I was the first (although not the last) member of my family to be born in the United States, and it gave me a complex. My aunts referred to me as “the little Yankee,” and it wasn’t long before I was obsessed with American politics, American history, and the wonderful, turbulent, and terrible march towards a better union. George W. Bush was my first political hero, and it seemed extraordinary for someone in Canada (I got dual citizenship around age 5) that the leader of the free world would be so unashamedly Christian.
But across the West, the citizens of other nations stare at America with confusion. Why does every American election seem existential, like yet another “most important election of our lifetimes”? Why has polarization ravaged hopes of unity in the United States more than almost anywhere else? In short, why is America so different?
The answer is simple and unpopular. It is because there is still a battle going on for the soul of America.
In the United States, there are still tens of millions of praying Christians desperately clinging to hope that America, with her Christian founding and high ideals and faith-wracked history, can be saved from the progressives that threaten to irreversibly transform her. Throughout the rest of the quietly dying West, a state of post-Christianity has been an indisputable fact for two generations. While it may be coming to America, too, there are still millions who will not give up yet. And wars are not lost until one side surrenders.
