World Wars, the Vatican finally internalized what it had accepted only grudgingly at Westphalia: In the temporal realm, it had become but the largest denomination among many. Neo-pagan Nazism and atheistic Communism highlighted the Church’s political weakness vis-à-vis utopian ideologies, forcing the reflection and reform manifested in Vatican II. Nostra Aetate reassessed relationships with other denominations and faiths, beginning with Jews. By its fiftieth anniversary, the Vatican could state: “That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery.”

This now-widespread rejection of theological supremacism demonstrates contemporary Christianity’s broad embrace of America’s founding spiritual platform—confirming Biblical morality while accepting that theological correctness has no bearing on legal equality. For Jews, these new developments—possible only because of America—were more than welcome. They meant that Christians may have finally accepted the terms Jews have long begged them to take: Judge us by how we act rather than by what we believe. You will find loyal, hard-working contributors to your society. Once again, the status of America’s Jews stands as witness to America: History’s most secure, vibrant diasporic Jewish community helps anchor history’s freest, most prosperous society.

This new breathing room also allowed Jews to reassess some of their own preconceptions. Nearly a millennium ago, Maimonides recognized the importance of Christianity and Islam to eliminating paganism, popularizing Biblical morality, and preparing the world for messianic deliverance. His problems were their mistreatment of Jews and their insistence on supersession. Over the centuries, a trickle of Maimonideans—notably the thirteenth century Rabbi Menachem HaMeiri—developed these thoughts further, casting Christianity and Islam as Judaism’s monotheistic partners in upholding human dignity and ethical boundaries on behavior. By the twenty-first century, Christian openings toward Jews allowed Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks to write—not without controversy: “In the course of history, God has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims.”

Thanks to the American spiritual platform, Jews and Christians could finally begin to see themselves as playing distinct roles in God’s divine plan. The two faith messages can now align in moving the world toward universal monotheism and ethical behavior—even while acknowledging that Jews cannot accept, and Christians cannot deny, the divinity of Christ. That far from all members of either faith embrace this shared narrative is hardly surprising. Divine plans unfold slowly. Whether this nascent reconciliation will flourish or wither remains uncertain. The American platform’s health seems a critical determinant—and that platform is far from healthy.

American Abdication

In the mid-twentieth century, America drifted from its founding spiritual platform. Misguided Supreme Court decisions empowered misdirected cultural responses. Their combined effect has been toxic.

The misconstruction of the Establishment Clause created an uneven playing field biased against Biblical stories and morals. It prohibited teaching specific religious beliefs as truth in public settings without defining religion—handing far greater latitude to belief systems presenting as ideologies or philosophies. Utopians, who reject the “religion” label, now teach their credal truths as educational and scientific fact in ways prohibited to traditional religions.

The misconstruction of the Free Exercise Clause opened the door to all denominations, including anti-American theological supremacists. Islamism—a virulently supremacist twentieth-century Islamic ideology—now dominates American Muslim institutions. Christian philosophies advocating the reintegration of theology into governance structures have recently begun moving from the fringes into mainstream discourse.

Taken together, bad Establishment Clause jurisprudence has elevated utopianism while bad Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence has enabled supremacism. Biblically-oriented, theologically ecumenical governance has receded in the face of these twin attacks. Denominations conforming to America’s spiritual platform find themselves on the defensive.

Non-religious Americans have turned sharply against the West’s Jerusalem pillar, jettisoning the Bible for utopian mythology and metaphysics—which taught them that the Athens pillar is “too white.” Americans educated in the twenty-first century lack familiarity with metaphors, allegories, parables, and stories that bound together generations of westerners. America’s own mythology—rooted in the Bible, the Classics, and Enlightenment thought—has been targeted for replacement.

Shorn of that foundational mythology, national unity and purpose have crumbled. Today’s sociopolitical writing shows a country divided over basic ethical definitions. Good, bad, evil, justice, compassion, freedom, equality, diversity, acceptance, tolerance, choice, hatred, and love have been deconstructed—often inverted.

Until recently, a presumed Biblical familiarity underpinned popular culture. That’s no longer the case. Supernatural tales now favor witches, vampires, and werewolves rather than prophecy or miracle. Morality plays now emphasize Western exploitation of other cultures. Superheroes originating in the 1940s as humans with exceptional capabilities have become immanent gods, traveling through time and parallel realities, altering nature, and experiencing multiple resurrections. The consequences of such cultural drift are dire. Anti-Biblical moral codes are taking easy root among those unfamiliar with even the most basic ethical stories of the Bible.

Utopianism has surged to fill the void. German Nazism’s 1940s defeat and Soviet Communism’s 1990s collapse merely nudged utopians in new directions. Critical theorists broadened Marx’s arguments into general theories of struggle, oppression, and exploitation. The Woke devised new metaphysical beliefs, replacing Biblical notions of creation, soul, persistent evil, purpose, and eschatology. Anti-imperialists and decolonizers inverted Western Civilization, casting Europeans, Christians, Jews, and “white people” as satanic. Liberal Democrats declared history had ended, resolving its thorniest questions in favor of their preferred models of economics and governance. The European Union validated the Vatican’s post-WWII assessment, reuniting the continent as utopian rather than Christian.

The historical revisionism now attempting to rehabilitate even such contemporary monsters as Hitler, Stalin, and bin Laden—particularly among the biblically illiterate young—conveys a sober message. Humanity has not evolved one iota beyond its brutal instincts. The Bible elevated us. Though other civilizations may have uncovered other elevating sources, Western Civilization has only the Bible.

If left unchecked, America’s abandonment of its founding spiritual platform will end in tragedy. The jurisprudential disfavoring of religious stories and lessons, and its predictable cultural response, has eroded the glue binding American society. Our proud historical/mythological justification of American exceptionalism has given way to alternative mythologies painting America as evil—and singularly unworthy of survival. Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and The New York Times’s 1619 Project stand out as preeminent examples.

The jurisprudential sidelining of objective good citizenship in favor of a purely subjective free-for-all has enabled the spread of dangerous theologically supremacist denominations. Their toxicity has been particularly destructive to America’s Muslims—a group whose immigration largely postdated our abandonment of standards. Bipartisan (and broad Western) leadership sidelined Muslims who’d fled to the West hoping to foster denominations fully consistent with American ecumenicism in favor of Islamism. The Islam now preached in many American mosques is theologically supremacist, rageful, violent, proudly opposed to Biblical morality, antithetical to good citizenship, and contemptuous of integration into the theologically ecumenical American nation.

Worse still, the supremacism of western Islamism, allied as it is with the virulently “anti-white” racism of the utopian Woke, is beginning to infect American Christians. Rising antisemitism—arguing that Jews cannot be true Americans—may be the most obvious manifestation, but it’s not the only one. Interdenominational sniping online and in podcasts harks back to the sixteenth century. Claims that doctrinal theological correctness conveys a right to rule are gaining traction, particularly among those educated in twenty-first century Woke metaphysics. As heartening as America’s youthful post-Covid return to faith may be, it’s not without its perils. Because many remain as biblically illiterate as their anti-religious peers, their newfound faith lacks knowledge, understanding, maturity, and wisdom. The zeal of the new convert often combines deep passion with shallow knowledge. That combination can prove volatile.

Taken together, Biblical illiteracy, utopian dominance of education and culture, rising Islamism, and zealous-if-uninformed new Christians threaten to render America unrecognizable if not unlivable. The resurgence of the Jewish Question—suddenly drawing answers unlike anything in American history—casts a dark shadow. American exceptionalism may be hitting one of its limiting principles. If we abdicate our founding spiritual platform, we will lose all claim to survival as a distinct, moral nation.

Restoration

America stands at a crossroads simultaneously spiritual and temporal. The utopian rejection of Jerusalem in favor of a new metaphysics embodied in Wokeism, socialism, globalism, and critical theory is driving toward a post-Christian successor civilization. Theological supremacism—the conviction that those committing theological error can be neither trusted nor accepted as equals—is surging, promising to revive dark chapters from the past. The American combination of core Biblical morality and theological ecumenicism is in retreat.

Those of us committed to the American spiritual platform must devise the right strategies and forge the right alliances. We must realign our laws with our foundational spiritual platform. We must return Bible stories to the public square, school curricula, and popular culture. Neither task will be easy. Do we want to retain control of our foundational stories, preserving fidelity and reverential treatment? Or do we want the broadest possible audience to appreciate basic characters, storylines, and morals defining Western Civilization’s metaphysical foundations?

The latter strategy is imperative. To reclaim our culture, we must craft stories and storytelling mechanisms appealing to those with no more reverence for Torah or Gospel than for Olympus or Asgard. We must shout down both the utopians screaming that we’re imposing faith and the faithful decrying us as blasphemers. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. Storytelling has been central to every successful religious and cultural movement; we must brave legal constraints to restore our own to their positions of primacy. Fables and parables are powerful, simple stories illustrating human nature and conveying moral messages. Society’s sustainability hinges far more on shared morality than on shared theology.

As to alliances, our faction in this struggle is cross-denominational: Christians and Jews who see ourselves as elements in God’s divine plan; American patriots committed to our founding ideals; adherents of all faiths aligned with the American spiritual platform. We must unite all who see in the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and the spiritual platform they created the emergence of what Abraham Lincoln called God’s “almost chosen people.”

Such a proposal is a radical departure from the way that most people think about faith communities. On matters of faith, the obvious alignments follow theological agreement—fine and proper when the questions involve theology, liturgy, and ritual, but not when they involve governance, societal structure, and faith’s role within them. While denominational differences remain central to the selection of a house of worship or a spiritual leader, alliances in the preservation of American society must cut across denominations and faiths.

In America today, many denominations have utopian factions and/or supremacist factions as well as true American factions. Never mistake your utopian and supremacist co-religionists for allies. Work to minimize their influence. Those praying next to you may agree with your theology, but if they place themselves in a different camp concerning temporal governance, they’re not your allies in this realm.

Not for the first time, the treatment of the Jews will stand as witness. The idea that the American founding was an act of providence is hardly new. Its experimental elevation of individual liberty and limited government gets most of the credit. It’s far past time to recognize its revolutionary reformulation of the interrelationship among faith, morality, and governance—the line between the rule of God and the rule of man. That foundational American model provides the only path toward a peaceful, ethical, divinely ordained future.

Athens needs Jerusalem to provide the moral foundation that reason alone cannot generate. Jerusalem needs Athens to translate divine wisdom into governance structures that work in the temporal world. Both need America—the revolutionary spiritual platform that solved the age-old problem of theological diversity while preserving objective morality. The United States will either return to its founding promise as a country that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance and requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens,” or the American nation will fall.