Searching for Purpose in America

When the ties that bind become unbound.

“Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

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When I was young, my family took road trips across the country — mostly throughout the West and Southwest. Our family embarked on annual journeys on the roads traversing the great expanse, first through the gentle, rolling waves of Midwest plains, through the chiseled Rocky Mountains that descended into the stark desert valleys of Albuquerque and onward to Tucson. Sometimes we headed through the Dakota Badlands — a wayward land separate from any modern concept of order; its yawning, rocky formations daring the adventurous spirits to attempt to search out its secrets; a futile task.

But it was there, in the midst of the open roads somewhere between Deadwood and Death Valley, past Sterling, Colorado and the easy cowboy persona lingering on the friendly smiles; hurtling through the vivid red siltstone and buttes of Monument Valley; past the twilight neon of Tucumcari from Amarillo on old Route 66. It was then, looking out the tinted windows of our pink GMC conversion van — upon fields and pastures and mountains and valleys — that I thought I’d find my purpose. I didn’t. Rather I was swallowed up by the possibility of America: that within its history and ideals, shaped by the motley people who called it home, my purpose would find me. America, after all, was a place confident in its role in the world, and there is where I would find my place.

Tucumcari, New Mexico

But what if, in the time between those halcyon trips of my youth and the disillusionment of the present the purpose I thought was waiting for me was lost somewhere in an America that no longer exists? What happens to the lost souls who go in search of America and find a nation without direction, without confidence, without purpose?

This is where America stumbles at the current moment. And it is brought about not by an external villain but by the dissolution of the institutional framework that acts as guardrails for our society. In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the protagonist, Christian, sets off on a journey from his hometown “City of Destruction” — heavily burdened by the knowledge of his own sin — with a singular purpose: to arrive at the “Celestial City.” Although he faces distractions and falters on his path, he always regains his footing and rights himself to fulfill his goal. But what if Christian was not certain of his purpose? Would he, like America, be wandering in the forest vulnerable to his enemies and at the mercy of his self-doubt?

The “shining city upon the hill,” (perhaps even the Celestial City) metaphor for America has been used as a metaphor for American exceptionalism and comes from John Winthrop’s 1630 treatise, A Model of Christian Charity, in which he proclaims this new world would be “as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” The phrase has been used by presidents from Kennedy to Reagan and Obama and is itself a reference made by Winthrop to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In his January 12, 1989 Farewell Address, President Reagan said, “I’ve thought a bit of the shining ‘city upon a hill.’ … After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the Pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

America’s purpose is clear, it is a light on the world, shining as a beacon of hope, freedom, and opportunity to the world; a defender of liberty; protector of human dignity; a bulwark between the forces of evil and good and buttress to the weak in the face of common enemies.

Photo by Oleg Chursin on Unsplash

In a treasure of insight and introspection, William F. Buckley, Jr. guest-hosted an episode of Charlie Rose on July 5, 2002. The guests included the late Terry Teachout and Father Richard Neuhaus, Richard Brookhiser, and George Gilder. They discussed America’s role — its purpose in the world — in the context of Independence Day, one year after 9/11.

Buckley: Let me ask you something. The Fourth of July, some of the rhetoric is chauvinistic, as one expects in those circumstances. Has there germinated in the past few years something that genuinely and justifiably irritates other countries — our allies, pre-eminently? What's the kind of thing that we say on the Fourth of July that makes people we respect say, in England, ''I'm glad you went?''

Neuhaus: I think that it's just inevitable. I mean, never underestimate the role of envy in personal life or in the communities and in international affairs. And there is an oddity and that is that America has always right from the beginning, from the founding era, always felt this need to define its purpose and a purpose in a rather singular way. Sometimes that's been called manifest destiny and it has had other different names. And that's American exceptionalism, et cetera. That's one of the things that's at stake in the phrase ''Under God,'' you know, in the Pledge of Allegiance. Does it mean, you know, an exceptional nation that somehow is exempt from the corruptions and the lusts for power and other vices? Or does it mean, first of all, which I think it should mean, a nation under judgment? Now I think the United States, considering its unprecedented role of global leadership today — militarily, diplomatically, politically, economically, culturally, every name, every dimension. Never before has any nation in the world been in this position. We are astonishingly self-critical and reflective about this. I don't think that — I don't mean simply at the academic mud puddle playing with post-modernist multiculturalistic kind of self-criticism, but sober serious in a reflection. We listen to the people who are unhappy with America. And I think we should. But we can't be crippled and we can't be paralyzed by it.

America’s great strength is also its great weakness: an overarching willingness for self-judgment and inclusiveness. We are painfully self-aware and apologetic for our sins. But it has now come at the expense of celebrating our accomplishments, leadership, and confidence in our moral soundness. And the left has taken advantage of that, reducing America to the sum of its greatest sins. It also uses Americans' accommodating nature to insist on codifying the exceptions - now to the point of demanding one narrative, often in contradiction to the personal values of millions of parents and families.

And the more we fall away from our central purpose, our role in the world — and confidence in it — the farther from a stable, healthy, free society we become: believing in a revisionist history that insists our moral foundation is built on nothing more than lies and deceit, that we are incapable of living up to the ideals promised at our founding, that America is the great obstacle to world peace rather than a defender of it, however imperfect. All of this leads to the crumbling of our cultural institutions. We have a staggering decline in marriage rates: at 6.3 it is at an all-time low. Birth rates, although rebounding slightly in 2021, overall trend precipitously downward. The nearly 3.7 million newborns are the second-lowest number on record. Our society is drowning in despair and loneliness, with American happiness dropping to a 50-year low paired with record-high deaths from drug overdoses.

All of this should not be surprising when politics becomes an identity rather than identity informing one’s politics. As we allow our religious beliefs to be superseded by political allegiance and our cause becomes our purpose, a withering hollowness threatens our very humanity. And it is filled not with benevolent leaders, but with politicians and bureaucratic elites who have more and more control from distant, broken institutions.

In writing about the nature of patriotism and the connection of community, nationalism, and public virtue, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his Oeuvres Complètes:

I am convinced that the interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity…Man has been created by God in such a way that the larger the object of his love the less directly attached he is to it…For the most part, the sole means by which Providence lets each of us work for the general good of humanity is to divide this great object into many smaller parts making each of these fragments a worthy object of love to those who compose it.

Contemporary American political and cultural commentators have revived this Tocqueville observation. Yuval Levin made similar observations in A Time to Build; and in his post-2016 election book Alienated America, Timothy Carney analyzed the disruptive effects of the hollowing-out of middle America and the disappearing “Little Platoons” in communities to society at large. Everywhere we see the unraveling of families, the devaluing of life, and the withering dignity of the forgotten man. Is it no wonder that without a purposeful life and a hopeful future there are fewer marriages, fewer babies — less happiness? But now, there is another element that deepens the morass: an abandonment of those things that connect us at the simplest, nuclear level: houses of worship, civic organizations — even the shared experiences such as mass participation in world conflicts that produced generations of battle veterans, an instant brotherhood with a common purpose.

This void was quickly filled with a growing government eager to be the savior that promised comfort but gave us peremptory commands and made us dependents. I highly recommend listening to Ben Domenech’s interview with Father Sirico for The Federalist Radio Hour in May of 2020. In it, Father Sirico and Domenech have a captivating discussion in the deep days of the pandemic, covering a variety of topics that have a common thread: navigating a world of uncertainty and isolation in an America unmoored from the traditional mores on which it was built, usurped by a government encroaching on individual rights and basic liberty. In the context of Tocqueville’s observed “promise of America,” Father Sirico explains

Tocqueville says something to the effect, ‘to the extent that the moral tie is weakened, the political tie will be strengthened.’ And isn’t that exactly what we’ve seen in the country? We’ve marginalized the churches and the other mediating institutions and increased the overreaching power of the state…

Domenech agrees, adding that America’s institutions are failing, “people can no longer trust each other, and so they look to a centralized power — the man on the white horse — that only he can save us. Can we have more confidence in each other, in our neighborhoods and our fellow Americans, as opposed to looking to an Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, or even a President Trump, and saying, ‘Come and save us’?”

Father Sirico justly states, “We have to choose to be leaders in our communities again, not followers of politicians.”

So how do we regain our footing? How does America, with unraveling tethers and fatigued from fighting a drawn-out internal battle over its very purpose, find the righteous path? I have to think we have always been on it, but our disillusionment has clouded our sight and muddied the course. Terry Teachout, at the end of the Charlie Rose roundtable poignantly declares, “It is the test of democracy as to whether or not it will produce leaders who will lead, not just when buildings are collapsing but when maybe something inside us is in danger of collapsing.”

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

What happened to the girl who was unafraid of the vastness before her? What happened to her bold determination to seek everything concealed? She was suffocated by the woman hiding in the shadows of her own fear; betrayed by her anger and regret, buried by self-doubt. And so it may be for America in the twenty-first century. But, for now, the promise of the Shining City still lingers, and with it a singular purpose to the world.

Thank you for reading and tolerating a long post. If you struggle with your own sense of meaning or have suggestions about America’s, I would love to hear them. It is an inroad to rebuilding our communities and common purpose.