Centennial Review September 2016
Centennial Review September 2016
Eric Metaxas, author, speaker, radio host, addresses the 2016 Western Conservative Summit audience about the importance of reclaiming Americas goodness.
If you care about the world, you have to care about America.
If you have the idea that, America is going to hell and itll be
good for America, the church will thrive under persecution,
thats not a Biblical view. Its like being glad that somebody
is suffering because it will be good for their soul. We dont
rejoice in suffering, we want to help people. We need to care
about this country and then we can care about the world.
Youve always known that America is a beacon of freedom
to the world. Its basically been our mission to be a blessing
to the world. I would argue that God has mightily blessed
this nation specifically so we can be a blessing to the world.
In fact, we have exported freedoms to the world. Weve sent
treasure and weve spilled blood on foreign fields. That is
who we are, and its the idea upon which we were founded.
We are being Hollowed Out from Within
Ive just written a book called If You Can Keep It. Ive never
felt as passionate about anything I have written before.
That includes my Bonhoeffer book. I feel like a man on
a mission with this book because our country is in serious
So those words that Franklin spoke, If you can keep it, are
My parents came to this
chilling because for about 200 years, rather miraculously,
country in the 1950s, my
we kept it very well. It is the last 40 or so years we have not
dad came from Greece and my mom from Germany. They
been keeping it. Weve been running on fumes.
met in an English class in New York City. They wanted
to become Americans, they became Americans, and they
My new book was influenced by Os Guinness and his
raised my brother and me to love our country. When they
book, A Free Peoples Suicide. Os talks about something
passed the Statue of Liberty on those ships,
called a golden triangle of freedom, which
they got choked up because they knew this
is the idea that freedom requires virtue,
is real. Immigrants are leaving hopelessness
virtue requires faith, and faith in turn
Treasure of
to come to a place where there is hope. This
requires freedom.
was real for me growing up. But in the last Self-Government
Freedom, which is to say self-government,
40 or 50 years, we have not been teaching
requires people to govern themselves. You
these things in our schools, and we
dont steal because somebody is pointing
certainly do not see it in the media. And thats why I wrote
a gun at you, you dont steal because it is wrong. Thats
this new book starting with Ben Franklins famous phrase,
called virtue. All of the Founders understood that without
If you can keep it.
virtue, self-government and the liberties we enjoy are
A Republic, Madam
not possible. When I heard Os Guinness talk about this,
I was sickened because I realize that this idea at the very
What the Founders created at Independence Hall in
heart of the American experiment was unknown to me.
Philadelphia was something genuinely miraculous. Many
Jefferson, Franklin, all of the Founders said that virtue is
of them wrote that it seemed a miracle what they were
utterly crucial to the kind of self-government they were
able to do, to create a way for people to govern themselves
proposing. So in order for us to keep it, as Franklin said,
which had never been done in the history of the planet.
we needed to be basically a virtuous populace.
They created something called a constitution, think of the
audacity of that idea. People around the world goggled in
So freedom requires virtue and virtue requires faith. Faith
awe at the idea that a group of people on the coast of a
and virtue are linked. It doesnt mean that every person of
continent had formed a government whereby the people
faith is virtuous or that every virtuous person is a person
would be genuinely free to govern themselves.
of faith but that communities full of faith tend to be more
It was a wild idea, and they did not know if it would work.
Actually, they knew it might fail. In fact, when Benjamin
Franklin came out of the building, a woman said to him,
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Centennial Review September 2016 2
Eric Metaxas encourages Americans to reflect on our countrys sins but to also embrace the good aspects that make our country great.
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