Speaking to the rise of socialist candidates within the Democratic Party, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) warned that “the barbarians are inside the gate.” He went on to explain, “We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic … or go down this dark road of death to communism.”
The Speaker isn’t crying wolf; the threat is real. But the battle to preserve the Republic will not ultimately be won in Congress. There will be legislative fights. There will be elections where your vote could determine the balance of power and whether socialist policies further undermine our freedoms. But if the barbarians are already inside the gate, we need to ask: How did they get in? And how do we get them out?
Congress reflects culture more than it creates it. Laws can restrain evil, but they cannot create virtue. A constitutional republic depends on citizens with the moral character to govern themselves and families that instill virtue in the next generation. Culture is ultimately shaped by what people believe about God, truth, and morality. When those foundations erode, political institutions follow.
To understand how this ideological and spiritual challenge gained traction in America, we have to look beyond politics to the forces that shape a nation’s character.
In his 1983 book The Gravedigger File, author and social critic Os Guinness warned that secularization was hollowing out the institution that had long guided Western civilization: the church. As biblical faith weakened, society’s moral foundations weakened, creating a vacuum secular ideologies would inevitably fill.
A little more than a decade later, Judge Robert Bork approached the same crisis from a different direction. In “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,” he argued that America’s moral and cultural foundations were being eroded by radical individualism and radical egalitarianism, weakening the institutions upon which constitutional government depends. Nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was rejected because of his originalist view of the Constitution. Though writing as a constitutional scholar rather than a theologian, he arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion.
After coming to Washington, I hoped to meet Robert Bork. I invited him to lunch, and he graciously accepted. During our conversation, I asked for his prognosis of America’s future.
He replied, “The culture is too far gone for the country to turn around.”