America's story has always been tied to a sense of divine purpose. I have spent a lifetime testing that conviction against history, against experience, and against everything I have seen at the intersection of faith and public life.
From the Pilgrims who knelt on a cold beach and gave thanks before they had survived their first winter, to the Founders who appealed to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" in the document that established this republic — there is a thread running through American history. It is not an accident. It is an invitation.
That invitation has been renewed in every generation. It was renewed when Lincoln called a divided nation to bind its wounds and act with malice toward none. It was renewed when a generation of young Americans crossed an ocean to stop a darkness from swallowing civilization. It is being renewed right now, in this moment, in ways that I believe we will only fully understand in hindsight.
I am not naive about America's failures. I have lived long enough and worked closely enough with power to know that it corrupts, that institutions drift, and that the distance between a nation's ideals and its practice is often vast. But I have also seen what happens when men and women of conviction step into that gap — when they refuse to let the gap close in the wrong direction.
The title of my book is Divine Disruption. I chose those words carefully. Disruption, because something has to change. Divine, because I believe the change God calls us to is not the kind that comes from rage or cynicism or mere political organizing. It comes from the same source it has always come from: people who have encountered something real and refuse to keep quiet about it.
America was never an accident. Neither are you.