Opinion: Eric Church’s commencement speech worked because it rejected performance

Every few years, America rediscovers the commencement speech. A clip goes viral and social media declares it “the greatest ever.” Commentators rush to crown a new oracle for the graduating class. This past week, that honor was bestowed upon country musician Eric Church after his University of North Carolina commencement address spread rapidly online, with the New York Post calling it “the greatest commencement speech ever.” That hyperbole misses the point. America has produced many remarkable commencement speeches. David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water,” delivered over 20 years ago, is required reading in many of my classes. In 2005, Steve Jobs gave us a reflection on mortality and purpose at Stanford — and “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” Such speeches endure because they speak honestly to universal anxieties about meaning and adulthood. Opinion: A mother’s advice to 2026 graduates Church’s address belongs in that conversation not because it eclipses others, but because it captured something young Americans are starving to hear. Armed with a Tar Heel-emblazoned guitar, Church opened with the image that anchored everything: “Six strings. When all six are in tune, the chords they make can stop a conversation cold, carry a broken person through the worst night of their life, or make a room full of strangers feel for three minutes like they’ve known each other forever. And if even one is off, the whole chord unravels. Not gradually, not politely — the moment you strike it, you know.” The image is potent. It is not a slogan about balance but a claim about wholeness: The goods of a human life are interdependent, and neglecting one corrodes the rest. From there, Church walked the graduates through the six strings as the six pillars of a life: faith, family, partnership, ambition, community and individuality. The framework risked becoming corny, but Church’s sincerity — not performance — kept it from sliding there. He began with faith. The low E, he explained, is the thickest, heaviest string — the one every chord rests on. “Your faith is the low E of your life,” Church said. “The people who tend to their faith in ordinary seasons often find steadiness in extraordinary ones.” Faith, in this telling, is foundational rather than reactive; cultivated in calm, drawn on in crisis. Tend to it, he urged, “not just when you’re broken, but when you’re whole.” In a culture that treats religion as ornamental or embarrassing, hearing a country star tell tens of thousands of graduates that faith is structural — the load-bearing string — counted as countercultural. BYU Class of 2026 reports highest-ever percentage of strengthened faith in Jesus Christ, prophets Here’s what Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn just told new grads Modern commencement addresses often collapse into political sermons aimed at social media applause, or self-help clichés detached from human experience. Graduates are either scolded about the state of the world or flooded with therapeutic slogans about “living your truth.” Church avoided both. What made the speech resonate was its grounding in obligation and rootedness rather than self-actualization. Church did not tell graduates to optimize themselves into personal brands. He told them to build lives around people and communities that endure when applause fades. He warned of “the temptation to perform for everyone and belong to no one — to have thousands of followers and no one who actually knows where you live.” That line struck a nerve. For a generation growing up with fewer siblings, weaker neighborhood ties and declining religious participation, the absence of durable bonds is not abstract, it is the texture of daily life, the replacement of real community with online identity. Today’s graduates have grown up inside a culture that rewards visibility. Every achievement is photographed, every opinion posted, every milestone filtered through metrics of approval. That constant self-display has left them exhausted, anxious and lonely. Bobby Wagner’s newest title — and he refuses to go by anything else Church offered an older alternative: a vision of adulthood rooted in commitment. He traded limitless individualism for interdependence, disruption for steadiness, reinvention for covenant: treating marriage, faith, family and community not as lifestyle options but as commitments that bind a person to something more permanent than ambition. Simplicity is often what makes commencement speeches endure. The ones people return to articulate truths graduates discover through experience. Foster Wallace’s endures because adulthood does become a battle over attention and perspective. Jobs’ endures because mortality clarifies priorities. Church resonated because young Americans sense that success without rootedness feels hollow. Americans are tired of constant irony, outrage and self-display. They are hungry for moral seriousness delivered without sanctimony. Church’s persona helped. He is not a university president managing institutional language, nor a celebrity activist signaling ideological purity. He came across as a man speaking plainly about what shaped his life. Commencement speeches function, at their best, as small civic rituals — moments where institutions publicly articulate what adulthood should mean. Increasingly, many seem uncomfortable doing that. They speak in abstractions about “change” and “impact,” but hesitate to offer thicker moral visions of duty, sacrifice or community. University of Utah’s newest grads challenged to take risks, embrace weakness — and keep ‘showing up’ Church did. That may explain why his speech spread so quickly. The label “greatest ever” is exaggeration; the resonance is real. The speech reminded audiences what a commencement address is supposed to do: offer wisdom sturdy enough for real life. At a moment when young Americans feel isolated despite constant connection, Church offered something increasingly rare in American culture: a vision of adulthood built not around self-display, but around commitment and on faith. Not around endless reinvention, but around people worth staying loyal to and family. That is why the speech resonated. And it is why America needs more messages like it.