Thoughts on America, Age 250

Americans are bad at history. As the late Christopher Lasch and many other scholars have noted, we’re ambivalent about the past. We claim to be a “new order of the ages,” words stamped in Latin on our nation’s Great Seal. The past comes with obligations that constrain the future and interfere with reinventing ourselves at will. Yet at the same we can’t escape the past as a stockpile of lessons and the foundation of our current circumstances.

Thus, one of the more telling trends in our culture as we approach America’s “Quarter Millennial” is an enhanced interest—especially among men, but including many women as well—in Roman history. A quick search with Anthropic’s AI tool “Claude” explains the phenomenon this way:

The Founding Fathers deliberately modeled aspects of American government on Roman precedents — the Senate, the concept of a republic, a political process of checks and balances. The architecture of Washington, D.C. itself evokes Roman classical style. This creates a sense of lineage and connection. And Rome’s trajectory from republic to empire to decline offers a compelling story that resonates with anxieties about American power and longevity. People often draw parallels (whether apt or not) between the two civilizations.

One of those “apt parallels” between Rome and ourselves becomes obvious in what follows.

The most sacred symbol of the ancient Roman state was an altar to the goddess Victory. It stood in the Roman Senate for nearly 400 years. In A.D. 382, a Christian emperor removed the altar as idolatrous. Two years later, after his death, the pagan prefect of Rome—Quintus Aurelius Symmachus—wrote one of the most interesting letters of Late Antiquity.

Addressing the new Christian emperor, Symmachus asked that the Altar of Victory be restored. In effect, in arguing for the altar, he argued the case for an entire way of life. He described the altar’s removal as unwise and unjust. He praised past emperors for their tolerance in maintaining the old religion and funding pagan ceremonies. He claimed that Rome’s pagan worship had protected the city and subdued the world, and therefore deserved to be treated with the reverence owed to posterity.

He stressed that the altar ensured a sacred guarantee for Rome’s civil authority. And in a strikingly modern passage, he said:

We ask then for peace for the gods of our fathers and of our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars; the sky is common; the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain so great a secret by one road . . . [so therefore] we offer now prayers, not conflict.

It’s impossible to read Symmachus today without feeling a kind of compassion for his cause. But his words did no good. Christians already outnumbered pagans in Rome itself. St. Ambrose of Milan, one of the great Latin Fathers of the Church, wrote a crushing response to Symmachus that ended the discussion. The Altar of Victory never returned to the Senate. Paganism slowly died away.

Symmachus argued well. But he argued from weakness—the weakness of nostalgia for old ways that were already dying; the weakness of religious rites that no longer had any power; the weakness of pleading to be heard rather than demanding and winning a place in the human heart through the zeal of religious action and the force of religious witness.

Nobody listened to Symmachus because nobody cares about dying embers. But everyone pays attention to a fire—especially when it burns in the hearts of other men and women. And that brings us to the heart of these brief thoughts.

Jesus said, “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk 12:49). For much of our nation’s history, those words were known to most Americans and actually meant something in the way people organized their lives. The United States was never a formally “Christian” nation. But it didn’t need to be. Its public life and civic institutions were deeply informed by biblical thought, language and morality. More importantly, most Americans were Christians, and many tried to live their faith to a degree that astonished Alexis de Tocqueville in his account of their Sunday worship.

But that was then. This–250 years later—is now. And it leads us to the lesson in the story of Symmachus: Christians once rightly felt at home in America, a land first settled by Christians and predominantly built by them over the course of three centuries. But in recent years, God, like Rome’s Altar of Victory, has been less and less welcome at the center of our common life. As a result, unless things change—and unless we ourselves change them—Christians will find themselves in the same place Symmachus once did: arguing from the margins.

There’s good news: By European standards, American religious practice remains high. The very public Christian faith of men like Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and Charlie Kirk may exasperate our mainstream media and draw the scorn of our secularized elites. But it hints at a potent biblical leaven that survives in both political parties. Nonetheless, our nation’s religious terrain is steadily shifting. The America emerging today is already much less friendly to the Christian faith than anything in our country’s past. It doesn’t need to be this way. And that poses a challenge for all of us as Catholics.

Here’s my point: We make the future; nothing in this world is inevitable. During my years as a bishop, I’ve met thousands—and I mean tens of thousands—of young adults on fire for Jesus Christ and deeply committed to their Catholic faith. And I’ve seen them come together in vigorous new movements and projects that give their hunger for God real force: things like Christ in the City, FOCUS, the Leonine Forum, the Augustine Institute, and many others.

These Catholic young people aren’t alone. We can find them by the hundreds in every corner of the country. But they need the kind of public witness from their leaders—both clergy and lay—that radiates confidence in the Word of God, fidelity to the Catholic faith, and a missionary zeal to make all things new in Jesus Christ, including the public square.

In that light, as we approach the 250^th birthday of our country, we’d do well to turn our hearts toward a very different figure of Roman history: St. Augustine of Hippo. He lived in a time and a world not unlike our own. Augustine embodies the Catholic ideal of personal holiness lived in a community of virtue, and the integration of faith and reason at the very highest level. He reveres the past as a tool for teaching and the traditions on which we depend. But he combines this with an awareness of the passing nature of this world and the culmination of the human story outside of time. Augustine is a man between two worlds, which is exactly the condition we Christians all share.

Augustine reminds us that the City of Man and the City of God intermingle. We have obligations to each of them. But our final home and our real citizenship are not in this world. Politics is important, but it’s a byproduct shaped by, and downstream from, our faith. If we do not know and love Jesus Christ, and commit our lives to him, and act on what we claim to believe, everything else is empty. But if we do, so much else is possible—including the conversion of the world and the structures of power around us.

The only question that finally matters for any of us is the one Jesus posed to his apostles: “Who do you say I am? Symmachus argued the case for a pagan faith that was already dead. We have no such excuse for failure: We receive the Son of the living and true God at every Mass. The core issue facing each of us is faith—always and everywhere, whether we’re scholars or nurses or priests or lawyers or mechanics. Do we believe in Jesus Christ, or don’t we? And if we do, then what are we going to do about it?

The vocation of a Christian disciple is to feed the soul of the world as well as its mind; to offer a vision of men and women made whole by the love of God, the beauty of creation, and the reality of things unseen; to see the world in the light of eternity; to recapture the nobility of the human story and the dignity and destiny of the human person.

This is the work that sets fire to the human heart. It starts the only kind of revolution that really changes anything: a revolution of love. Jesus said, I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled.

If we call ourselves disciples, our task is to start that blaze and then help it grow.