I was recently asked a question that, at first hearing, seemed unserious: “If America were attacked by Russia or China, how many people would support and defend her?” My instinct was to dismiss it. Americans have always rallied in moments of existential threat, and surely they would again. But after a moment’s reflection, the question no longer felt silly. It felt unsettlingly plausible.
Would the nation unite? Probably — but not fully. The political environment suggests that a significant percentage of citizens may align rhetorically or psychologically with America’s adversaries. How many? That is difficult to quantify, but in my own anecdotal estimation, the number could be as high as 30-40%. Not because these Americans sympathize with autocracies, but because they doubt America’s moral worthiness. If you have been taught that your civilization is fundamentally guilty — colonizing, oppressive, systemically unjust — then defending it in its hour of need feels morally ambiguous.
This is where the deeper problem begins. Those who question whether America deserves loyalty are not primarily reacting to geopolitics. They are reacting to a deeper cultural shift: civilizational moral uncertainty. They are unsure whether the nation they inhabit is good enough to merit their allegiance.
Which brings us to the central proposition: If you think moral certainty is a problem, wait till you get a load of moral uncertainty.
That line captures the essence of America’s cultural moment. A nation once grounded in a shared moral vocabulary has drifted toward a confused, improvisational ethic. The long decline of religion — and the moral clarity it traditionally supplied — now parallels the decline of civic trust, public order, and the sense that Western civilization is held together by a common moral spine. In its place rises a new ethic of personal preference dressed up as moral reasoning, combined with the naïve belief that society can be held together with feelings, vibes, and procedural norms alone.
For decades, intellectuals and cultural critics warned that “moral certainty” was the root of oppression, judgmentalism, and intolerance. The antidote, they claimed, was liberation from fixed standards. True enlightenment, they said, would come when individuals cast off inherited rules in favor of self-defined ethical frameworks. But the last 30 years show that when a culture trades moral clarity for moral improvisation, it does not become more compassionate. It becomes more chaotic. Shared norms vanish. Institutions lose legitimacy. Communities fragment into tribes that cannot agree on the meaning of basic words, much less on enduring categories of right and wrong.
The United States’s rapid abandonment of religious affiliation is central to this shift. Weekly church attendance — once a defining feature of American civic life — has plummeted to historic lows. The number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has surged. And as religion recedes, a free-floating relativism expands. Increasing numbers of Americans say morality is “up to the individual,” a pleasant-sounding phrase that actually describes a world in which no one can say with confidence what ought to be — only what “works for them.”
But a society cannot run on personal preference. Civilization depends on shared expectations: the idea that some actions are right, others wrong, and these distinctions are not endlessly negotiable. Moral clarity does not eliminate disagreement; it creates a common framework whereby disagreement can occur productively. Without that framework, every dispute becomes existential, every disagreement a crisis, and every attempt to enforce rules an act of alleged oppression.
The consequences are visible everywhere. Public disorder rises when citizens no longer believe in the moral legitimacy of law enforcement. Schools struggle to articulate standards when adults themselves cannot articulate their own. Political arguments harden into tribal warfare in which victory, not truth, is the ultimate aim. In the vacuum created by declining religion and shared values, people do not become more tolerant; they become more suspicious and more convinced that those who disagree with them are not merely mistaken but morally corrupt.
Here lies the paradox: those who warned most loudly about the dangers of moral certainty never anticipated the far greater dangers of moral uncertainty. Certainty can be abused, yes, but uncertainty corrodes. It dissolves the social grammar that enables citizens to live peaceably together. A civilization cannot be sustained on abstractions about fairness and inclusion alone. It requires a durable moral architecture — something sturdy enough to outlast individual impulses and cultural fashions.
The West once possessed such architecture. Rooted in religious tradition, reinforced by civic institutions, and transmitted through families and communities, it provided moral ballast. One did not need to be devout to benefit from it; one inherited it simply by belonging to a culture that acknowledged enduring truths. As that inheritance thins, the West finds itself technologically advanced, materially wealthy, and spiritually hollow.
If the 20th century was the age of skepticism toward moral certainty, the 21st century is shaping up to be the era in which we rediscover why certainty mattered. A civilization seeking order, meaning, and purpose will not find it in the cult of the autonomous self. The recovery of moral clarity — whether grounded in religion, philosophy, or renewed civic virtue — is not optional.
It is the precondition for national survival.
