As the United States has crested its 250th anniversary, this is a fitting occasion to consecrate anew the spiritual and moral underpinnings of our Founding, the things that continue to hold our country together. No American thinker recognized this need for renewal more in his lifetime than Russell Kirk. Michael Lucchese’s careful selection of Kirk’s thoughts on America’s spiritual and moral order, Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, answers many of the questions that Protestant Christians are wrestling with regarding America’s Christian roots.
The book speaks to three aspects of American civil order and national character: the roots of our moral and spiritual constituted order; the statesmen who understood and cultivated the American character; and the writers, poets, and lettered men who gave expression to the American imagination. In his introduction to the volume, Bradley Birzer notes that it was Kirk’s attachment to the spiritual loves and duties in his home, family, and local community that centered his love of country on the Permanent Things.
For Kirk, a love of America is not a nationalism that binds smaller loves together, but rather a spreading tree that gives protection to those local loves and is itself comprised of the smaller things. But all these loves are also connected to the higher love of God. Kirk does not compromise the Christian essence of America, nor does he insist on a national force which compels the conscience. Instead, Kirk believes in a republic of laws—not men—under God, and in defense of an ordered liberty of loves. To that end, three aspects of the American order emerge from this volume: the bulwarks of order in our Founding; the landmarks of liberty that have preserved this order; and the wardrobe of imagination which has given it life and vitality.
Read more from E. Welsey Reynolds, III in Mere Orthodoxy.
