INDIVISIBLE: Hope for the Future

For too long those who profess to have faith in the living God and claim to believe marriage, family, and freedom are important have hidden the light of truth under the covering of personal comfort, compromise, and unfruitful conformity. Now is the time to raise high the standard of liberating truth while standing together as one with the Father and other believers who love God in order to truly become the shining city on the hill that cannot and must not be hidden. INDIVISIBLE is our attempt to inspire all people of faith to find common ground for our common concerns. Together we can help correct our nation’s perilous course.

In its first week of release, INDIVISIBLE reached #1 on both Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com (non-fiction). We were informed this week that it will be listed #5 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list to be posted March 11. To God be the glory!

With gratitude we share the following review from Ken Hagerty, Vice President, Policy for Renewing American Leadership (ReAL) and ReAL Action in Washington, D.C.

This is a book we’ve needed for a long time. Other conservative books provide useful analyses of various social and fiscal issues facing our country. This is the book that combines that information with a unique understanding and explanation of the crucial spiritual dimension.

Indivisible offers a unique fusion of Evangelical and Catholic scholarship in theology, culture, economics, science and history on a range of the most pressing issues in America today. This is the book that will equip pastors and priests to speak out knowledgably and effectively on the issues that are threatening our society. It will also arm lay church members to help educate their own clergy and to encourage them to provide the leadership we need to restore our Judeo-Christian values in this country.

High quality research and reasoning, combined with clear writing make this book unusually valuable. Indivisible analyzes and explains a host of the most urgent social, political and economic issues facing this country, yet it’s still accessible and easy to read. Those of us who try to write about these topics understand what a rare achievement that is. If Friedrich Hayek had been able to present his views this clearly, it could have changed history. But this book pulls together much of what we’ve learned in science, economics and culture since Hayek’s time.

The thesis is that there is no way to separate so-called “fiscal” issues, from so-called “social” issues, and we shouldn’t try. You can’t have free markets without free men. Economics should serve human freedom in all its dimensions—political, social, physical, spiritual. Our freedom, in other words is indivisible. (p. 211)

This is exactly the worldview that informed the American founders and allowed them to create the greatest charter of government for a free people in world history.

Now, after more than a century of progressive education, our political discourse has become so secular that a high percentage of our fellow citizens have no understanding of the relevance of the Judeo-Christian worldview to their lives. Indivisible offers a series of principles that explain the political relevance of our moral values. Two examples really struck home for me.

First, I was surprised by the power and simplicity of the principle that God wants us to be free. I had never recognized that our free will reflects the fact that God intends for mankind to be free. “God valued our freedom so much that he has given us the power to reject him. And we did… But God has also revealed ways for societies to restrain evil and achieve some measure of freedom. In free societies the government both protects and submits to the rule of law…Free societies protect private property. They allow their citizens to participate in the political process, to make basic economic choices, and to freely exercise their religious faith. These freedoms are indivisible. (p. 319)

Second, I have wondered all my life why and how the secular progressives and socialists can possibly continue to assert, and base their policies on the inherent goodness of man, when all of history, and especially the hideous record of the twentieth century demonstrate that the opposite is irrefutably the case. Well, now I finally understand.

The myopia of the secular progressives is caused by the simple and profound fact that they reject the concept of sin. I now recognize that the evil and selfishness of men simply does not enter into their calculations. In the absence of human sin, all their faith in the state, and their totalitarian ideas, make a lot more sense—but not in the real world. In the real world, the consequences of those ideas are the ones honest people see in the coercive “peoples’ paradises” around the world—and yet the progressives and socialists stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the horrors that inevitably flow from their utopian fixations.

The reason I haven’t confronted this simple, but totally foundational explanation before, is that we’ve all adopted secular conventions pushed by the progressives to such an extent that our “political science” and even our conservative media no longer acknowledge fundamental principles like human sin. Sin is something in the “religious” realm, and we reserve that for Sundays.  

But once again the American founders knew better. The reality of sin was clear to them. Sin explains the need for limited government, for the separation of powers and for checks and balances. (p. 316) In James Madison’s famous words: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. (p. 25)

Yet this is an optimistic book. The authors offer hope for restoration and transformation for America in our politics, our economy and certainly in the spiritual life of our people. They point out that almost all American politicians still profess some version of Judeo-Christianity today. That shows that faith is not marginalized in this country. (p. 167)

They document the dramatic acceleration of technological innovation that is underway, and explain its implications. (p. 268) The authors refute the doomsayers who have been falsely predicting the starvation and impoverishment of the world for two hundred years by pointing out that the finite amount of anything in nature is less important than the ingenuity we put into new ways to access and exploit it. The Stone Age didn’t come to an end because we ran out of stones. And the oil age will end, but not because we ran out of oil. (p. 301) We create resources. (298) Man, not matter, is the ultimate resource. (p. 304)

But the transformation they say is possible can only occur if people of faith will stand up and return our nation to its founding values. As the great German pastor, theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: “Not to stand is to stand. Not to speak is to speak.”(p. 7)

My only quibble with this outstanding book is for abbreviating one of the greatest quotes in the pantheon of liberty, a powerful and prophetic statement by Edmund Burke, which summarizes so much of what the book is about. The first edition of Indivisible uses only the first of Burke’s four sentence statement. (p.31) That’s worth fixing in the next editions. [To this suggestion both James and Jay say “Amen!” We agree.] Here is Edmund Burke’s complete statement:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites…Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” [How true. Meditate a moment on Burke’s statement.]

This review is typical of the encouraging feedback coming to us. Get your copy of INDIVISIBLE today. Read it and discover how you can make a difference in your home, community and nation!

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